ARK: Survival Evolved drops you onto the shore of a mysterious island with nothing but your bare hands and a strange implant in your arm. Dinosaurs and other primeval creatures roam the jungles, mountains and oceans around you, and every one of them is either a threat, a meal or a future mount. Studio Wildcard's open-world survival game asks you to hunt, harvest, craft and build your way from a lone survivor shivering by a campfire to the head of a tribe with an army of tamed creatures at its back.
Surviving the Island
The ARK does not care whether you live. Hunger and thirst tick down with every action, weight slows you, and the day-night cycle and shifting weather push the temperature toward frostbite or heatstroke depending on where you have wandered. Berries and raw meat will keep you alive for a while, but real progress comes from fire, shelter, cooked food and clothing suited to the climate, all governed by a proper insulation system that separates a snug hut from a windswept cliff.
Everything you make is crafted from Blueprints with variable quality, and everything wears out with use. Experience earned by simply doing things levels your character and unlocks Engrams, permanent recipes you keep even after dying. Die you will, and when it happens your body and everything it was carrying stay where you fell, waiting to be recovered by you or looted by someone else. When you log out, your character sleeps in the persistent world, so a safe bed matters more than in most games.
Tame, Breed and Ride
More than 100 creatures can be tamed, and the process is the heart of the game. You weaken a wild animal until it collapses, then feed and guard it, sometimes for hours, until it wakes up loyal. From there each tame levels up, carries inventory and armor, follows commands, and in many cases can be saddled and ridden directly. A few examples of what that opens up:
- Fly a Pterodactyl over the snow-capped peaks to scout new territory, or use a larger flyer to lift allies and supplies straight over an enemy wall.
- Run with a pack of Raptors through the jungle, or tromp through a rival base on the back of a Brontosaurus with a platform saddle strapped to its spine.
- Chase down prey from the saddle of a raging T-Rex, then bring the kill home on a beast of burden strong enough to carry a whole settlement's worth of resources.
Tamed pairs can be mated, and their offspring inherit stats and colors through a genetic trait system that rewards patient breeders across generations. Eggs need incubating at the right temperature, mammals need gestation time, and babies of both kinds need feeding around the clock. Raising a line of superior Rexes is a project in itself, and one of the most satisfying in the game.
Build, Farm and Fortify
Chop down forests and mine metal to craft the parts for sprawling multi-level bases: foundations, ramps, pillars, windows, gates, trapdoors, water pipes, generators, wiring and a whole catalog of electrical devices. Structures use a real load system, so a base whose supports are destroyed will come down in pieces, and reinforcing it properly is worth the effort. Every wall, sign, weapon and piece of gear can be painted, so your tribe's base and colors become recognizable across the server.
Farming sits alongside the building. Gather seeds from the wild, plant them in crop plots, water them and feed them fertilizer (everything on the ARK produces compostable waste, and some of it is better than others). Crops feed you and your herbivore tames, and rare fruits go into recipes and tonics that push your stats when it counts. A vegetarian survivor can genuinely flourish here, and it is possible to conquer the ARK without ever swinging a blade at another player.
Tribes, Bosses and the Truth of the ARK
Form a Tribe with friends and everything becomes shared: tames answer to any member, respawns can happen at any tribe bed, and admins can hand out access to storage and gates. Whether your neighbors become allies or targets is entirely up to the people on the server. Knocking out and capturing rival survivors is a legitimate strategy, and so is feeding them to your carnivores.
The endgame lives at the Obelisks. Gather enough rare tribute items and you can summon one of the ARK's god-like creatures for a boss fight that demands an experienced tribe and a trained army of tames, with valuable progression items on the line. Along the way, collectible Explorer Notes left by survivors from across the millennia piece together the backstory of the island and hint at what the ARK actually is, and why you are on it.
Ways to Play
- Single-player and local sessions
- Play alone in a private world with every server setting under your control, or host a non-dedicated session so a few friends can share your ARK. Characters and items can be moved between single-player and unofficial servers, so nothing you build has to stay in one place.
- Community multiplayer
- Studio Wildcard shut down the official ARK: Survival Evolved servers in September 2023, so the official network and its themed event ARKs are no longer available. Tens of thousands of player-hosted and unofficial community servers remain active, with persistent characters, bases and tames, and you can run a dedicated server of your own with the rules tuned however you like.
- Mods and custom maps
- Full Steam Workshop support and a customized Unreal Engine 4 editor have produced one of the deepest modding scenes in the survival genre, from quality-of-life tweaks to entire new maps and creatures. You can also generate your own Procedurally Generated ARKs for a fresh island whenever you want one.
Backed by dynamic lighting, volumetric clouds and a score by Ori and the Blind Forest composer Gareth Coker, the ARK is a place that rewards curiosity as much as caution. Light your first campfire, learn which creatures to run from and which to knock out, and start building the tribe that will one day stand at the foot of an Obelisk. The island is waiting to find out what you are made of.
