As a naked man or woman, freezing and starving on the shores of a mysterious island called ARK, you must hunt, gather resources, craft items, farm, research technologies and build shelters to withstand the elements. Use your wits and resources to kill or tame and raise the leviathan dinosaurs and other primitive creatures that roam the wilds. Team up with or attack hundreds of other players to survive, dominate... and escape!

The following features are in-game on your first day of Early Access. We have many more aspects and refinements planned for the long-term development roadmap, and here's what you'll experience now in the ARK:

Highlights

• TAME, TRAIN, BREED & RIDE DINOSAURS IN A LIVING ECOSYSTEM - Dinosaurs, Creatures & Breeding! -- over 50 in Early Access and over 100 planned for final release -- can be tamed using a capture-&-affinity challenge, involving weakening a feral creature to render it unconscious and then healing it with the proper food. Once tamed, you can issue commands to your Animal, which may follow you depending on how well you've tamed and trained it. Animals, which can continue to level up and consume food, can also possess Inventory and Equipment such as Armor, carry prey back to their housing depending on their strength, and larger animals can be ridden and controlled directly! Fly a Pterodactyl over snow-capped mountains, lead allies over enemy walls, dash through the jungle with Birds of Prey, ram through an enemy base with a giant Brontosaurus, or chase prey on the back of an angry Tyrannosaurus Rex! Participate in a dynamic ecosystem with its own hierarchy of predator & prey, where you are just one creature among many species fighting for dominance and survival. Animals can also be mated with the opposite sex, to breed generations successively using a system based on genetic traits that will be inherited. This process includes in both egg-hatching and mammalian gestation life cycles! Or more simply, breed & raise Dinosaur Babies!
• FOOD, WATER, TEMPERATURE AND CLIMATE - You must eat and drink to survive, with different types of plants and meat having different nutritional properties, including human flesh. Ensuring a fresh water supply for your home and inventory is a pressing concern. All physical actions come at the cost of food and water, long journeys are fraught with the danger of livelihood! Inventory weighs you down and makes you move slower, and the day/night cycle along with randomly patterned weather adds another layer of challenge by altering the temperature of the environment, causing you to hunger or thirst more quickly. A campfire or shelter and a wide range of customizable clothing & armor help you protect yourself against locational hazards & extreme temperatures using the Dynamic Indoor & Outdoor Insulation Calculation System!
• HARVEST, BUILD STRUCTURES, PAINT INTENSES - By cutting down trees from thick forests and mining metal and other precious resources, you can craft the parts to build massive multi-level structures made up of complex interlocking parts, including ramps, beams, pillars, windows, doors, gates, remote gates, trapdoors , water pipes, faucets, generators, wires and all kinds of electrical devices and stairs, among many other types. Structures have a weight system to collapse if the support support is destroyed, so reinforcing your buildings is important. All structures and items can be painted to customize the look of your home, as well as dynamically pixel-painted placement on signs, textual billboards, and other decorative objects. Shelters reduce weather extremes and provide security for you and your loved ones! Weapons, clothing, and armor gear can also be painted to express your own visual style.
• PLANT, CULTIVATE AND GROW - Take seeds from the wild vegetation around you, plant them in plots that you build, then water and feed them with fertilizer (everyone poops after consuming calories, which can then be fertilized, and some fertilizers are better than What others). Tend to your crops and they will grow to produce delicious and rare berries, which can also be used to cook a multitude of recipes and make useful tonics! Explore to find the rarest of plant seeds that have the most powerful properties! Vegetarians and vegans can flourish, and it will be possible to dominate and conquer the Ark in a non-violent way!
• INVOCATE THE ULTIMATE LIFE FORMS - By bringing enough rare items from sacrifices to special Summoning locations, you can have the attention of Ark Gods like mythical creatures, who will arrive for battle. These hulking monstrosities provide an end-game objective for the most experienced groups of players and their pet armies, and will drop extremely valuable progression items if defeated.
• TRIBE SYSTEM - Create a tribe and add your friends, and all your pets can be commanded by the allied party, anyone in your tribe. Your tribe will also be able to respawn at any of your home spawn points. Promote tribe members to Admins to reduce management burden. Distribute key points and passwords to provide access to your shared village!
• RPG STATISTICS - All items are crafted from Designs that have varying qualities and statistics and require corresponding resources. More remote and difficult locations on the other side of the island tend to have more resources, including the highest mountains, darkest caves and depths of the ocean! Your character Levels up by gaining experience through performance actions, Level up your pets and learn new "engrams" to be able to craft items from your memory without using Blueprints, even if you die! Customize your character's underlying physical appearance with hair, eye, and skin tones, along with an array of body proportion modifiers.
• HARDCORE MECHANICS - Everything you create has durability and will wear out from prolonged use if not repaired, and when you exit the game your character remains dormant lingering in the world. Your inventory physically exists in chests or on your character in the world. Everything can be looted & stolen, so to keep it safe you must either upgrade your buildings, your staff, or have pets to guard your stash. Death is permanent, and you can even KO, capture, and force other players to use them for your own ends, such as extracting their blood for transfusions, harvesting their fecal matter to use as fertilizer, or using them as food for your animals. pet carnivores!
• EXPLORE AND DISCOVER - The mysterious Island is a formidable and imposing environment, composed of many natural and man-made structures, above ground, underground and under water. Exploring its secrets fully, you will encounter the most exotic procedurally randomized creatures and rare technical drawings. Also to be found are the dynamically-updating notes for the game, written by previous human inhabitants of the island across the millennia, creatively detailing creatures and backstories of the ark and its creatures. Fully develop your in-game ARK-map through exploration, custom record landmarks on it, and create a compass or GPS coordinates to help explore with other players, whom you can communicate via text and voice chat. proximity, or long distance radio. Build and draw on in-game boards for other players to help or derail them... And of course... how do you finally challenge the creators and conquer the ARK? A definitive ending to the game is planned.
• VAST PERSISTENT WORLD AND UNIVERSAL GOAL - On the 100+ servers, your character, everything you've built and your pets remain in the game even when you leave. You can even physically transport your character and items across the Ark's network by accessing obelisks and uploading (or downloading) Steam economy data! A galaxy of ARK's, each slightly different than the last, to make your mark and conquer, one at a time--Official ARK events will be revealed on the world map for a limited time sometimes in uniqueness with themed events with Matching items with limited time!
• GREAT STEAM WORKSHOP MODIFICATIONS SUPPORT - You can play in local single-player and bring your character and items between unofficial hosted servers, and bring back to singleplayer from multiplayer. Mod the game, with full Steam Workshop support and custom Unreal Engine 4 editor. See how we built our ARK using our maps and live as an example. Host your own server and configure your ARK precisely to your liking. We want to see what you can create!
• STATE-of-the-art, HIGH-QUALITY VISUALS - The hyper-real images on top of ARK and its creatures are brought to expressive life using a highly customized Unreal Engine 4 engine, with fully dynamic lighting and global lighting, weather systems (rain, fog, snow, etc.) & truth-to-life in volumetric cloud simulations, and the latest advanced rendering techniques in DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. Music composed by award-winning "Ori and the Blind Forest" composer Gareth Coker!