Magmasaur Smelting Bug

[IslandBrewer]

Playing on single player just to check out the map, raised a magmasaur, and now it only smelts when I'm nearby. If I up and go to another corner of the map, smelting appears to stop. I've compared this side by side with a regular stone forge starting with the same amount of metal. If I'm nearby, the magmasaur out smelts the forge (I mean, it's not like an industrial forge). If I leave the base, it's the other way around.  Has anyone else had, or even heard of this bug?

[Hodir]

Wildcard introduced a hibernation system for single player games in patch 259, where dinos outside your immediate area will enter a hibernation state and the game won't acknowledge their existence or render them. It's a bit of a lame attempt at dealing with performance problems and hardware resource usage for players running the game on lower end systems.

Fortunately, if you're not running an absolute potato of a computer by current standards, hibernation can be disabled. You need to start the game with an additional parameter:

-preventhibernation

Add the above to your game startup parameters. 

For Steam, use this short guide on how to add the option: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/7D01-D2DD-D75E-2955

For Epic, you'll need to refer to their support knowlegebase or forums on how to add command line arguments to ARK, but I believe it's something like:

1. Open Epic Games store.
2. Click Configurations (gear icon)
3. Scroll down until you find ARK Survival Evolved tab and open it.
4. Check the option for Advanced Command Line Arguments
5. Add the -preventhibernation option. 
6. Save changes.
7. ??
8. Profit!

Once you have hibernation disabled, you should test again and report back here with your findings.

 

 

[IslandBrewer]

Ah, I see! Thank you so much!

That totally makes sense, now, as I've seen some other weird things suggesting dinos "freeze" after  I've gone a certain distance from them in single player. I'm planning on eventually running a private server, so that shouldn't be a problem, but I'll see if I can disable hibernation on the single player.

 

Thanks again!