Ark: Survival Evolved

ARK: Survival Evolved strands you, naked, freezing and starving, on the shores of a mysterious island. You hunt, gather resources, craft items, grow crops, research technologies and build shelter to survive the elements. Across the island, you can kill or tame and breed dinosaurs and other primeval creatures, then team up with other players or prey on them as you work to survive, dominate and escape.

Survive the island

You must eat and drink to stay alive. Plants and meats have different nutritional properties, and keeping fresh water at your home and in your inventory is an ongoing concern. Physical actions consume food and water, while carrying too much weight slows you down. The day-night cycle and randomized weather change the temperature, making you hungry or thirsty more quickly. Fires, shelters, and customizable clothing and armor help protect you from extreme temperatures and locational damage; shelter also reduces exposure to the weather and secures you and your supplies.

Tame and breed creatures

Over 100 creatures can be tamed through a capture-and-affinity process: weaken a wild creature until it is unconscious, then nurse it back to health with suitable food. Tamed creatures can gain levels, consume food, carry inventory and equipment, and follow commands depending on how well they have been tamed and trained. Stronger creatures can carry prey, while larger ones can be ridden and controlled. You can fly a Pterodactyl over snowy mountains, carry allies over enemy walls, race through the jungle with Raptors, cross an enemy base on a brontosaurus, or chase prey on a T-Rex.

Creatures live within a dynamic ecosystem of predators and prey. You can mate tames of opposite genders and selectively breed generations through a trait system based on recombinant genetic inheritance, with both egg incubation and mammalian gestation. You can also raise babies.

Build and grow

Chop trees and mine metal and other resources to craft structures from complex, snap-linked parts. Build multi-level shelters using components such as ramps, beams, pillars, windows, doors, gates, remote gates, trapdoors, water pipes, faucets, generators, wires, electrical devices and ladders. Structures can collapse if enough support is destroyed, so reinforcing them matters. You can paint structures, weapons, clothing and armor, and decorate your home with per-pixel paintable signs, textual billboards and other objects.

You can collect seeds from wild plants, set them in plots, water them and use fertilizer to grow crops. Everything that consumes calories produces waste that can be composted, and some fertilizer is better than others. Crops yield fruits for cooking recipes and making tonics, while rare seeds can have powerful properties. You can flourish as a vegetarian or vegan and master the ARK without violence.

Explore and progress

The ARK has natural and unnatural environments above ground, underground and underwater. Exploring its tallest mountains, darkest caves and ocean depths can lead to better resources, rare blueprints and exotic, procedurally randomized creatures. You can develop an in-game map, add custom points of interest, and use a Compass or GPS coordinates to navigate. Proximity text and voice chat let you communicate with nearby players, while a radio supports long-distance communication. You can also build and draw signs to guide others or mislead them.

Collectible 3D Explorer Notes contain clues from survivors who lived on the ARK in ages past. Written by human inhabitants from across the millennia, the notes describe creatures and the island’s history; finding them all can help you piece together the ARK’s nature and purpose. Special Summon locations let you offer rare sacrificial items to attract god-like creatures for battle. These huge opponents provide an end-game goal for experienced groups and their armies of tames, and defeating them yields valuable progression items. The game also describes a definitive end-game as planned.

Tribes and multiplayer

You can form a Tribe and invite friends. Tribe members can command and ally with its tames, respawn at any of its home spawn points, and share access to a village through key items and passcodes. Promoting members to Tribe Admins can ease management.

On servers with over 100 players, your character, tames and builds remain in the persistent world when you leave. Items physically exist in the world, either in boxes or on your character, and can be looted or stolen. Your character remains asleep when you log out, so you can protect your supplies by building up, teaming up or having tames guard them. You can travel with your character and items between ARKs in the network by uploading or downloading data at Obelisks. Official ARKs can appear on the world map for limited-time themed events with corresponding limited-run items, and you can create or randomize Procedurally Generated ARKs.

Crafting and character growth

Items require resources and are crafted from blueprints, which have variable statistics and qualities. You gain experience through actions and can level up both your character and your tames. Learning Engrams lets you craft items from memory without blueprints, even after you die. You can customize your character’s hair, eye and skin tones and body proportions.

Crafted items wear out with use and need repairs. Death is permanent, and players can knock out, capture and force-feed other players for purposes such as extracting blood for transfusions, collecting waste for fertilizer or feeding carnivorous tames.

Ways to play

You can play a local single-player game, host a server with settings of your choice, or join player-hosted servers. Characters and items can move between single-player and unofficial servers. The game supports mods through Steam Workshop and a customized Unreal Engine 4 editor, with its maps and assets available as examples for modding.