Ark Cluster Updates

This is an update to explain some of the balancing that we have done to the Ark servers. This is a common question from new players, so it’s probably good to write about it here rather than have it lost in Discord conversations.

Rules

First, a quick update on the rules.

I had an encounter with Frosty who had built a base with turret infront of a mission terminal on Genesis 2. Because the base is semi-camoflagued from a distance, it can definitely catch unsuspecting players by surprise as they try to do their missions. This has caused us to think about our open rule set and maybe throw a few ground rules down so that new players don’t get camped by turrets that could be considered needlessly offensive (as opposed to defensive) in nature.

Check out (our rules on our server page)[/servers] for more details, however a general rule of thumb is to just not be a dick and to be mindful of new players. If you want more PvP content out of our cluster, don’t suppress beach bobs and force them away from the cluster; just let people grow and take turns raiding one another. I’d recommend being mindful of turret placement too; try to keep them defensive and don’t set them up in areas new comers would spawn. Any ‘anti-social’ turrets designed to kill bobs just to be a dick will be removed.

Frostys Tower will be left in-place for people to test out their raiding skills; he mentioned in-game that it’s no longer in use but I asked him to keep the turret alive because I thought the whole thing was funny.

Boosting

General

XP gain is boosted 2.5x. Hexagon rewards are boosted 5x.

Hexagon rewards boosting doesn’t really need much said. It just makes sense to give more than a pittance in Hexagons. XP Boosting is intended to reduce the grind to level cap, which should appease our player base who are often infrequent players that take prolonged breaks from the game.

Resource Harvesting

We originally ran an unboosted Harvest Amount multiplier with a boosted Health multiplier. After feedback from the community (ie people complaining that “harvesting isnt boosted”), we increased the harvesting multipliers to the below:

HarvestAmountMultiplier=2.50000
HarvestHealthMultiplier=5.00000

The idea is to not rapidly progress players from beach bobs to alphas and retain a part of the ‘grind’ of Ark that we all love, while making things a little easier for mid-game players prepping up for boss battles. A kindly reminder that a 700% ascended pump shotgun costs almost 30k metal to craft, which is something that we consider when balancing our multipliers.

Stack sizes have also been increased 10x. This allows for stacks of 1k wood, 1k stone, 3k metal, 200 organic polymer, etc. We also increased stack sizes for things like meat, ambergris and mutagen. To complement this, we have also boosted player carrying capacity; bobs start with 500 and it per-level increments are boosted 25% (dont ask me to do the math on this).

The reason for this is because we can’t run mods without locking our Epic players out of the cluster again. Ark doesn’t allow modifying items weights; only their stacks. Increasing player and dino storage is the only thing that we can do to give an experience close to stack mods.

Taming

We run 1x taming speed with 2.5x food drain multiplier. This is a compromise between balancing taming difficulty against reducing time-to-tame to avoid prolonged tames (no 24 hour tames, yay!). The idea is to still require the large stacks of food so that taming isn’t too easy, but increasing the food drain multiplier causes the dinos to eat it faster, giving you faster tame times.

This won’t be changed at all as it brings Giga tames down to 30 minutes which is around what we want.

Breeding

This is the big one. Instead of going crazy explaining this, here’s the config:

MatingIntervalMultiplier=0.25
MatingSpeedMultiplier=10.0
EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=10.0
BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier=10.0
BabyFoodConsumptionSpeedMultiplier=5.0
LayEggIntervalMultiplier=0.5
BabyCuddleIntervalMultiplier=0.0625
BabyCuddleGracePeriodMultiplier=10.0
BabyImprintAmountMultiplier=100

Super OP, needs thorough testing. My breeding project will start pretty soon so I will be testing these; I’ll soon know if you lot have been taking advantage of unbalancing breeding and not saying anything ;)