KriegTiger

I did find a reddit post which mentioned finding the game ID for it and I may try it, it's something at least. Heck even after all these years the Linux dedicated server for ASE still has zero documentation and a couple mixed up issues (like they include the windows steam client rather than the linux one in the folder structure).

TL; DR: ASA looks amazing and I *REALLY* want it but until and unless I can run my own server on my own equipment for my friends and I, I will not drop a red cent on ASA. I grabbed ASE at the beginning of Early Access, and had my own server up and running the moment I had the ability to do so. It was buggy as hell, not optimized, and generally a pretty rough experience and I still logged HUNDREDS of hours into it because me and my friends could play together easily. ASE has come a long way from the early days and is a much more stable (even polished!) experience. I wrote a thorough Linux dedicated server guide for the steam community that to this day STILL gets comments, thanks, and updates as needed. I run a full story map cluster (Island, Scorched, Aberration, Extinction) out of my home server and my friends and I completed the whole thing over the course of a couple years before the story was completed, then went back and did it *again* to gather all the notes, see all the lore, and generally experience the game 'as it was meant to be experienced'. My server was running would run for months at a time without anybody doing more than logging in on the occasional whim, then suddenly we'd all be on daily for weeks at a time. I now have thousands of hours logged in the game, and you know what I never had to do? I never had to connect to a public server or pay a rental/hosting company a dime, and it was F'ing GLORIOUS. To say that being able to play the game with friends, and for me in particular being able to facilitate our play without ANYONE having to pay some form of subscription, was a key factor in how much time we logged and how much fun we had would be an understatement on the level of calling the ocean a puddle. It. F'ing. MATTERED. So now, with ASA being a hosted or public only multiplayer option? Nope. Forget it. Not going to see a penny from me. I refuse to have my fun be held hostage by random strangers; whether that's public server griefers or third party companies. And playing the game single player is boring, I don't care how pretty it is. I (me personally, my opinion, only speaking for me) was OK/interested in pre-ordering ARK2 when it was said that ASA (base game) would be a freebie reward, I was a little salty when it became its own standalone game purchase but knowing how much time and effort goes into this sort of thing (because it wasn't a copy/paste conversion) but that was palatable because I assumed (wrongly, apparently) the same formula would be kept. IE 'here's the game, there's public servers, hosted servers, and if you have the chops for it you can do it all yourself'. So I applaud the dev team for all their work in getting the game over to UE5, and changes like the water delivery system are amazing and welcome. I have a double-bird F-U to the companies pulling contractual BS that sets the game up to be either public/official or rented systems only. It's them that I want to understand using the loudest and most staunch slamming shut of my wallet: I WILL NOT BUY OR PLAY YOUR GAME ON THESE TERMS. If there's been an update that makes this rant/corpo-PSA obsolete, someone please PLEASE let me know; otherwise I'll just be over here staying forever on my ASE home cluster, there's plenty to still enjoy even after multiple thousands of hours.

EDIT / SOLUTION - I edited the 4th group to be 7778, 27016, 27021 and that fixed it. Apparently the LAN queries will ONLY probe a very narrow band of ports and anything above the group 3 ports is ignored. ------ I've been running a small cluster of systems for a number of years. Up until now it's been 3 maps at a time, but I wanted to add the 4th (extinction) to the group. For the outside world, it's great. The servers are all visible in the Steam global/master list, all run perfectly as expected, and inter-map-travel is flawless. But on LAN, all I ever see are the first three. This is the port assignment section of my config file for the map. I can comment out group 4 and uncomment ANY other group and it shows up perfectly on LAN, but using that 4th group it suddenly is never detected as a LAN available server. There is no firewall to worry about, either on server or client. #arkserver ports #port="7777" #queryport="27015" #rconport="27020" #arkserver2 ports #port="7779" #queryport="27017" #rconport="27022" #arkserver3 ports #port="7781" #queryport="27019" #rconport="27024" #arkserver4 ports port="7783" queryport="27021" rconport="27026" What's the deal?