Structures Plus+ is a mod made by orionsun first released 26 Jul, 2016. It has been a staple for modded servers ever since. S+ (short for Structures Plus+) adds a lot of quality of life changes to the core mechanics of ARK. One of these core mechanics is breeding and S+ does a lot for breeders.
S+ Hatchery, S+ Item Aggregator
The S+ Hatchery and the Item Aggregator fit in the same niche of helpers for breeding. While the Hatchery is the primitive approach, the Item Aggregator requires a Tek Generator to be run and has so many more functions. Let’s just focus on breeding though.
Hatchery:
Crafting costs and requirement:
- Level 30
- 20 x Eggs (unfertilized or fertilized)
- 50 x Keratin
- 500 x Thatch
Fuel: Re-Fertilizer
The Hatchery has the visuals of a nest and contains a little Dodo in the middle. This Dodo can be switched out via Chibis. The Hatchery has two main tasks. It collects fertilized eggs, and it incubates them until they are ready to be hatched. The hatchery is slower than the normal incubation in an incubator or in front of air conditionings. This was a choice orionsun made to balance the Hatchery.
Item Aggregator:
Crafting costs and requirement:
- Level 72
- 125 x Electronics
- 350 x Metal Ingots
- 125 x Polymer
Power: Tek Generator
The Item Aggregator combines several S+ Structures in a Tek-like structure that can be used for many things. In the breeding context it can as well collect fertilized eggs and incubate them at a quicker rate than the hatchery, the incubator and normal incubation. It also has a fairly big inventory, so you can keep your animals on breeding overnight and then collect the eggs that have your dinos produced overnight.
S+ Nanny
Crafting costs and requirement:
- Level 40
- 250 x Cementing Paste
- 100 x Hide
- 50 x Human Hair
- 100 x Metal Ingot
Fuel: Honey
The S+ Nanny is probably breeding in cheat mode. She feeds your babies and also imprints them for free for you. All you have to do is claiming them and placing them within her radius. She will push food from her inventory into their inventories regularly making sure they don’t starve. When they grow the Nanny will set the imprint to the growth percentage so that when the baby is adult it will be at 100%.
S+ Mutator
Crafting costs and requirement:
- Unlock required: Cloning Chamber
- 20 x Black Pearl
- 55 x Crystal
- 10 x Element
- 550 x Metal Ingot
- 80 x Polymer
Fuel: Element
The mutator is the heart of the breeding structures in S+. To unlock and use it, you need to have the cloning chamber unlocked, which requires dragon, crystal wyvern queen or Rockwell defeated.
The mutator can:
- force mutations when started while the animals are breeding,
- switching genders on animals without breeding cooldown,
- switch between variants (careful it’s partially broken),
- enable mating on non-breedable creatures,
- give genders to non-breedable creatures,
- freeze growth to get imprints done in time,
- and growth pulse to let them grow faster.
Starting and running the mutator requires the use of Element. How much Element a Mutator pulse costs and how efficient it is or how many mutations you can get per round, can be set per ini file.
S+ Propagator
(careful, this structure has bugs, that can “brick” your creatures, so use at your own discretion)
Crafting costs and requirement:
- Level 111
- 2500 x Electronics
- 500 x Element
- 5000 x Metal Ingot or Scrap Metal Ingot
- 2500 x Polymer, Organic Polymer, or Corrupted Nodule
Fuel: Element
The Propagator is a structure that can hold dinosaurs in its inventory in cryopods and then breeds with the dinosaurs in that inventory. It will automatically breed, mutate them and create eggs for the creatures no matter if those creatures actually are egg layers. The eggs created come with an incubator buff, so looking at them allows you to see stats and colours on them.
Bug: There is a current bug where the propagator will reset your dinos’ ancestry IDs of the parents. This is usually not a big problem unless you want to use ARK Smart Breeding because ARK Smart Breeding needs the parents and grandparents IDs to create relations between those animals. ARK Smart Breeding will only import creatures as single non-related creatures when bred with the Propagator.
S+ Air Conditioner, S+ Feeding Trough
S+ Air Conditioner:
Crafting costs and requirement:
- 80 x Metal Ingot or Scrap Metal Ingot
- 15 x Electronics
- 5 x Polymer, Organic Polymer, or Corrupted Nodule
- 15 x Crystal
Power: Generator
The Air Conditioner is only in that sense a breeding structure that you can use it to incubate eggs. It will give you 750 insulation in both ways while the normal Air Conditioner that is in the game, will only provide 100. That means you require far less for incubating.
S+ Feeding Trough
Crafting costs and requirement:
- Level 18
- 120 x Wood or Fungal Wood
- 60 x Thatch
- 40 x Fiber
- 8 x Metal
The Feeding Trough is also just a breeding structure in that sense that you can whitelist or blacklist creatures from it. This is handy when you want to make sure that adult dinosaurs won’t eat from the trough that is dedicated to the juvenile and adolescent dinosaurs.