Author: Krim

ARK: Survival Evolved patch 174.11 – Patchnotes

(Click here for the patchnotes of the previous ARK: Survival Evolved patch 174.11.)

These are the changes of ARK: Survival Evolved’s Patch 174.11. If not otherwise indicated, they’re quoted from the relevant Steam Thread.

  • Lessened rate of torpidity recovery (relative to max torpidity) for wild unconscious dinos (server-side change), and increased its speed recovery for Tamed Dinos! Win-Win 🙂

(Original announcement on Steam)

ARK: Survival Evolved patch 174.1 – Patchnotes

These are the changes of ARK: Survival Evolved patch 174.1. If not otherwise indicated, they’re quoted from their respective Steam thread.

  • Fixed female Saber riding anims
  • Low chance to get metal from ALL non-metallic rocks, albeit more commonly from smooth river-rocks. And better with picks, of course. (this will not take effect on Official Servers until they are upgraded to 174.1 overnight)
  • Reduced explosions damage onto metal structures by 50%. (this will not take effect on Official Servers until they are upgraded to 174.1 overnight)
  • Increased piranha turn rate.

 

(Original Announcement on Steam)

Click here for the Patchnotes of the previous patch 174.0, and here for those of the next patch 174.11.

ARK: Survival Evolved Patch 174.0 – Patchnotes

These are the changes of ARK: Survival Evolved’s Patch 174.0, grouped by categories for clarity. If not otherwise indicated, they’re quoted from the relevant Steam Thread.

Modified Items / Structures

  • Fix for Gas Consumption Rate (30x improvement)
  • Armor durability rebalancing (~3x durability)
  • Tripled the metal content of metal and rich-metal rocks
  • Re-added a small chance to get metal from river-rocks. Thanks for the feedback everyone, it makes sense to provide an alternate less-intense progression path 😉
  • Made Smithies and other containers automatically have the necessary engrams when new engrams are added, rather than having them be rebuilt

Modified Game Mechanics

  • Increased level cap to 70
  • Raised Max Tamed Dino Level Additions to 38
  • Raised Max Player Level to 64, providing 120 additional Engram Points
  • Increased effectiveness of temperature insulation by 20%
  • Fixed a bad damage multiplier for explosives on Wood structures (like several times too strong :-P)
  • Cloth now adds positive hyperthermic insulation, all other armors currently add negative hyperthermic insulation but now scaled more appropriately. Swimwear coming to add more positive hyperthermic insulation!

Changes related to Dinos

  • Fix for Flyer Stamina (!)
  • Prevented tamed dinos from drowning so easily
  • Dino Knocked-Out state will now hold until the Dino’s Torpor reaches 0%, previously they could exit earlier. However, their Torpor will decrease more quickly based on how much their maximum Torpor level is so that higher-level Dinos are naturally more difficult to keep knocked-out.
  • Non-water Dinos will now attempt to swim to the surface and not drown 🙂
  • Mid-size dinos (less than Rex, such as Stego etc) now properly fit thru the Dino Gate. For large-tier dinos you need still a Mega Gate, of course.
  • Adjusted Spawn Rates: Piranhas more common on insland lakes/rivers (they were missing primarily), Carnos less common everywhere, Spinos less common everywhere
  • Reduced Spino overland run & walk speeds by 25%

Client Features

  • Made it clear via description that the Food Preservation Bin requires Sparkpowder to preserve food, and that it can also create Beef Jerky.
  • Added Option to disable Torpor screen flash (purple flash)
  • Bronto saddle can now be equipped properly 🙂
  • Fixed armor insulation values & UI display (wasn’t displaying hyperthermic insulation properly)

Server Changes

  • Changed autodestruct in PvE structures to 18 days, and made it so that rather than automatically demolishing itself, the structure then gives the option for anyone to demolish it via radial menu.

Client Bugfixes

  • Fixed LOD’s on dino gates and other assets
  • Fixed crafting table requirements on a number of items, to now display their proper crafting table in the Engram UI (i.e. now it says that a Smithy is required to craft a Spinosaurus Saddle)

(Original Announcement on Steam)

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.ark survivial dye cookingPut 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

ark survival dye dialog

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 
howitshouldlook-300x93
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

Gamma Correction
Gamma Correction

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

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

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

 

The Taming Interface
The Taming Interface.

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)

 

Das Menü des gezähmnten Tieres

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.

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