So you're riding on the back of a stegosaurus and you're thinking to yourself, "Yeah, this is pretty cool, but it'd be really cool if I had a quad-50 strapped to the back of this thing." You will therefore be happy to hear that Ark: Survival Evolved now supports modding through the Unreal Engine 4 mod tools.

"The Ark Dev Kit is a simplified version of the Unreal Engine 4 Editor specifically compiled to streamline the process of creating Mods & Maps for the Unreal Engine 4 game Ark: Survival Evolved, and to upload them directly to Steam Workshop for other users to download and play," the Ark mod tutorial explains. The dev kit doesn't provide access to the game's source, but it does "does contain all of our editable source art for the game, as well as our editable maps and blueprint classes."

The editor will allow for the creation and modification of various aspects of the game including items, weapons, structures, AI behavior trees, and game logic. The tutorial site also offers instructions for playing mods or customized maps, for dino-riders who would prefer to just horse around with the strange creations of others, and of course there's a new Ark: Survival Evolved modding forum, where creators can find help and exchange tips.

"We'll have more tutorials in the upcoming days about how the specific features of Ark level design are put together, but for now, feel free to explore and modify 'TheIsland' map to poke around at how things work, including the stream sublevels and the zone area spawners," the studio wrote. "If you have any questions about the Mod Tools, feel free to post on this Forum. We encourage intrepid mod makers to help each other out here, the more the community can collaborate to build exciting new content, the better it s going to be. Stay tuned to our Steam page, Twitter feed, and here for more information on upcoming ARK modding news, including a major initiative to mobilize the mod community that will be announced soon!"

I don't know if you can actually mount four M2 machine guns onto the back of a dinosaur (although I'm not sure what the point is if you can't) but Ark: Survival Evolved is already an indie hit, and full-on UE4 mod support is bound to make it even bigger. Tom spent an hour playing the game last week with Ark co-creator Jesse Rapczak, which you can still catch now thanks to the miracle of our Twitch page.

Update: The stream is over, but you can watch the whole thing right here on our Twitch page. 

Original: We're playing the Twitch darling Ark: Survival Evolved with co-founder of Studio Wildcard and co-creator of Ark Jesse Rapczak. Jesse and I will be hunting and taming dinosaurs together while I talk to him about the game, its future, and the impressive milestone of hitting one million sales in less than a month. 

The stream will be live from 10:30-11:30am PDT, and you can watch here, or over on our Twitch page, and join the conversation through Twitch chat. Raise your dino dongers, etc.

The online survival sim Rust broke one million copies sold in early 2014, just two months after it hit Steam Early Access. That's an impressive feat by any sure, but Ark: Survival Evolved, the vaguely Rust-like game with rideable dinosaurs that became something of a Twitch sensation, has managed to match that number in half the time.

Jesse Rapczak, the co-founder of Studio Wildcard and co-creative director of Ark, credits a number of factors for the game's success, and it's no surprise that the dinos are top of the list. "[With] the timing of Jurassic World, dinosaurs are really big right now, so that [release timing] was kind of intentional. We wanted to be out and be the biggest dinosaur game around summertime," he said. The proximity to the Steam Summer Sale was a big help too, even though the game was only featured for a single day.

But the real secret of its success, he said, is simple word of mouth. "A lot of people have been streaming the game during this time, it seems like it's a very streamable game. People have a lot of fun, they're doing all sorts of stuff in the game, and I think that's kept it at the top of people's playlists. They see a lot of their friends doing fun stuff in the game when they're playing together," he continued. "That's really one of the things we designed the game for, with our tribe system, and I think a lot of people sharing the news of the game and sharing all the fun they're having has helped the world spread."

Doug Kennedy, Studio Wildcard's vice president of business development, said the developers make a point of engaging with the Ark community as often, and as extensively, as possible. "This is probably the cheesiest comment you're going to hear, but it kind of is the community's game, because we do have so many people in the forums listening to what the community is saying, and hearing what people are requesting," he explained. "That's taken to heart, and I think the development team really hears what's being said. If somebody likes something, we're going to try to make sure we get it in the game, and if they don't like things, we're going to try to find a way to fix that."

Interestingly, the ugly failure of The Stomping Lands, which raised $114,000 on Kickstarter and then fell apart, also proved to be a boon of sorts. Rapczak said Studio Wildcard initially worried that people would be wary of another "Early Access dinosaur game," but that concern passed fairly quickly as disappointed Stomping Lands supporters began to embrace Ark.

He also made the point that while Ark appears at first blush to be similar to Rust, there are actually quite a number of elements that differentiate it. "We're very careful to call Ark an 'open world adventure game,' because it's not just about survival. And I don't think it's a very deep comparison [with Rust], to be honest. Ark has a lot of solo play that's available and that will become more available over Early Access. There's a lot of adventure and discovery in the game, attaining creatures and creating pets and having that AI that's in the game with you. I think it's a little bit of a deeper experience than a lot of the survival games that are out there right now."

"One of the reasons that this game is different from other survival games is that it really encourages cooperation and exploration," Kennedy added. "A lot of the other survival games out there aren't really aimed at cooperating. They're really aimed at solo survival skills, where with this game, you can do a lot of things with a village or a tribe or a group that you just can't do alone."

Studio Wildcard said big things are coming to Ark over the next couple of months, including a new Swamp biome planned for July, and then a Snow biome that will turn roughly a quarter of the map into a wintry snowscape. More dinosaurs are coming too, and in fact two new aquatic creatures, the Plesiosaurus and the Ichthysaurus, joined the Ark menagerie yesterday. More immediately, however, the developers are joining us (in the form of digital dino-wrangler Tom Marks) for an hour or two of streaming later today. You can watch that right here starting at 10:30am PDT.