Are Steam Ark players able to play with Epic Ark players?

[prodigy1202]

I remember back when Ark was free on the Epic games store, all of my friends downloaded it and were ready to get into the game, but when we tried, I was not able to play with them on servers because I have Ark downloaded through Steam, not Epic. Was this ever fixed?

[Dreadcthulhu]

Epic users can play with Steam users on any of the official servers, or any unofficial that does not use mods.  Modded servers are a no-go due to lack of mod support on the Epic store.

[Pipinghot]

On 6/7/2021 at 4:05 PM, prodigy1202 said:

I remember back when Ark was free on the Epic games store, all of my friends downloaded it and were ready to get into the game, but when we tried, I was not able to play with them on servers because I have Ark downloaded through Steam, not Epic. Was this ever fixed?

Following up on what @Dreadcthulhusaid above, if you want to play on an Unofficial server that uses mods you might be able to find mods that you can manually download and install on other web sites, which means you might be able to play on an Unofficial server even if the owner of that server is using mods.

I do this for Valheim, for example, because the game publisher "doesn't support" mods even though mods work with the game. I bought Valheim on Steam and then I've installed a mod manager and downloaded mods from third party web sites that I run with my Valheim game. Mind you, I can't say for certain that you'll be able to find the specific mods you want to ARK on a website other that Steam, but if you're comfortable with either manually installing mods or using a mod manager with your game, then this might work for you.

Having said that, I've also read that mod support for ARK will be coming to the Epic version soon, so if they make that happen fast enough then you might not even have to do that extra work to join a modded server with people who use the Steam version.