Chibis are an item that has been added to ARK Survival Evolved in December 2019 during the Winter Wonderland 4 event. Since then Chibis have become popular collector items within the game. Chibis are equipped on your offhand and once equipped you can use them to raise the max level of your character by 5 levels raising the initial level cap without ascension to 110.
After their initial release in the Winter Wonderland event, Chibis have been a part of every event since. Wildcard has also kept adding more creatures to the pool of available Chibis and even published a few rare event-related Chibis like the “Pair-O-Saur” Chibi for Valentine’s Day.
How to get a Chibi in ARK?
There are several ways of getting a Chibi in ARK. The easiest is to play the game mechanics of the different seasonal events. The best event to get Chibis is the Easter event, that allows you to crack Easter Eggs with a high chance to get Chibis as a price. If there is no event active, you can also get Chibis by buying loot chests on Genesis or Genesis 2 with your Hexagon points. The loot chests have a chance to contain Chibis as well. If you already own the Genesis Season Pass, you will also spawn with two different Chibis to begin with.
What do the different colours on the Chibi mean?
Chibis come in different colours just like almost everything in ARK. The colours of the backgrounds of the Chibis are an indicator of their rarity. The highest rarity is red, and they count as legendary Chibis. This is the second time ARK left the path of colour coding their items with cyan items being the highest quality/difficulty. They did the same with the air loot drops on Extinction. The chances to get the different qualities are the following:
| Rarity | Colour | Chance |
|---|---|---|
| Common | green | 89% |
| Uncommon | blue | 10% |
| Rare | purple | 0.4% |
| Very Rare | yellow | 0.1% |
| Legendary | red | 0.01% |
Can Chibis have different dino colours?
Yes they can. Even if you have double and triple Chibis, they can look different depending on how they are spawned. Chibis pick from a list of 37 predefined colours. These are the colours sorted by rarity the number in front is the “weight” of how likely the colour is. You can see crazy colours are rarer:
Chibi Colour List (click to expand)- 1.0 Dino Light Red
- 1.0 Dino Dark Red
- 1.0 Dino Light Orange
- 1.0 Dino Dark Orange
- 1.0 Dino Light Yellow
- 1.0 Dino Dark Yellow
- 1.0 Dino Light Green
- 1.0 Dino Dark Green
- 1.0 Dino Light Blue
- 1.0 Dino Dark Blue
- 1.0 Dino Light Purple
- 1.0 Dino Dark Purple
- 1.0 Dino Light Brown
- 1.0 Dino Dark Brown
- 1.0 Light Grey
- 1.0 Dark Grey
- 1.0 Black
- 1.0 Dino Albino
- 0.3 WyvernBlue0
- 0.3 WyvernBlue1
- 0.3 WyvernPurple0
- 0.3 WyvernPurple1
- 0.3 DragonFire
- 0.3 DragonGreen0
- 0.3 Dino Medium Blue
- 0.3 Dino Deep Blue
- 0.1 Red
- 0.1 Blue
- 0.1 Green
- 0.1 Yellow
- 0.1 Cyan
- 0.1 Magenta
- 0.1 Light Green
- 0.1 Light Orange
- 0.1 Light Yellow
- 0.1 Light Red
- 0.1 Dark Green
- 0.1 White
How does the Chibi increase your max level?
You can increase your max Level with a Chibi just once per character. Equip the Chibi into your offhand slot in your inventory. It is the same slot you would equip Shields into. If you then go and kill Alpha animals with the Chibi equipped, the Chibi will get experience points. With every additional Level the Chibi gets, your personal Level Cap will be increased. You can see this also in the description of your implant.
Re-rolling Chibis to get a new one with a forge
After a while you will have collected a lot of double and triple Chibis but still missing out on the rare ones. You can put 4 different Chibis (excluding the Noglin Chibi) into a Forge and change them into a new Chibi. The rarity of the Chibi is dependent on the table further up.
Which Chibis need you to have a DLC installed?
Some Chibis need to have the DLC installed the original animal the Chibi portraits comes from. This is a technical limitation because certain game files needed are within the file structure of those DLCs. The following Chibis require you to have the DLC installed:
Scorched Earth:
- Ghost Mantis
- Mantis
- Phoenix
- Rock Golem
- Skeletal Wyvern
- Thorny Dragon
- Wyvern
- Zombie Wyvern
Aberration:
- Basilisk
- Bulbdog
- Featherlight
- Ghost Basilisk
- Glowtail
- Karkinos
- Reaper
- Rock Drake
- Rollrat
- Seeker
- Shinehorn
Extinction:
- Enforcer
- Gacha Claus
- Gasbags
- Managarmr
- Snow Owl
- Velonasaur
- The Witching Owl
Genesis: Part 2:
- Astrodelphis
- Maewing
- Noglin
- Shadowmane
- Voidwyrm
Why do ARK Chibis look so weird?
Chibi comes from the Japanese ちび or チビ and means “short” or “to be short”. In Japan the word “Chibi” has been a description of small comic characters that have very extreme proportions following the “baby schema” of big heads, big eyes and in comparison small bodies. Chibi characters often have the appearance of toddlers. ARK tried to resemble this by changing the meshes of the existing dinosaurs to fit this aesthetic. This works with some better than with others for sure. The Chibi Dodo and the Chibi Pulmonoscorpius are the only Chibis that kept their proportions in their Chibi version.
What do you do with your Chibi once you have levelled?
Once you have your 5 extra level you can either keep your Chibi or put it away. You won’t lose the levels even when you lose the Chibi.