Mechanics

Our engrams page carries a table of every engram in the game with its unlock level and its price. Add the price column up and the total is 8,997 engram points across 515 engrams. Then read our leveling tips, which walks a character to the level cap and reports having around 477 points spare after spending roughly 573 on the way. Call it a thousand points earned against nearly nine thousand needed.

That ratio is the single most useful fact about this game's systems, and no page states it outright. You will unlock somewhere near one engram point in nine. Everything below is therefore organised by what each system charges and what you get for it, because in ARK the question is never whether you can learn something, it is what you are giving up to learn it.

What the tech tree actually costs

The engram table is worth reading as a shape rather than a list. Costs start trivially and end absurdly, and the curve is steep at the top.

The last two bands are where the budget dies. Ninety engrams sit above level 60 and they want 3,652 points between them, which is more than three times what you will ever hold. Individually the worst offenders are the Titanosaur Platform Saddle at 120 points, the Gas Mask at 110, and Night Vision, the Rocket Turret and the Heavy Auto Turret at 100 each. A single one of those is a tenth of your lifetime income. Down at the other end a Campfire, a Stone Hatchet and a Spear are 3 points apiece at level 2, and the most common price in the entire table is 6 points, which 64 engrams share.

The practical consequence is that late-game engrams are not a reward for reaching a level, they are a choice to permanently not have something else. Our leveling tips page sketches the standard route to the cap, from 48 points of thatch, cloth and a sleeping bag through to a 292-point block covering the Assault Rifle, Rocket Launcher and Auto Turret, and even that disciplined path leaves you with a few hundred spare rather than a full tree.

Free systems: the ones that cost nothing to learn

Some of the most important things in ARK are not engrams at all, which makes them the best value in the game.

Taming is the obvious one. Knocking a creature out and feeding it the right thing costs no points, and the payoff is transport, combat and harvesting all at once. Our guide covers the knockout method, the feeding stage and the practical business of building a pen so the tame survives the trip home. Berries and meat is the lookup table that goes with it, matching creatures to what they will actually accept: Mejoberries for Parasaurs and Trikes, raw meat for Raptors, and spoiled meat for a Pulmonoscorpius.

Power leveling is free in the same way. It is a list of experience exploits rather than a system to unlock: crafting Notes for cheap XP, killing Sauropods and baby dinos, hunting Wyverns and Titanosaurs, and sitting in a tribe so everyone's kills count. Since engram points arrive with levels, this is the only page in the bucket that increases your budget rather than spending it.

Base raiding defence mostly costs thought rather than points. Hiding a base among trees and rocks, layering the outer walls, patching the inner weak spots and keeping an emergency box of loot somewhere else are all decisions rather than unlocks, though the turrets that eventually back them up are the most expensive engrams in the game.

Cheap systems: the ones you unlock in the first hour

Crafting is where engram points first become real, and our page runs from Narcotic and Gunpowder up through structures and saddles while pointing at the metal farms that feed them. Cooking sits alongside it, with exact ingredient counts for the recipes worth making at a Campfire or Cooking Pot, Enduro Stew and Focal Chili among them.

Dyes are the cheapest thing here and the only purely cosmetic system in the bucket: a Cooking Pot, water, charcoal and berries, with Red Dye taking fifteen Tintoberries. Farming is the opposite, an unglamorous system that quietly removes a whole category of chore, running from berry seeds in crop plots up to irrigation pipes and taps, with fertilizer worth 60,000 fertilizer points at the top end. And honey harvesting is the specialist case, since taming a Queen Bee with Rare Flowers turns a hive from a one-time raid into a supply.

Building: the same system written twice, deliberately

Two pages cover construction and they are not duplicates. Building is the beginner's route: which engrams unlock thatch, wood and stone, how to lay a foundation that will hold, and how decay timers work. Base building is the materials sheet, with component costs like eighty wood per foundation, the durability difference between thatch, wood and metal, and the metal farming needed to reach the top tier.

Read together they explain why the building tree eats so much of a budget. Each tier is a separate set of engrams, so upgrading a base from wood to metal is not a materials problem but a second purchase of every piece you already own.

The expensive end, and one bargain

Taxidermy is the outlier that proves the pricing is not simply about power. Extinction's Taxidermy Tool unlocks at level 10 for 7 engram points, which is about the price of a storage box, and what it buys is the ability to mount your best kills on display bases. It is the only system in this bucket that exists purely to be looked at, and it is priced accordingly.

Saddles are the other place the budget disappears, and they are covered creature by creature in our creatures guide, where the Megachelon's platform saddle runs to 35 points against the Thorny Dragon's 18. Platform saddles in general are the worst value per point in the game, which the engram table confirms: the Titanosaur's is the single most expensive entry in all 515 rows.

None of this is map-specific, which is the real division in this wiki. The systems on this page work identically everywhere, so what you learn here you keep. What does not travel is geography, and that lives in our map guides, our resources coverage and the wiki hub.

Frequently asked questions

Can I unlock every engram in ARK?

No, and not close. The full tree is 515 engrams costing 8,997 points, while a character at the cap is working with roughly a thousand by our leveling guide's own accounting.

What is the level cap?

Level 100 for engram purposes, which is where the engram table stops and where our leveling guide's own Level Cap section places it. Individual items on some maps ask for more, with Fjordur's Mjolnir wanting level 190.

What should I spend my first points on?

Shelter and food. Our leveling guide's opening block, thatch structures, cloth armour and a sleeping bag, comes to about 48 points and covers the two things that actually kill new characters.

Which engrams are the worst value?

Platform saddles and turrets. The Titanosaur Platform Saddle at 120 points, the Gas Mask at 110, and Night Vision, the Rocket Turret and the Heavy Auto Turret at 100 each are the five most expensive entries in the table, and any one of them is around a tenth of everything you will ever earn.