Ark Survival Evolved

Everything you can learn in ARK falls into one of two piles. There is the pile that comes with you: how taming works, what an engram costs, how to keep a base standing. Learn it once and it is yours on every island the game will ever sell you. Then there is the pile that expires the moment you change maps, which is every coordinate, every spawn, every cave mouth and every good place to build.

This wiki is organised around that split, because it is the split that decides what to read next. If you are stuck on a system, the answer is the same wherever you are standing. If you are lost, the answer depends entirely on which of the eleven maps you are lost on.

The half that travels: systems

Our mechanics guide is the map-independent half of the game, and it opens on the number that governs all of it. There are 515 engrams in ARK costing 8,997 points to learn, and a character at the level cap holds roughly a thousand. You will unlock about one point in nine, forever, so every system below is really a spending decision.

The engrams page is the full price list, level by level. Leveling tips plans a route through it to the cap, and power leveling is the shortcut version, built on cheap experience from crafted Notes, Sauropods, Wyverns and shared tribe kills.

Staying alive comes first in practice. Berries and meat is the reference for what each creature will eat, cooking turns that into recipes worth the pot, and farming replaces the foraging entirely once you have crop plots and irrigation. Honey harvesting is the specialist branch, and taming a Queen Bee is what turns a hive from a raid into a supply.

Shelter is two guides because it is two problems. The building guide is how to put up your first house without it falling down, while base building is the materials arithmetic behind thatch, wood and metal. Once it is standing, base raiding defence covers keeping other people out of it.

The rest of the portable half is craft and companionship. Crafting runs from Narcotic and Gunpowder up to saddles, dyes is the one purely decorative system in the game, and our taming guide explains the knockout, the feeding and the pen, none of which costs an engram point at all.

The half that expires: eleven maps

Our maps guide ranks all eleven by how much of the above stops working when you arrive, which is the fastest way to decide where to go next. If you already know where you are going, the table below is the shortcut.

The shape of that table is the argument. Ragnarok and Lost Island need two pages each because nothing about them is surprising. Genesis needs eight because almost everything about it is.

What sits between the two halves

Four of our guides are neither purely systems nor purely geography, and they are the ones people usually arrive looking for.

Resources covers the materials that got their own write-ups, which is mostly the same familiar list at a new address, plus the four things the expansions invented outright, including a currency you can spend at a shop. Items collects the nine things worth chasing, every one of which is really a permit for somewhere you cannot yet go, priced from a free explorer note up to a hammer that will not speak to you below level 190.

Creatures is the seven tames with pages of their own, sorted by what you have to build or spend before the animal is yours, and bosses covers the three fights we document in depth, all of them from Extinction and Genesis rather than the Island.

Places, wherever you are

Our locations guide runs through a place's whole life cycle, from the beach you wake up on to the structure you leave the map by, and three of its pages are worth bookmarking on their own because they apply everywhere.

Spawn points is the one you will want after your first bad death, since planning a route back to your body is easier than sprinting hopefully. Caves locations is the general primer on land and underwater caves, their loot tables, their level requirements and the effects that hit you on the way in. And obelisks gathers the Red, Blue and Green towers across every map, which are simultaneously how you summon a boss and how you move a character to another server.

If the game itself is the problem

Two pages exist for when the trouble is not in-game at all. Performance tweaks covers the settings and graphics changes that make ARK run better generally, and Genesis performance tweaks deals with that expansion specifically, which needs its own treatment because its biomes are far heavier than the base game's.

Frequently asked questions

Which map should I play first?

Ragnarok or Lost Island. Both are large, free and conventional, and our coverage of them is short precisely because nothing on them needs explaining beyond where things are.

Do my engrams carry between maps?

Yes, which is the whole reason the systems half of this wiki is worth reading first. What does not carry is anything with a coordinate attached to it.

How much of the tech tree can I actually unlock?

Roughly a ninth of it. The full set of 515 engrams costs 8,997 points and a capped character has around a thousand, so the tree is a menu rather than a checklist.

Is this the same game as ARK: Survival Ascended?

No. Ascended is the separate Unreal Engine 5 rebuild and it has its own wiki here, with its own maps, creatures and resource coordinates. This one covers the original release.