Ark: Survival Evolved - Dinos and Leveling Survival Game

I’ll have to post a screenshot of the wyvern breeding additions to my base. I’ve been building down from the bottom of my suspended houses. I still use the glider wings that Grem gave me and they have saved me a number of times.

Except for that one time I just came back from snow biome on the Island and was wearing fur armor that didn’t have glider wings. I jumped over the edge to glide to one of my lower levels and promptly realized that I would be going to the ground floor in a hurry.

Ok I laughed out loud on this one. Then had to explain to the wife what was so funny. It did make me wanna log in. May have to scratch the itch if it gets worse.

So I’ve wanted to try this for a while, so went to install via Gamepass - 203 GB? Is that for real?

It is. I have no idea why but I think the issue is that ARK team didn’t code in compressed image files for ARK. I think there are some workarounds but they are only after the full game downloads.

Holy hard drive Batman! That’s… a lot.

Thanks for the info.

No worries, just in case, here was the old method people used to get around some of the issue. It should still work as far as I know:

One of the reasons for the huge space issue is performance.

The devs extracted out a lot of the packages/files/assets/whatever from the compressed files so it is easier to find and load them.

I’m willing to tolerate the space because when Ark was first released it could take anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes to load the game. The other thing that helped my Ark performance was putting it on a SSD.

Thanks for the info Guys

No problem, good luck!

See, as an ARK player I can see the failures in their plan:

  1. That’s barely even a thatch set up there. They were going to get pwned if not rescued.
  2. Why didn’t they get some tames going and get the dinos working FOR them?

I mean, eating coconuts? That’s bush league right there.

HAHAHA damn straight. No forge. not even a stone axe and pick come on.

I know, right? At a minimum get some resource grinding going. That’s a lot of stone I see there.

How viable is Ark for single player? I’d love to jump on a server, but I just don’t have time to commit to a community often. But the gameplay appeals to me with the crafting and the taming.

Being on sale right now isn’t helping my wallet.

I wonder what a news report of three castaways whose only knowledge of survival was Ark would look like. One guy would have a hand full of broken bones from punching trees, and the other two would have died from eating poisonous berries and drinking seawater.

I’ve got about 2200 hrs in, every second of it SP (or paused, or waiting to load), so I guess I can field this one.

First thing you’ll need to know is that it’s quite buggy. Moreso than the MP apparently. Drop crates, tames, and wild dinos constantly clip through the map, and for whatever reason, that problem is way worse on the official maps than the expansions. Genesis was the biggest offender on that count, with Extinction and Abberation a distant second, while Ragnarok, Valguero, and CI are mostly fine.

Also, if you go straight single player, the start times are ridiculous. 20 minutes at least from pressing play in Steam to actually playing it. I guess you could get around this a bit by setting your own server-for-one (which I’ve never tried).

But, the maps are quite lovely looking (especially the expansions), and the taming mechanic can be fun, but you’ll really want to crank taming rates all the way up, lest you sit in the hills for hours waiting for a tame to finish. I’d also strongly recommend mods to assist you with your one man show, as this was designed to be a team game. Here’s a few that I use:

Basically lets you craft ‘fast-travel’ points that you can plop down wherever. Also speeds up resource gathering as you can teleport back to base.

These are pretty OP, so I stick with the weakest variant, which still delivers 10x normal narcotic. One shot will down most small & medium creatures, while big ones can still take over a dozen. There might be similar mods with lesser potency.

Useful for finding your beasts when they fall through the ground. You’ll also want to learn your admin codes (“ghost” is one you’ll use a lot, LOL)

Increases carry weight.

I also use a bunch of mods that add more animals, like Additional Creatures, Prehistoric Beasts, and ARK Additions. Mostly for variety as I fill out my dino zoo.

It’s very much a sandbox, so you can make whatever games you want to out of it, and mod/play accordingly.

If you’re considering playing in singleplayer mode on your PC, @Andon, keep in mind that the entire game world pauses whenever you pause the game, and when the game isn’t running. This would also pause things like taming dinos. For this reason, playing solo on a friendly PVE server would probably be a better experience overall.

If you do get it, sticking to the Steam version would allow you to join the QT3 servers for free and enjoy all of them, even if there are only a few of us on right now. We tend to join up during events or new maps and slowly reduce playtime until the next event, etc. Ours are all PvE, but there are also plenty of free non-official and official PvP servers you can find online besides other PvE servers like ours.

There is a stark contrast in gameplay/strategy for PvP versus PvE. I’d recommend the latter to get your feet under you even if you think PvP is your thing. And the game isn’t really that hard, it has a fun driving “leveling” portion surrounded by collection stuff, survival, and because it’s ARK, dinosaur taming/fighting/locating, etc.

It’s quite fun, most of the people posting in this thread have probably thousands of hours on it at this point, it’s like fully immersive survival and some fighting against the environment as you struggle to stay alive, then get better, then get more things to repeat the cycle. The “maps” are essentially a full game into themselves providing everything from starting areas to boss tier areas and you slowly progress your gameplay in each.

If you do pick it up, post back and we’ll help you with the info needed to try PvE on the QT3 cluster, which is just multiple different maps loosely connected together so you can transfer around between them.

I’m pondering picking it up and it does sounds like perhaps dipping my toes into the the QT3 cluster might be the safe space enough for a single player, who might occasionaly poke his head up.

@TranquilityBase thank you for the suggestions, I’ve got them all bookmarked!

Yeah, the QT3 cluster should be just fine if you want to be mostly single player. Sometimes just having another player to bounce questions off, or assist with a tame, or give you some equipment or dinos/eggs when you need a boost can be a huge help! You can of course go at your own pace too.

The players here have fine tuned a pretty balanced experience with mods and server settings that make it not so punishing time wise and also add some cool features. Just the addition of the rare dinos added a lot to game play for me.

Logged in last night, died about 97 times on the beach. Realized perhaps I need to have a plan.

Started a camp, but got a bit too comfortable and tried to tame a Triceratops. Lost my body on the beach along with all my stuff. Decided to call it a night. I’ll return soon and see if I can get a camp settled again.

I’m taking a guess that you can relate to this video.