Creatures

A tame is never just a taming method. Before any of these seven creatures belongs to you, the game asks for something specific and different each time: a structure you have to build first, five hours of incubation, a bottle of milk you can only take off a knocked-out female, or a saddle that costs engram points you will not get back. Sorted that way the bucket stops being an alphabet of dinosaurs and becomes a price list, and two of the entries turn out not to be for sale at all.

The two you cannot have

The Alpha T-Rex page is honest about this in its own opening: Alpha creatures cannot be knocked down, which makes them untameable. The taming section that follows exists only to tell you that the admin console's forcetame is the sole route, and that you may need to enter it twice. Treat the page as a hunting map instead. It puts Alphas at the Grand Hills on the Island at 42 LAT, 32 LON, in the ancient city of the Sanctuary on Extinction at 48 LAT, 33 LON, and on the Floating Island on The Center, and it is blunt that walking up without a plan gets you killed instantly.

The Corrupted Master Controller is a stranger case, because it is a boss sitting in the creatures bucket. Our page describes it as less of a creature than a control tower: a metal head behind a purple shield that never fights you directly, only through Corrupted Avatars and Dinotars. It also carries the numbers the fight page does not. The System Root portal will not open until you have cleared 58 missions for Gamma, 116 for Beta or 158 for Alpha, and the health behind the shield scales from 25,000 through 60,000 to 150,000. Four phases, fifteen minutes each, and damage only lands in the last one. If you want the stage by stage walkthrough of the same encounter it is on the bosses side, where the fight is written up as Genesis's finale.

Paying in time: the Fire Wyvern

Wyverns are the one tame here where the adult is simply off the table. Our page says so plainly, and the whole process is therefore a theft and a nursery rather than a knockout. The Fire Wyvern egg shares a nest ground with the Lightning and Poison variants, down in the trench that separates the snow biome from the volcano, entered at 30.8 Latitude and 65.4 Longitude, with the red egg sitting slightly raised to your left near 30.7, 63.9, just past the lava pool.

Grabbing it wakes every adult in the trench, so the exit plan matters more than the approach. After that the bill is heat and patience. The egg wants 80 to 90 degrees, held there with torch stands, four air conditioners or an incubator, and it takes roughly five hours to hatch. The hatchling then refuses raw meat and drinks only Wyvern Milk, which means either knocking out a female, which our page suggests doing with a Harpoon Launcher and a net projectile for a one minute stun before you cage her, or killing an Alpha Wyvern for a batch of fifty bottles.

Paying in construction: Karkinos and the Spirit Dire Bear

Two of these tames are really building projects. The Karkinos wants a behemoth gateway with stone pillars blocking the far exit and a catapult lined up on it; you lure the crab in, shut the gate behind it, and then keep the catapult shots on the body rather than the arms or head. Spoiled meat or exceptional kibble finishes it. What you get is a river-dwelling hauler that drops Chitin, Organic Polymer and Raw Meat, and that can carry other creatures around.

The Spirit Dire Bear is the ghostly Ragnarok variant, and it is easy to spot for exactly that reason. Our page lists six spawn zones, from 37.2, 75.5 in the north down to 31.3, 30.8, and the trap is a 2x2 foundation with two high door frames and a ramp: run up, jump the river, and pull the bear through the frames behind you. The taming itself is unusually delicate, because the bear has to be worn down with arrows without being killed, and it heals by eating a corpse roughly every ten arrows. It has a long list of acceptable foods, from Superior Kibble and Giant Bee Honey down to plain berries, and the page warns that an unfed bear turns aggressive.

Paying in engram points: the three saddles

Only three creatures in this bucket have a saddle write-up, and putting their numbers side by side produces the one genuinely surprising thing here. The engram cost does not track the level gate at all.

The Megachelon's platform saddle is the most expensive of the three at 35 points and unlocks twenty levels earlier than the Karkinos saddle, which costs 28. That is worth knowing before you spend, because as our mechanics guide covers, engram points are the one budget in this game you cannot fully clear, and a mid-level platform saddle takes a real bite out of it. The Megachelon at least earns it back: it is a floating turtle you can grow crops on and treat as a mobile base, tamed passively by dragging a swarm of ocean-biome fish underneath it and then killing anything that interrupts the bar.

Where the rest of the wildlife is written up

Seven pages is a thin creature bucket for a game this size, and the reason is that most of ARK's wildlife is documented by map rather than by species here. Spawn maps for Valguero, Ragnarok, Fjordur, Crystal Isles and the rest sit in our map guides, Extinction's corrupted wildlife has its own roundup, and the general method for anything not listed above is in the taming guide. The wiki hub is the quickest way to find which of those applies to the map you are standing on.

Frequently asked questions

Can any Alpha creature be tamed legitimately?

No. Our Alpha T-Rex page states that Alphas cannot be knocked down, which rules out the standard route, and that the console is the only alternative.

Which of these can I ride?

The Thorny Dragon, Megachelon and Karkinos all have saddles documented, and the Megachelon's is a platform saddle you can build on. The Fire Wyvern is flown once raised.

What is the cheapest useful tame here for a new character?

The Thorny Dragon, on both counts. It is a straightforward tranquilliser tame, its saddle is the cheapest of the three at 18 engram points, and our page rates it as the best wood gatherer on Scorched Earth.