These are the changes of ARK: Survival Evolved’s Patch 178.0, grouped into categories for clarity. If not otherwise indicated, they’re quoted from the relevant Steam Thread.

Official Servers

• Official PvP servers one-time Clearance of all old unequipped items (with the exception of blueprints, eatables, notes, and quest items), to ensure fairness after Item Duplication bug exploit. Server admins can enforce this once if they run with this command argument (will only work ONCE on pre-update save games):ShooterGameServer.exe theisland?listen -ClearOldItems

New Items / Structures

• New Structures: Stone Walls/Fence Foundations (the first of a potential stone tier)
• New Structure: Metal Water Tank, stores 500 water and is metal tier.

Dino Changes

• Plesiosaurus preparation…
• Reduced probability of Spinosaurus spawns by 30%
• You can now hurt your own unconsciously-taming Dinos in PvE
• “All Passive” whistle
• Sarco and Turtle now dive/climb in water at properly quick speeds (making full use of their move speed)
• There is now a dedicated keybind for accessing the whistle wheel, which will soon be expanded with emote animations
• Sarco now swims up and down much faster
• Dino Specs now allow painting all saddle color regions, and the specs look thicker
• Rex roar now has a large attenuation range
• Spinos no longer lay bronto eggs
• Turtles now regen stamina in water
• “Your thing killed something” messages are now in yellow to avoid scaring you
• Argentavis HP reduced by 30%

Game Changes

• Notes can now be written at any time not just upon crafting
• Toggle key for Running
• Cosmetics now all weigh 0 KG
• Vault now will drop rather than be destroyed if its floor is destroyed
• Compass Engram moved to level 10, & no longer requires Smithy (is hand-crafted)
• If there are multiple bed/sleeping bag points overlapping on the same area on the respawn UI, upon clicking one you will now get a popup list to choose between them more easily.
• Texture Resolution settings no longer affect Terrain geometry quality
• Explosions now do +200% damage to dinos and +50% damage to players
• Steel Vault now has 50% more storage slots
• Spikewalls can no longer be built nearby enemy core structures
• Fabricators, etc, now show craftable resource counts from their own Inventory even when they are not powered-on
• Rockets do about 50% more damage
• Notes now display the first 30 characters of written text as the title of the Note, once something is written on them

New Server Features

• Player-Hosted Server control of day-cycle length, and relative lengths of Day & Night respectively! Who wants a 24h real-time RP server? ME!!!!!!!
• Player-server options for which engrams/blueprints are available on a server, how much they cost, how much XP is earned & level XP thresholds, and how much damage players & dinos do respectively. Your primitive-only servers are now possible 🙂
• Admin can now kick/ban/list players by SteamID
• Player-hosted servers can now maintain a whitelist of SteamID’s who are admin cheat-authorized, and those accounts will automatically be able to use cheats without having to enter enablecheats. When utilizing this feature, no cheat password is utilized.

Bugfixes

• Fixed case of invisible campfires
• Fix for Engrams not appearing on characters in some cases
• C4’s now attach properly to structures in some cases where they couldn’t
• Fixed an exploit with accessing inventories over great distances
• Demolition Item Duplication bug fixed

Performance

• Major memory reduction on dedi server (multi-GB reduced)
• Server perf resolved, finally! (and an overall perf benefit for everyone). Major PhysX system change. Expected gains of >33%+ on Server in some cases.

 

(Original Announcement on Steam)

Here are the patchnotes of the previous patch (177.2)