Author: Krim

Dyeing Tutorial

This short tutorial explains the dyeing process in ARK: Survival Evolved. It will tell you about the crafting and mixing of colors and explain how to apply them.

Producing Dye

Before you can actually dye your clothes, you’ll have to produce dye. Its base ingredients are berries (their color will determine the colour of the product). You also need some water.Put the water and the berries into the inventory of a cooking pot and ensure that there’s some fuel too. Ignite the fire below the pot (key “E”), and wait a short time. The dye will now appear in the cooking pot’s inventory.

Dyeing items

To actually dye an item you have to drag the dye onto the item inside your inventory. If it’s possible to dye that kind of item, a dialouge window will open. In it, please select the appropriate region. After a click on “Dye now” your garment will be dyed, and the neccessary pigments removed from your inventory.

Advanced: Mixing colors

ARK: Survial Evolved knows the following basic colors:

Blue	Red	Black	Yellow	White
Azulberry	Tintoberry	Narcoberry	Amarberry	Stemberry

As far as we know, the following recipes exist:

9 Azulberries (Blue) + 9 Tintoberries (Red) = Purple
9 Azulberries (Blue) + 9 Amarberries (Yellow) = Green
9 Tintoberries (Red) + 9 Amarberries (Yellow) = Orange

If you find any other recipes, please comment below! We’ll add them to this article as soon as possible.

ARK: Survival Evolved Patch 173.0 – Patchnotes

These are the changes of ARK: Survival Evolved’s Patch 173.0, grouped by categories for clarity. If not otherwise indicated, they’re quoted from the relevant Steam Thread.

New Items / Structures

– Spinosaurus! Fear the beast!
– New Structures: Spike Wall (great for defending against incoming tribe dino attacks) and Food Preservation Bin items, and Beef Jerky!!! (Sparkpowder+Oil+Cooked Meat or Cooked Prime Meat+hour wait == SUPER LONG LASTING FOOOOOD!)
– Added Rich Metal and Regular Metal Mountain Rocks
– Rare Limited-Edition Cosmetic Item Skin drops: Nerdry’s Glasses (from the bellies of Dilo’s) and Rex Bone Helmet

Modified Items / Structures

– You and dinos can attack when no stamina now, however doing so will increase your torpidity
– Grenades rebalanced, ~60% damage reduction vs structures and now also require oil to craft
– Metal Tools’ durabilities fixed
– Upped bullet damages by about 20%

Modifications related to Dinos

– Land dinos now lose stamina when swimming while mounted, Amphibious dinos (turtle, sarco, etc) now regain stamina much more quickly in water
– Pteras now land better when out of stamina, won’t eject you as soon
– Broodmother will now give Dossier and Steam Achievement correctly when defeated
– Base Carno damage buffed from 30 to 50, base Rex damage buffed from 50 to 80
– Rate of health recovery from mounts consuming corpses or trees is reduced (was previously essentially granting mounts nearly instant health recovery)

Client Features

– After login you now get a message indicating how you died if your character was killed when you were logged out (needs more details added)
– Slight purple overlay when torpidity is increasing
– Character bodytype presets
– “Find Mods” button added to Host Game Menu
– Fixed bug where Generator with cables attached could not get its inventory accessed
– Realtime time and current map now indicated on pause menu
– Downloading mods at the Host Game screen now indicates download progress, mods that have been updated on Steam Workshop will now redownload
– You can now set the temperature scale to Fahrenheit in the Options menu
– Your current Biome/Temperature now updates correctly when riding a mount
– “Transfer Tribe Ownership” button is now clickable properly

Server Features

– PvE structures that haven’t had a Tribe/Creator nearby in one week are now auto demolished. Can be disabled on player-run servers.
– Structure Limit now configurable for player-run servers
– Non-Tribe Flyer Carrying now an option for PvE servers

Server Fixes

– Spoiling timer exploits fixed
– Various ways to teleport into people’s houses seemingly fixed
– Unconscious dinos being tamed no longer can be harmed by non-tribe players in PvE
– Tribe ID’s and Player ID’s are now guaranteed to be unique. Should eliminate future cases of player/tribe body snatchers.

Performance

– General GPU optimizations plus new graphics configuration options: Mesh LOD slider, High Quality Materials checkbox (disabling this and restarting will have tremendous perf savings at the cost of less detailed terrain materials), Subsurface Scattering Checkbox (disabling this will make plants and skin material look a little less good, but also save a lot of perf)

(Original Announcement on Steam)

Careful: Items can get lost in your Inventory

Once you start to craft large amounts of items, your inventory will invitably fill up. That is in and of itself not a tragedy, though certainly annoying. As it turns out, some players have had to face a much more drastic problem: Their items simply vanished. Having counted the items before, they were sure that they had everything in their inventory when they started. But it wasn’t there anymore!

Now, it is not impossible to misplace something once in a while, and yet, the more often this happens in-game the more suspicious one gets. Are there thieves at work? One wouldn’t have put it past the developers to add the elves from the Shoemakers Tale into the game. Unfortunately though, the end-products were missing too.

This prompted a reddit user to investigate, and his findings are truly enlightening (and should certainly put some minds at ease):

The inventory has a hidden limit of 146 slots. If you use put any more than that into it, it will delete those items!

So keep that in mind or you risk losing the items you have worked so hard for. So far there hasn’t been a comment from the developers on the matter, however the general consent is that this, in its current form, is a bug and not a feature.

Never import Player Data on your server

With the current implementation the character files for Up- and Download from the ARK are accessible to the player. In practice that means that players can arbitrarily manipulate them, cheating as they see fit.

Obviously you will want to avoid that on your self-hosted servers. As it turns out, that is actually quite easy, since there is an option to disable character imports onto your server in the server settings. It’s called NoTributeDownloads (set it to True) and saves you all this trouble. If you’re not sure on how to set this option to the correct value, please consult the Server Settings Overview Page.

All of this does of course go to show is a larger principle in preventing cheats: Don’t trust any data provided by the player. Why this principle wasn’t observed in this instance is unclear, but given the amount of patches they have produced so far I’m fairly confident that we will see a patch reacting to those issues soon.

A Short and Easy ARK: Survival Evolved Server Setup Guide

Prerequisites

You’ll need a Windows server for this. If you want to install on Linux, use THIS tutorial.

Step 1 – Setup SteamCMD

Download SteamCMD (direct download link here). Since the program will later download additional components, I would recommend putting it somewhere separate (like C:/SteamCMD/ for example). After extracting the content of the zip archive, there should be a file called SteamCMD.exe.

Step 2 – Download the game

Start SteamCMD.exe. Once that program has finished downloading the rest of itself, it will prompt you for input. Replace the relevant placeholders with the correct information. For the purposes of this guide we will assume that your installation directory is “C:/SurvivalServer/”

login anonymous
force_install_dir C:\SurvivalServer\ 
app_update 376030 validate

How the SteamCMD Update should look

Step 3 – Install the rest of the prerequisites

You now need to install DirectX and the Visual Studio 2013-Redist package. Conveniently enough, setups for those were already downloaded into the last step. Hence please execute the following installers

C:\SurvivalServer_commonredist\DirectX
C:\SurvivalServer_commonredist\Vredist

Step 4 – Create a startup script

Since you don’t want to have to type in a huge command every time you start the server, please create a new text document StartServer.bat in your server directory. Copy the following code into the file and replace the placeholders “CHOOSEAPASSWORDHERE” and “CHOOSEANADMINPASSWORDHERE” by the password (and admin password) of your choice.

start ShooterGameServer "TheIsland?SessionName=GameServerSetup?QueryPort=27015?ServerPassword=CHOOSEAPASSWORDHERE?ServerAdminPassword=CHOOSEANADMINAPASSWORDHERE?listen"
exit

Save the file.

You can also add other parameters here. Just take a look at this list of possible parameters

Step 5 – Make sure that you have opened the relevant ports

UDP on ports 27015 and 7777

Make sure your firewall allows data to pass through to these ports. If you’re at home (or in any environment using NAT for that matter), you may also have to forward the ports. PortForward.com contains guides that explain how to do this. Note that port 27015 was the one we set as QueryPort in Step 3. If you at this point chose to use a different port for this function, you’ll have to open that port instead.

Step 6 – Start the Server

Simply double-click your “StartServer.bat”. If this guide doesn’t work for you, or you require additional help, please feel free to leave a comment.

How to Fix: Torches don’t illuminate the surroundings

This article explains how you can fix some problems related to improper illumination, especially those happening around camps and torchfire, that the “performance-saving” configurations which have been floating around for a couple of days cause.

Chances are high that you’ve tuned some settings in the configuration (or alternatively have downloaded a configuration file like this one) in the hopes that you’ll increase performance thereby.

The problem

The problem lies in the option

r.simpledynamiclighting=1
  in ARK\ShooterGame\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\Engine.ini

The fix

Delete that line and the torch-illumination should be back to normal. Please note that this will however significantly reduce the performance gain. This the dilemma here (at least until the game has been optimized further): Either you’ll have the comfy cozy light or a high framerate.

Altnernatives

Another Setting you can try to play around with is the Gamma setting. Basically, it’s a setting that describes how pronounced differences in luminance are, and you can tune it as you see fit. Simply use the gamma command ingame to change it.

Taming Tutorial

You will be able to virtually any animal in “ARK: Survival Evolved” once you know how to do it. Considering the vast benefits of having tamed animals at ones disposal, they can after all be used as guard dogs, means of transportation or entertainment, it’s without a doubt essential to the advanced player to learn how taming works.

This tutorial is for the classic taming. Since patch 182 it’s possible to tame without knocking the animal unconscious. Read more in our dedicated “Non Violent Taming Tutorial“

Taming

Step 1 – Temporarily render the animal unconscious

The first thing you have to do is to get the animal into an unconscious state, as it will resist your attempts at tamin it otherwise. Mind you, you’ll have to be careful not to kill the animal in the process! The more soft you manage to transition the animal into a suitable state the better, as it will speed up the next part significantly. To that end, you’ll want to either use Tranquilizer Arrows or the less fancy option of fist-fighting.

Step 2 – Feed the animal

This is how the animal gets used to your presence. Open its inventory (“E”-key) and insert a sufficient amount of a suitable food into it (the higher the level the more sustenance it needs). Note the word “suitable” here, as every animal only accepts a specific food. You can tell which one needs what by consulting the following table, though a good rule of thumb is that carnivores will need a sort of meat while herbivores require berries.

Berries	Meat
Azulberry Blue: Ankylosaurus, Brontosaurus	Raw / Prime: Carnotaurus, Dilophosaur, Shark (Megalodon), Piranha, Pteranodon, Raptor, Sabertooth, Crocodile (Sarcosuchus), Spinosaur, Titanoboa, Tyrannosaurus
Azulberry Red: Turtle (Carbonemys), Dodo
Mejoberry (Violet): Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Elephant (Phiomia), Parasaur, Mammoth	Spoiled: Scorpion(Pumonoscorpius), Vulture (Argentavis)
Tintoberry (Red): Stegosaurus	Spoiled: Scorpion(Pumonoscorpius), Vulture (Argentavis)

Step 3 – Assure Anaesthesia and Provide a Steady Supply of Food

At this point you should see an interface similar to this one:

There are two important progress meters here: The Narcotics-Bar (currently filled) and the Taming-Bar (currently empty), the first one of which is integral to the whole taming process. Generally speaking, in order to tame you have to ensure that your animal is unconscious for long enough to consume a sufficient amount of food. What that means in pratice is that you’ll have to see to it that your animal is permanently sedated. In that state it will only move its head up once in a while.

How does one do that? With Narcotics or Narcoberries. You can get the latter in large quantities by picking virtually any bush. Simply put them into the animal’s inventory. You can gauge how much items and time you’re going to need by looking at our taming time cheatsheet or using our taming calculator

As soon as the taming is finished the animal awakes. You can now assign it a name (a dialog to that effect should pop up, otherwise you’ll be able to do it by looking at the animal, holding down “E” and waiting until the menu below appears. This menu is also what one uses to control the animal, but there’s more about that in the article devoted to that topic)

Tips and Tricks

In case you run out of Narcoberries there is always the possibility of hitting the animal softly. Be careful though, you risk injury (which in turn impedes the taming process)
Carnivores and Herbivores have different preferences regarding narcotics (“Narcotics” and “Narcoberries” respectively). Getting them the wrong one will slow down everything.
You can accelerate Carnivore-taming significantly by feeding them Eggs and Prime Meat. Don’t give the developers any ideas though, otherwise we could soon find ourselves having to sauté the meat in order to satisfy the picky eaters that are dinosaurs.

We recommend you read the guide on animal keeping, or the one on uses for animals next.

New Server Settings Format in Patch 171.0

(Link to the original announcement)

As it turns out, there has been a change in the way the game expects settings. The Command Line Options now have to also specify a value, ie where there was only ?ServerPvE there now must be ?ServerPvE=true.

In better news, there now is a way to actually have a configuration file for the Server. The GameUserSettings.ini contains the following section:

[ServerSettings]
ShowMapPlayerLocation=False
ServerHardcore=False
GlobalVoiceChat=False
ProximityChat=False
NoTributeDownloads=False
AllowThirdPersonPlayer=False
AlwaysNotifyPlayerLeft=False
DontAlwaysNotifyPlayerJoined=False
ServerHardcore=False
ServerPVE=False
ServerCrosshair=False
ServerForceNoHUD=False
ServerPassword=
ServerAdminPassword=
DifficultyOffset=0 to 1

How to set an ARK: Survival Evolved Server MotD

In the new patch (171.0) we can now finally set a MotD. According to this post by the devs, this is how it’s going to work: Put the following text into your GameUserSettings.ini and change it to suit your needs.

[MessageOfTheDay]
Message=Welcome to your new home, on my ARK! :D :) 
<RichColor Color=1,0.1,0.1>Red Text</>!
Duration=20

ARK Patch 171

(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.

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