Jen

Hey Survivors! Welcome to the latest edition of the Community Crunch! Mysterious Mysteries: Introducing ??????? What an intriguing discovery survivors, can you guess what this creature is? ??? Mod Community Updates! The ARK Modding Contest submission period ends in 5 days. Make sure to get your entries in before the end of the day on October 5th! After that, we'll begin the voting phase which will last for two weeks, so get your communities ready to vote on their favorite mods. Enter the contest here! I also have a new tutorial prepared for you today. We need to cover bitmasks before we start dealing with custom structures. After this we'll be moving on to a new project that builds on some of the concepts from our Dino Shrine mod, so look forward to the Virtual Sentry Mod that will be the focus of coming tutorials. PS4 (EU) Sale! ARK: Survival Evolved ARK: Explorer's Edition ARK: Season Pass ARK: Scorched Earth ARK: Aberration Fanart of the Week! Beautiful camp scene by ScutalTheLizard. ARK: Evolution Event! Survivors across ALL Platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 5th of October at 1 PM EST until Monday the 8th of October at 3 PM EST. All Official Servers across each platform will be undergoing this evolutionary change which includes: 2x Harvesting Rates 2x Taming Rates 2x EXP Rates That's it for this post guys! As always if you’ve got anything to share you can find us at: Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark Steam: steamcommunity.com/app/346110 Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark All the best, Studio Wildcard View full article

What is Conquest? Conquest is a new PvP player experience for PC players which focuses on large-scale PvP while avoiding the problem of mega tribes. Increased rates will allow tribes to set up and establish themselves quickly and enable them to rebuild after potential losses instead of being wiped completely. Conquest Breakdown: Experience gain, taming, gathering, breeding, hatching, and raising rates have been doubled compared to our standard Official Servers (2x). Tribes are set to 25 players max. Tribe alliances are disabled, though informal alliances are allowed. Servers have a maximum player count of 100. There will be 36 servers in total on the Conquest cluster. Server transfers are enabled. Conquest servers are unaffected by Evolution Events. Enforcement: Our Enforcement team will be expanding to patrol this new cluster actively. We are testing this type of active enforcement and while we know this presents a challenge, we hope to be able to maintain this program while working alongside players. We desire to actively patrol and get to know the players of each server. The leader of each large tribe on Conquest will be able to submit a request to join a Discord server (to be announced at a future date) with access to the Enforcement team. We hope that this style of active enforcement and cooperation from the Conquest players will ensure that the servers are fair, fun, and competitive. The Enforcement team consists of both English and Chinese support, with expansions coming to Russian and Portuguese in the near future. Failure to comply with our Code of Conduct will result in consequences, including but not limited to a tribe, item, structure, and dino wipe by the Enforcement Team. Players should be aware that all reports submitted to Enforcement are taken seriously. Tribe Spotlight Program: It is our goal that your tribe in Conquest will become your identity on this cluster, a team name that you’ll carry with you into battle like a badge of honor. We will be offering clean/validated tribes (via the Discord) opportunities to brand themselves within the community. Tribes will have the opportunity to be spotlighted in articles on SurviveTheARK and will also receive opportunities to be promoted on our social media (such as retweets for content creators). This program is still in development and will be further fleshed out in the weeks to come. The Conquest servers will be spun up and available for PC players on September 28 at 10am PST. We'll be monitoring the success of the cluster and then evaluate bringing them to console at a later date. We encourage PvP players to check these new servers out for a fresh experience! View full article

Hey Survivors! Welcome to the latest edition of the Community Crunch! Conquest PVP Servers! Today we have some exciting news to bring our PvP official players. We are introducing a new server cluster called: Conquest. In contrast to our successful 6-man tribes servers, Conquest will focus on big tribes (25=player limit per tribe) and big battles. In order to fuel this large-scale fight these servers will have 2x rates compared to other official servers (unaffected by Evolution Events). This will allow tribes to build up faster, gain experience faster, raise, breed, and tame creatures faster, allow more focus directly on battling other tribes. The servers will also be capped at 100 players per server instead of 70. Server transfers will be enabled between servers within the cluster. There will be 36 servers total within the cluster, offering all map types to play on. This batch of Conquest servers will provide a fertile grounds for big tribes to come and play! The Conquest servers will be spun up and available for PC players on September 28. We'll be monitoring the clusters success on PC and then evaluate bringing them to console at a later date. We encourage PvP players to check these new servers out on Friday! ARK Digest 54! Thank you for all of your questions, Survivors! We're excited to be bringing back the ARK Digest as it's been quite awhile since we had one. We plan to do these approximately once a month going forward so Digest 54 will take place near the end of September. Here is our question and answer session with Lead Programmer Chris Willoughby! Survivor Thomas asks, “Will the Titans of the land be a temporary tame (like the Titanosaur's on these Islands in the sky) or will we be able to properly keep them in our collection forever? Will we be able to ride them?” Survivor Caleb asks, “Will there be another dino TLC pass? If so could you provide more details about it? Examples of dinos that could benefit from a TLC pass would be the Carnotaurus, Dimetrodon, and the Sabertooth among others.” Survivor Caleb asks, “If Rockwell is trapped/killed on Aberration, which takes place before Extinction in the story, does this mean we will not receive new additional recipes on Extinction due to the fact that Rockwell is the creator of the recipes?” Survivor Jacob asks, “Will you guys do another live stream of the new dlc Extinction like what you did with aberration?” Survivor Lorenzo asks, “Will the scout in extinction also be able to tag wild dinosaurs and are there going to be more relevance and new features regarding PvE?” Survivor Cyrus asks, “Will Extinction have a similar transfer system that Aberration had during the first few months? Will we be able to download items, Dino’s, or pre existing characters onto the Extinction map?” If you have a question you want answered by the ARK dev team please submit your questions with the Subject "ARK Q&A" to our email address: arkfans@studiowildcard.com STA Chinese Language Support! SurviveTheArk.com 现在提供简体中文支持以及简体中文举报系统！用户可以在网页最下方选择语言。在更改语言后，系统将会自动翻译相应部分。 SurviveTheArk.com now offers Chinese language support and Chinese PC Abuse System support! You can select your language from the very bottom of the website. Once the language is changed, the PC incident report fields will automatically translated. Mod Community Updates! We just have a couple reminders for the mod community today. There are two weeks left for submissions on both the Mod Contest and the Sponsored Mod Program. Get your entries in soon, because the deadline is October 6th. After that, we enter the voting phase; so this might be a good time to get people to try your mod and see what it has to offer. We're also nearing the end of the month so I will be reviewing bounty requests and claims soon. If you are looking for any specific tutorials please make sure to take a look at the bounty request form. Community Livestream #9 This Thursday! This Thursday September 27th the community team will be doing another biweekly livestream! During these livestreams Zen Rowe, Chris, and Jen bring you ARK news, celebrate modding, and the community as a whole every other week. We mix it up between playing ARK, showing off mods, and showing off your community creations for all to see. Survivors are invited to join us in the chat (and sometimes even in-game) to play and talk with the community team. We are accepting any type of ARK related fanart to be featured in the Showcase section of the stream and entries are always open. This can be drawings, videos, builds, ANSEL screenshots, handmade crafts, anything ARK related! You can submit your ARKwork to our streaming email address: arkfans@studiowildcard.com Be sure to follow us on our Twitch page so you don't miss a stream! twitch.tv/survivetheark We'll be hosting our next Community Live Stream on Thursday, September the 27th at 1pm EST! We hope to see you there PS4 (EU) Sale! ARK: Survival Evolved ARK: Explorer's Edition ARK: Season Pass ARK: Scorched Earth ARK: Aberration Fanart of the Week! Spinosaurus painted with Indian ink by Anna! ARK: Evolution Event! Survivors across ALL Platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 28th of September at 1 PM EST until Monday the 2st of October at 3 PM EST. All Official Servers across each platform will be undergoing this evolutionary change which includes: 2x Harvesting Rates 2x Taming Rates 2x EXP Rates That's it for this post guys! As always if you’ve got anything to share you can find us at: Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark Steam: steamcommunity.com/app/346110 Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark All the best, Studio Wildcard View full article

Happy Patch Day, Survivors! It's Tuesday and ARK's latest is live. In celebration of the patch today we're sharing what we have been working on: some more brand new previews of our upcoming expansion pack ARK: Extinction. Check out the images below for a sneak peak at what you can expect to see on planet Earth! In Extinction, Earth has become an Element-infested planet filled with fantastical creatures both organic and technological. Element has ravaged the planet and corrupted both the landscape and some of its inhabitants, causing mutations in the creatures and plants that can be found there. We look forward to sharing more in the months ahead as we work towards our Extinction release! Our Extinction Chronicles IV event is going on right now (PS4 coming soon), including new Corrupted skin, Explorer Notes, and Tek dinos. You can read all about it in yesterdays Community Crunch announcement: View full article

Hey Survivors! Welcome to the latest edition of the Community Crunch! Extinction Chronicles IV! Tomorrow there will be a client and server side update that will bring Extinction Chronicles IV to survivors on PC, Xbox, and PS4! Leading up to the release of Extinction there will be monthly drops of Extinction-related Explorer Notes on The Island, Scorched Earth, and Aberration. Once collected these notes will unlock new Extinction-related skins! There will also be the appearance of more powerful Tek-themed Dinosaur variants within the ARKs each month. These Tek Dinos are permanent additions (meaning they will continue to spawn even after the event is over), with a new one beginning to appear each month. In Extinction Chronicles I we released three Explorer Notes, the Corrupted Helmet and the Tek Rex. In Extinction Chronicles II we released three Explorer Notes, the Corrupted Boots and the Tek Stego. In Extinction Chronicles III we released three Explorer Notes, the Corrupted Pants and the Tek Raptor. And now, tomorrow we're excited to bring you three new Explorer Notes, the Corrupted Shirt and a new Tek creature, the Tek Parasaur! In addition, special colored dinos will be populating the ARKs. You'll be able to find creatures sporting black and green for the next month beginning tomorrow. Be sure to take advantage of these special colors before they're extinct! Last but not least: just like we did last month, you can expect to see some more extinction screenshots tomorrow here on our forums! Be sure to check back for that. Patch Notes! Here are the full fixes and notes coming in tomorrows Extinction Chronicles IV update. Community Livestream #8 Roundup! On September 13th we had our seventh Community Livestream. Thank you to all of those who attended and participated! The community team had a lot of fun and we hope you did as well. If you weren't able to catch the stream you can watch the video-on-demand on our Twitch page or by clicking on the video below. Chris and Jen took on the stream without Josh this week who was moving apartments, and they were joined by the creators of the Dragonpunk Roleplaying Server. The server utilises many mods from our Sponsored Mods program. It also has its own lore with the players actively contributing to its story and the progression of the server with everything they do! Chris and Jen then played a game of Hangman with the chat, utilizing in-game mechanics to send the guesser into the lava if they guessed wrong. Spoiler: Jen is much better at Hangman than Chris is. Things concluded with looking at fan submissions, including an amazing ARK cosplay! We are accepting any type of ARK related fanart to be featured in the Showcase section of the stream and entries are always open. This can be drawings, videos, builds, ANSEL screenshots, handmade crafts, anything ARK related! You can submit your ARKwork to our streaming email address: arkfans@studiowildcard.com Be sure to follow us on our Twitch page so you don't miss a stream! twitch.tv/survivetheark We'll be hosting our next Community Live Stream on Thursday, September the 27th at 1PM EST! We hope to see you there Mod Community Updates! Good day modders, I have another tutorial prepared for you today; but before that, I want to remind everyone that the entry period for the contest is still open. You can continue to enter until October 6th! I have also received some questions about the video that was posted last week for the sponsored mod contest and I want everyone to know that the mods featured in it are not necessarily contestants. The mods shown were some of the great projects that the community has created and featured to get people interested in making mods if they aren't already, to show what has been possible thus far. By popular demand, very popular demand actually, we're going to cover some information on version control. Now, this is not a comprehensive tutorial on version control, as that would likely mean its own miniseries, but it should get you going so that you can feel more secure about your projects. ARK Digest Next Week! We'll be doing another ARK Digest post in the next Community Crunch! If you have a question you want answered by the ARK dev team please submit your questions with the Subject "ARK Q&A" to our email address: arkfans@studiowildcard.com The Great Migration #4: Inactive Legacy Server Removal This is the last reminder that we will be removing some of our lower population legacy ARK servers on Xbox and PS4 from our Official legacy network. This takes place next Monday! Here is a quick breakdown on how this process works: Taking Down Low Pop Servers With calculations based on sustained player-count as well as the popularity of game mode, we will be removing lower population legacy servers, most of which retain a 0-1 player concurrent population. These servers will be taken offline on September 24th. Any existing server that is not considered a low pop server and is not taken down at this time will still exist on the Legacy network. Legacy servers will continue to remain on a separate cluster from the new cluster, which means you will not be able to transfer anything between Legacy servers and the new servers. Servers Up for Deprecation Below is a complete list of the LEGACY servers that will be deprecated come September 24th. You have from now until then to move your belongings onto a server not present on this list. Please click one of the links below. They are separated by platform. How To Move Servers If you are unfamiliar with the process, you are able to upload your items, creatures, and player through the Obelisk terminal, supply drops, as well as the Tek Transmitter. Survivors are advised to use Cross-ARK immediately to relocate their belongings onto a server that is not included in our take-down list above. Server Saves of Deleted Servers We will make the save files available as soon as we can. We will host the PC files which anyone can download and then you are welcome to re-host the save file for your own use. We'll include a link to where you can download server saves in this post when they are available. Nitrado will also be able to provide the saves for use on Nitrado servers for console, as they have done in the past.You can see a list of our currently available depreciated official servers on this webpage: https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/server-backups/ Fanart of the Week! Check out this awesome JW-style Allo done by milokamilo! Very impressive! ARK: Evolution Event! Survivors across ALL Platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 21st of September at 1 PM EST until Monday the 24th of September at 3 PM EST. All Official Servers across each platform will be undergoing this evolutionary change which includes: 2x Harvesting Rates 2x Taming Rates 2x EXP Rates That's it for this post guys! As always if you’ve got anything to share you can find us at: Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark Steam: steamcommunity.com/app/346110 Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark All the best, Studio Wildcard View full article

Hey Survivors! Welcome to the latest edition of the Community Crunch! Extinction Chronicles IV Next Week! On September 18th Extinction Chronicles IV will be released on all platforms. As usual survivors can expect a new tek dino, new Explorer Notes, a new cosmetic, increased level cap, and special colored dinos on all ARKs! Developer Diaries! This weeks diary entry is brought to you by Lead Programmer, Chris Willoughby, as he talks about the process for designing gameplay mechanics for Extinction. Upcoming Server Maintenance! This Wednesday, September 12th at 12pm EST we will be merging the PC ARKpocalypse servers into one cluster. It is important for players on those servers to note that during this process any items or creatures uploaded into the Obelisk will be lost. Therefore it is strongly encouraged that you download anything in your cloud to ensure nothing is lost before Wednesday. You can follow us on Twitter to keep up-to-date with this server process. Mod Community Updates! The ARK Modding contest is now in full swing, and we've been getting some good entries, but I still want to encourage anyone that has ever considered making mods for ARK to dive in and participate. The submission period will be open until Saturday, October 6th so polish up those mods and let's have some fun. After that, we'll move into the voting phase where we'll post all the mods in the contest publicly and let everyone try them out and vote on their favorites. We've also received a couple tutorial bounty claims for chat commands and map optimizations and I have added a bunch of new bounties to the board ready to be claimed. You can find all of them here: We're going to need some new tutorial requests too, and please check the list in the form to see if the request already exists, as I choose new bounties based on demand which can only be counted if everyone submits the form using one of the items from the drop-down. Next week I'll have a new tutorial ready. I've been getting a ton of requests for a tutorial on version control, so I'm going to show everyone how to use Git with the devkit. Happy modding! The Great Migration #4: Inactive Legacy Server Removal Once again it is time to remove some of our lower population legacy ARK servers on Xbox and PS4 from our Official legacy network. Over time the ARK population has migrated from legacy to non-legacy and in its wake left many servers with low populations for 0-1 players in a significant amount of cases. Here is a quick breakdown on how this process works: Taking Down Low Pop Servers With calculations based on sustained player-count as well as the popularity of game mode, we will be removing lower population legacy servers, most of which retain a 0-1 player concurrent population. These servers will be taken offline on September 24th. Any existing server that is not considered a low pop server and is not taken down at this time will still exist on the Legacy network. Legacy servers will continue to remain on a separate cluster from the new cluster, which means you will not be able to transfer anything between Legacy servers and the new servers. Servers Up for Deprecation Below is a complete list of the LEGACY servers that will be deprecated come September 24th. You have from now until then to move your belongings onto a server not present on this list. Please click one of the links below. They are separated by platform. How To Move Servers If you are unfamiliar with the process, you are able to upload your items, creatures, and player through the Obelisk terminal, supply drops, as well as the Tek Transmitter. Survivors are advised to use Cross-ARK immediately to relocate their belongings onto a server that is not included in our take-down list above. Server Saves of Deleted Servers We will make the save files available as soon as we can. We will host the PC files which anyone can download and then you are welcome to re-host the save file for your own use. We'll include a link to where you can download server saves in this post when they are available. Nitrado will also be able to provide the saves for use on Nitrado servers for console, as they have done in the past. You can see a list of our currently available depreciated official servers on this webpage: https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/server-backups/ Community Livestream #8 This Thursday! This Thursday September 13th the community team will be doing another biweekly livestream! During these livestreams Zen Rowe, Chris, and Jen bring you ARK news, celebrate modding, and the community as a whole every other week. We mix it up between playing ARK, showing off mods, and showing off your community creations for all to see. Survivors are invited to join us in the chat (and sometimes even in-game) to play and talk with the community team. We are accepting any type of ARK related fanart to be featured in the Showcase section of the stream and entries are always open. This can be drawings, videos, builds, ANSEL screenshots, handmade crafts, anything ARK related! You can submit your ARKwork to our streaming email address: arkfans@studiowildcard.com Be sure to follow us on our Twitch page so you don't miss a stream! twitch.tv/survivetheark We'll be hosting our next Community Live Stream on Thursday, September the 13th at 1pm EST! We hope to see you there Fanart of the Week! We would like to give a special shout out this week to creature paint artist Sharkcat for their Jurassic World raptor paints! ARK: Evolution Event! Survivors across ALL Platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 14th of September at 1 PM EST until Monday the 17th of September at 3 PM EST. All Official Servers across each platform will be undergoing this evolutionary change which includes: 2x Harvesting Rates 2x Taming Rates 2x EXP Rates That's it for this post guys! As always if you’ve got anything to share you can find us at: Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark Steam: steamcommunity.com/app/346110 Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark All the best, Studio Wildcard View full article

Hey Survivors! Welcome to the latest edition of the Community Crunch! Mod Community Updates! Hello, modders! As many of you noticed, early Saturday morning the ARK Modding Contest became officially open for entries, where you can compete for a grand prize of $15,000! Further, something I didn't really say before is that the contest is planned to occur on a regular schedule, multiple times a year! The application for sponsorship also opened up at the same time. ? There have been some questions that have arisen from the modding community though, and so I will try to answer here some of the common ones I have received so far. You can! While it is true that we made actively sponsored mod authors ineligible for the contest, these two systems (the contest and sponsorship program) are not in any way linked. You can enter the contest and apply for sponsorship at the same time as long as you are not currently sponsored already, but the results of the contest do not influence or inform the decision of sponsorship. The winner of the contest is not a guarantee of sponsorship or an indication of likelihood. They have different objectives in terms of what they are looking for. No, we have set a limit on how many times a calendar year you can enter a project to twice. We want people to give serious consideration to when they will submit for these events and how. Not until the entry phase has concluded and voting begins, after that point all entries will be made public and their rankings updated hourly on the main contest page. Yes, you can! We understand that sometimes things sneak by; however, once a Wildcard evaluation has been made it probably won't be re-evaluated based on a new update to the mod. It is best to make sure that your mod is as clean as possible before the voting phase begins. Those are the most common questions I have been receiving. If you have any others feel free to ask me, most of you know how to contact me on discord or twitter, you can also send questions to ModProgram@studiowildcard.com I also know that a number of you have been waiting to hear about tutorial bounty claims. Now that I am back from PAX I will be getting to those this week. Good luck fellow modders and I hope that we can all keep an environment of good sportsmanship for these contests! Community Livestream #7 Roundup! On August 30th we had our seventh Community Livestream. Thank you to all of those who attended and participated! The community team had a lot of fun and we hope you did as well. If you weren't able to catch the stream you can watch the video-on-demand on our Twitch page or by clicking on the video below. The stream started off with our special guest GG Fizz who is a returning guest. We also has a special WC guest joining us for the first time, Seggzy, who does QA here at Studio Wildcard. Unfortunately due to some technical issues our building contest ended up a little one sided, with Jen and Fizz on one time and Zen left to build on his own. The competition required each team to build a cliff platform base that included an area for a Rock Drake, a zip line, and a bed. The winner was then decided by the chat. There may have also been an addition special guest, though an unintentional one at that. Zen Rowe then took us on a journey around the modded map Amissa. The map was created by Sicco0803 and is a fantasy styled map with beautiful terrain and several cities dotting the landscape. If that sounds liken something you'd be interested in definitely check it out on the Steam Workshop! Things wrapped up on stream with showcasing your fan submissions and talking about the ARK Modding Contest in further detail, which is open now for submissions! We are accepting any type of ARK related fanart to be featured in the Showcase section of the stream and entries are always open. This can be drawings, videos, builds, ANSEL screenshots, handmade crafts, anything ARK related! You can submit your ARKwork to our streaming email address: arkfans@studiowildcard.com Be sure to follow us on our Twitch page so you don't miss a stream! twitch.tv/survivetheark We'll be hosting our next Community Live Stream on Thursday, September the 13th at 1PM EST! We hope to see you there The Great Migration #4: Inactive Legacy Server Removal Once again it is time to remove some of our lower population legacy ARK servers on Xbox and PS4 from our Official legacy network. Over time the ARK population has migrated from legacy to non-legacy and in its wake left many servers with low populations for 0-1 players in a significant amount of cases. Here is a quick breakdown on how this process works: Taking Down Low Pop Servers With calculations based on sustained player-count as well as the popularity of game mode, we will be removing lower population legacy servers, most of which retain a 0-1 player concurrent population. These servers will be taken offline on September 24th. Any existing server that is not considered a low pop server and is not taken down at this time will still exist on the Legacy network. Legacy servers will continue to remain on a separate cluster from the new cluster, which means you will not be able to transfer anything between Legacy servers and the new servers. Servers Up for Deprecation Below is a complete list of the LEGACY servers that will be deprecated come September 24th. You have from now until then to move your belongings onto a server not present on this list. Please click one of the links below. They are separated by platform. How To Move Servers If you are unfamiliar with the process, you are able to upload your items, creatures, and player through the Obelisk terminal, supply drops, as well as the Tek Transmitter. Survivors are advised to use Cross-ARK immediately to relocate their belongings onto a server that is not included in our take-down list above. Server Saves of Deleted Servers We will make the save files available as soon as we can. We will host the PC files which anyone can download and then you are welcome to re-host the save file for your own use. We'll include a link to where you can download server saves in this post when they are available. Nitrado will also be able to provide the saves for use on Nitrado servers for console, as they have done in the past. You can see a list of our currently available depreciated official servers on this webpage: https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/server-backups/ Fanart of the Week! We would like to give a special shoutout this week to artist Mysterious Mandrill for their hilarious ARK comic! ARK: Evolution Event! Survivors across ALL Platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 7th of September at 1 PM EST until Monday the 10th of September at 3 PM EST. All Official Servers across each platform will be undergoing this evolutionary change which includes: 2x Harvesting Rates 2x Taming Rates 2x EXP Rates That's it for this post guys! As always if you’ve got anything to share you can find us at: Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark Steam: steamcommunity.com/app/346110 Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark All the best, Studio Wildcard View full article

Hey Survivors! Welcome to the latest edition of the Community Crunch! Mysterious Mysteries: Introducing ??????? What an intriguing discovery survivors, can you guess what this creature is? Mod Community Announcements! We have two important announcements for the modding community! The first is that we are making some changes to the sponsored mod program. Previously it was more challenging to get eyes on the potential candidate projects as we would have to scour the workshop, discords, and forums; we could only see projects in their current public state, and what information the mod author chose to include. We will instead be moving to a more structured system. Starting on September 1st, you can fill out this application to apply for sponsorship. This will help ensure that only the projects that are interested and ready for sponsorship are being brought to our attention and allow those mod authors to provide some additional information about where they are planning to take their project. The program will also be moving to a more regular pattern, the application will be open for a period of five weeks starting in the months of January, March, May, July, and September at which point there will be slots opening in the program. Sponsorship periods will be capped at a year, but it is possible to re-apply for sponsorship after that period. These changes will lead to a more predictable schedule of the program and give a more clear route to sponsorship for all interested mod authors. Now for something a bit more exciting... The ARK Modding Contest is back!!! That's right; your eyes are not deceiving you, the ARK Modding Contest will return on September 1st! We have $28,000 in cash prizes for mod authors to compete for, and the Grand Prize is a whopping $15,000!!! So saddle up those Dev Kits, ready the mod cannons, and prepare for battle! This will be our third modding contest, and the modding community as a whole has come a long way in terms of skill and creativity since we held the last one. There will be a five-week entry phase followed by a two-week voting phase where players can show support for their favorite mods. Head over to ark.gg/ModContest for more information on the contest and to start preparing. This will take you to the main contest page where you can find out current information about the contest as it progresses, including hourly updates on rankings once we enter the voting phase. The Great Migration #4: Inactive Legacy Server Removal Once again it is time to remove some of our lower population legacy ARK servers on Xbox and PS4 from our Official legacy network. Over time the ARK population has migrated from legacy to non-legacy and in its wake left many servers with low populations for 0-1 players in a significant amount of cases. Here is a quick breakdown on how this process works: Taking Down Low Pop Servers With calculations based on sustained player-count as well as the popularity of game mode, we will be removing lower population legacy servers, most of which retain a 0-1 player concurrent population. These servers will be taken offline on September 24th. Any existing server that is not considered a low pop server and is not taken down at this time will still exist on the Legacy network. Legacy servers will continue to remain on a separate cluster from the new cluster, which means you will not be able to transfer anything between Legacy servers and the new servers. Servers Up for Deprecation Below is a complete list of the LEGACY servers that will be deprecated come September 24th. You have from now until then to move your belongings onto a server not present on this list. Please click one of the links below. They are separated by platform. How To Move Servers If you are unfamiliar with the process, you are able to upload your items, creatures, and player through the Obelisk terminal, supply drops, as well as the Tek Transmitter. Survivors are advised to use Cross-ARK immediately to relocate their belongings onto a server that is not included in our take-down list above. Server Saves of Deleted Servers We will make the save files available as soon as we can. We will host the PC files which anyone can download and then you are welcome to re-host the save file for your own use. We'll include a link to where you can download server saves in this post when they are available. Nitrado will also be able to provide the saves for use on Nitrado servers for console, as they have done in the past. You can see a list of our currently available depreciated official servers on this webpage: https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/server-backups/ Community Livestream #7 This Thursday! This Thursday August 30th the community team will be doing another biweekly livestream! During these livestreams Zen Rowe, Chris, and Jen bring you ARK news, celebrate modding, and the community as a whole every other week. We mix it up between playing ARK, showing off mods, and showing off your community creations for all to see. Survivors are invited to join us in the chat (and sometimes even in-game) to play and talk with the community team. We are accepting any type of ARK related fanart to be featured in the Showcase section of the stream and entries are always open. This can be drawings, videos, builds, ANSEL screenshots, handmade crafts, anything ARK related! You can submit your ARKwork to our streaming email address: arkfans@studiowildcard.com Be sure to follow us on our Twitch page so you don't miss a stream! twitch.tv/survivetheark We'll be hosting our next Community Live Stream on Thursday, August the 30th at 1pm EST! We hope to see you there Fanart of the Week! We would like to give a special shoutout this week to artist Djaymasi for their amazing fanmade Koolasuchus Dossier! ARK: Evolution Event! Survivors across ALL Platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 31st of August at 1 PM EST until Monday the 3rd of September at 3 PM EST. All Official Servers across each platform will be undergoing this evolutionary change which includes: 2x Harvesting Rates 2x Taming Rates 2x EXP Rates That's it for this post guys! As always if you’ve got anything to share you can find us at: Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark Steam: steamcommunity.com/app/346110 Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark All the best, Studio Wildcard View full article