If you want to breed for mutations, you need to provide a certain amount of females per male to get the highest possible and reasonable mutation chance. I have been asked very often how many females are needed to get a guaranteed mutation. First there is unfortunately not such a thing as guaranteed mutations, but we can set up our breeding to increase the likelihood of it.
Things that influence your numbers
There are 3 big things that will influence your numbers when calculating the amounts of females needed.
- Are both parents uncapped or do you have one capped parent?
- How many stat does your animal have to mutate? Some dinos can mutate less or more stats than normal.
- Which fail rate you see as acceptable?
To the third point it’s important to say that in order to have a 100% success chance the number of females would be so high, you would blast through every servers’ capacity. Therefore, we had to make a reasonable cut. This one we calculated by the possible failure round (empty rounds without the right stat). That makes it easier to understand.
So the first possibility is accepting that every 10th round will not get the stat you are looking for. The second we took will accept to fail every 20th round.
To put this into success chance percentages the first is 90% chance of getting it and the second 95% but explaining it in “rounds” is easier to understand as a visual picture.
When your dino has 6 stats:
This applies to flyers without movement speed activated and for Shadowmanes which can’t mutate Oxygen despite getting wild levels in it.
| For 6 stats | fails every 10 rounds | fails every 20 rounds |
| uncapped | 188 | 245 |
| 1 parent capped | 339 | 441 |
| uncapped (S+ Mutator) | 13 | 17 |
| 1 parent capped (S+ Mutator) | 27 | 35 |
When your dino has 7 stats:
This basically applies to the majority of animals in ARK. It also applies to flyers with enabled flyer speed.
| For 7 stats | fails every 10 rounds | fails every 20 rounds |
| uncapped | 220 | 285 |
| 1 parent capped | 395 | 514 |
| uncapped (S+ Mutator) | 15 | 20 |
| 1 parent capped (S+ Mutator) | 32 | 41 |
When your dino has 8 stats:
This applies to Gachas, since they have more stats available than the average dino.
| For 8 stats | fails every 10 rounds | fails every 20 rounds |
| uncapped | 251 | 327 |
| 1 parent capped | 452 | 588 |
| uncapped (S+ Mutator) | 18 | 23 |
| 1 parent capped (S+ Mutator) | 36 | 47 |
I can’t have that many dinos!
There is a high chance that you are limited by a dinosaur cap or even a server cap, and you can’t have 588 females (in the worst case when mutating Gachas) standing around to breed them.
The numbers just tell you how many eggs or babies you need to have a very close chance to get the stat you want. If you now do 10 rounds with 40 females or 40 rounds with 10 females or even just 1 round with 400 females, does not really matter here. Organize your setup just as it fits to your needs.
I hatched more eggs and didn’t get it!
These numbers are chances in theory. So this is your success “on average”, but average is just the average because it combines very lucky and very unlucky chances on getting your mutation into a common number. So don’t count to 10 to get your fail round but rather expect fails to happen.
How we did it
Because I know there are some nerds here who are very interested in the maths behind it and maybe even want to try it out themselves. We provided a Jupyter Notebook with our Python code to do the calculation. Feel free to play around with it!
We also plan on adding a little calculator to ARK Utils that can do the calculation for you in the future, so make sure to bookmark our tool page and check back on it later.
EDIT: The tool is now live at https://arkutils.netlify.app/tools/howmanyfemales