(This is a summary of the important changes that will come with the upcoming patch. Omitted are client-changes and client-bugfixes. To view the original patch announcement in its entirity, click here.)

Please note that this quotes the expected patch-notes for an upcoming patch, and therefore none of the changes are currently online.

Hosting Related

New Features

• Added a “Difficulty” slider for Local/Custom Servers that scales the levels of the creatures encountered, along with the quality of loot (but not quite linearly with each other, so you can expect a tougher challenge overall as that slider goes up!).
• Added the capability to choose respawn region upon each player respawn. Set 12 spawn regions, rather than 4.
• You can now whitelist specific SteamID’s that will always be granted access to your server. Even if it’s full.
• All Host Game options are now visible in the in-game launch menu (which also affects single player), as well as saved in INI for easy access
• Console key can now be rebinded through the Options Menu
• On your server, you can now use ‘cheat’ or ‘admincheat’ to cheat after logging in as and admin. “cheat broadcast MessageString” will now let you broadcast a server message to everyone on your server (which also force displays the chat). Note that you can also set a Message-Of-The-Day here:[MessageOfTheDay]
  Message=Hello and welcome to my ARK Server!

Bugfixes

• Downloading ARK Data Characters into other Servers will no longer lose them

Game-Mechanics

• Argentavis now has a very limited (60% reduced) targeting range for live creatures, but his targeting range for corpses has been boosted by 40%. So watch out if you’ve got a dead body around, you might want to get out of the way. In any case, this is more true to their real-world likely behavior and will make them grief less.