These are the changes of ARK: Survival Evolved’s Patch 180.0, grouped into categories for clarity. If not otherwise indicated, they’re quoted from the relevant Steam Thread.

Official Servers

• Four new “PvE Hardcore” servers for North America, Europe, and Oceania — each.

New Items / New Structures

• Added the unique Phiomia and Carnotaurus saddles
• Major map update: new resources (including summit and underwater Crystals), better visuals, better optimization, and WIP areas completed

Dino Changes

• Fixed Swimmers (i.e. Megalodon) and Flyers dive/climb speeds — they no longer leave the “sprinting” speed when diving/climbing
• Wild AI Targeting Range on Megalodons is reduced by 50%
• Flyers now take approximately 6x damage from bullets and ranged projectiles.

Game Changes

• Fixed a missing value in thatch & wood structure settings, now effectively thatch and wood about 2.5x as resistant to damage as they were before.
• Can’t build signs near enemy foundations anymore, was used to grief people by wedging them into their homes etc
• Structures in PvE now have per-structure PvE allowed-demolish time, by default: 4 days for thatch/small utility structures, 8 days days for wood, 12 days for stone, and 16 days for metal
• PvE now shows a “Anyone Can Demolish” timer on structures
• Can no longer… place sleeping bags/structures thru other player’s/team’s structures
• Spear-killing a fish will now also instantly grab the fish so that you can stay out of the water
• Stone wall properly colorizable

UI Changes

• New Server gameplay options exposed to the Host Game UI

Bugfixes

• Particle FX on activated structures now appear correctly after reloading in singleplayer
• Water Taps connected directly to intakes now work
• Fixed hidden player hands when wearing gloves while riding a dino in FPV
• Explosions no longer damage structures thru walls/obstructions
• Can no longer melee attack people thru walls
• Can no longer place doors of multiple tiers over each other.
• Fixed exploit with getting flyers underneath the World. If you do this, they will die. Also you can’t pull-grab targets through the World either.
• Fixed issue where foliage would sometimes respawn on your base or on your dinos
• Can no longer damage players through walls with pikes/grenades etc
• Can no longer strafe while prone
• Can no longer pull characters through ground with flyers
• Flyers no longer get into a bad flying state when saved while flying (work-around before v180: whistle for them to follow you , then whistle for them to stop after they start flying)
• Can no longer place structures if line of sight is broken by enemy structure
• Crop plot saving issue fixed

Performance

• Massive async level load/unload hitching reductions
• Approximate 15-20% server and client CPU perf gain!!!! combination of link time code generation and opcode optimizations
• Massive Server Perf Improvement / PhysX Bug fix: no more super-slow servers
• 3GB+ RAM reduction for servers, ~1GB RAM+ reduction for clients. For serves over 50% memory savings!!!!!!!! Basically we’ve converted all our foliage structures to use data primitive types rather than “Objects” 🙂
• Client side GPU perf improvements: foliage batching rewrite

(Original Announcement on Steam)

Here are the patchnotes of the previous patch (179.5)