Rentable PS4 Servers & Ragnarok Update!

Hey, Survivors! 

We've got some very exciting news for you!

Rentable PS4 Servers

As of today, you will now be able to rent private dedicated PC hosted PS4 servers, and we've also been able to confirm that Xbox One rentable servers will be making their way to ARK in September! Nitrado is the first providers to offer ARK PC hosted console servers as we go through this initial technical iteration and launch phase, with other companies joining the party later. For those itching to get started head on over to https://nitra.do/arkps4!

These servers will offer you the opportunity to host private, player-run servers for you and your console friends to enjoy with up to 100 players per server. A key feature offered is “Cross ARK”, which allows players to connect multiple custom private servers together to create a large cluster and jump seamlessly between different servers. All server settings can be adapted to your preference by editing the settings through the web portal.

For those on Player Dedicated servers, rest assured, we'll be continuing to support those throughout ARK, this is just an additional feature we're adding as an option for players. 

Ragnarok Update!

We're excited to say Ragnarok has received its first expansion and here's what the the development team behind the map had to say:

Ragnarok is expanding into the South West region of the map where it'll be opening up the playing field by adding a near 25% (the size of The Island) additional playable landmass including: large islands, lots of flat-lands to build, a new experimental free range Wyvern cove, temple ruins, a meteor crash site, underwater passages, as well as a mini Tasmania Australia as we call it.

This most recent update has been a challenge creativity-wise. Scorched Earth and The Island assets were never really meant to be placed side by side necessarily, so finding that balanced between the two has been rewarding. We really wanted to emphasize a change from the more tight-knit North West to a more open and accessible South West. Where, we could give ARK players a host of new wide open areas to conquer and explore, as well as the real estate to really drive those large creative builds.

With this update, we wanted to try something new, something different. Rather than just do another Wyvern trench in the South, we thought, why not mix it up and give the wyverns a domain to reign over, rather than crowd them in a trench. This drives a bit more uncertainty with the player's safety, as well as creating dangerous air traffic! Moving forward with Ragnarok development, players can expect two things: Us going back and adding some extra love and definition to the most recently released area as well as more resources, and us fixing any bugs that show up in the South West that we or any player may find in their adventures!

This major version update also included a number of awesome changes and fixes for PC v256:

- Tameable Titanoboas!
- New Server Option: Force Respawn of Wild Dinos on Server Restart! Enabled by default on official servers, this will force weekly respawns of dinos on all servers to prevent certain dino types (like the Basilo and Spino) from becoming depopulated on long running servers. (?ServerAutoForceRespawnWildDinosInterval=SECONDS). Note in some cases this may not work more than once, we may have solved the case but we're looking into it .
- New Server Option: Tribe Size and Alliance Size Limits! The new tribe member limit is defaulted to 70 players and the new alliance per tribe limit is defaulted to 10 on official servers (MaxAlliancesPerTribe=# and MaxTribesPerAlliance=# in Game.ini). Note: Values may be off by 1 (looking into it!), so just pick your number and then add 1 to it.
- Platform Saddles are now limited to maximum 40 saddles per tribe. Each platform saddle (with structures) counts as 19 tribe tame slots (?PersonalTamedDinosSaddleStructureCost=19 & ?MaxPersonalTamedDinos=40).
- 1/4 sized Ragnarok map update (the "Southwest Update")
- Eggs no longer fall through structures during rendering.
- Baby ovis should no longer fall through structures after being born.
- Players can now escape being grappled by any enemy by using tools with blades to "cut" the line.
- Turrets now have a Players Only mode which targets players riding on dinos before targetting the dino.
- Crops can now be fertilized be pressing E on them instead of having to open the inventory.
- Hatching and Gestation progress bars now include countdown timers as well as percentages.
- The structure limit is now properly indicated to the player once the limit is reached.
- Containers/structure inventories now indicate how many slots are full without having to open them.
- Corrected spelling of Pulminoscorpius.
- Pump action shotgun pellets per shot increased from 10 to 12 (20% damage increase on full hit), initial spread decreased from 10 to 7.5, and max cone size at full range decreased from 100 to 75 degrees.
- Decreased the stun on humans from shocking tranq darts from 5 seconds to 2 seconds.
- Fixed 3 exploits used to get under the world map.
- When structures or tames are deleted due to the PVE timer expiring it is now properly communicated in the tribe log.
- Huge perf gains, may vary based on system configuration due to upgrading to the latest Unreal Rendering code. After changing your in game settings, be sure to restart your clients!