In ARK, it doesn’t matter for how long you play the game, you learn something new every day and there will always be things you wished you had known before you started even playing. I have asked people on my YouTube channels what things they wished to have known before they started playing ARK and I got some interesting answers which I want to show you here. Maybe you can learn something today.
Set your game to the normal difficulty right away
When you start your game, then your difficulty might be on easy and not on the “normal setting” which is what we know as “Difficulty 5”. The standard difficulty will spawn creatures up to level 150 for normal creatures. The lower difficulty will spawn them in the lower 2 digit level numbers. Please check your hosters settings page on how to change it for yourself . Normally you would add this like to the GameUserSettings.ini or change it if it is already in that file.
OverrideOfficialDifficulty=5.000000
Unofficial servers exist
One thing a lot of players mentioned was that they played for too long on official servers and totally disregarded that unofficial servers existed and often offer a much better game experience. Official servers have a very tight schedule on which you have to refresh your structures and animals for them not to decay. The tone and interaction with others is also pretty rough from time to time and there will be people cheating and hacking.
Unofficial servers offer mods for quality of life changes, boosted rates and admins that are available to solve problems quickly. On average unofficial servers also have a better performance.
Jump off your dino when you’re falling
I don’t know how often I lost a mount in my early playtime because we fell down a cliff, and it died to fall damage. There is a trick to avoid it. You jump off you mount before it hits the ground because unmounted dinos won’t get fall damage at all, and you will only get the fall damage from the point you jumped off the animal. So in the best case you won’t get any fall damage at all or just a tiny bit that you can heal up quickly. I wish I had known that sooner, that would have saved all my animals that didn’t make it. 😭
The otter can carry more than one artefact
Animals and players can only one artefact of the same type in their inventory. But there is an exception. The otter can carry as many as you put in there because it does not have the restriction. So if you go and farm artefacts for your boss fights, then bring your otter and put the additional artefact in its inventory.
Don’t stay too long on only one map
If you want to progress through the 6 story maps then you need to be a little efficient especially when playing with friends who don’t want to stay in the same game for months or years. I got a lot of similar and related answers to this one. Some people said to make sure to only tame animals you really need and use and not everything you see. Focus on boss creatures. Another person said to start breeding and mutating early and don’t waste too much time with other things.
I personally would add to it—if it’s your first time playing, It’s completely fine when you like to explore and don’t rush through the maps. But if you play in a team, It’s important to communicate the goals you have.
Use traps to tame and don’t ignore loot drops
Another person mentioned that they wish they would have used traps earlier and also didn’t ignore loot drops until later in the game. I agree to both because trapping a dino makes the whole progress so much less stress. And I also wholeheartedly agree on the things with the drops. Especially early on the overworld drops will help make the game easier by providing better gear and armour. Later in the game you should regularly hunt for cave drops to get the saddles you need. That gives you a lot of blueprints to chose from once you are ready to fight the bosses!
Save your resources
Don’t throw away any resources because the endgame is so demanding with materials that you can save yourself from hours of farming. Especially things like chitin, keratin and hide should never be dumped anywhere. You need them for armour and saddles later on. Saddles can go into the ten thousands per piece for certain materials.
There won’t be another game for you after ARK
This is something I realized very quickly. There is no game available at the moment that can offer you, what ARK offers you. Game depth, social connections, the feeling of long time accomplishment. ARK is one of its kind and that is why many players have thousands over thousands of hours in it. There is no game that can offer it. Especially no game that doesn’t have microtransactions implemented. It will be hard for you to find a game to enjoy after ARK. Or how we say: They will always come back.
