Happy Patch Day, Survivors! It's Tuesday and ARK's latest patch is live on all platforms.

First off, be sure to tune in to the Xbox channel on Mixer at 2pm EST today to see a brand new Extinction creature teaser during their stream!

We're also sharing some more 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!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1540666780
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.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1540666929
This will be the last Extinction Chronicles related event and screenshot teasers on patch day before Extinction release. We hope that you've been enjoying them, and we're very excited to be sharing the entirety of Extinction with you very soon.

Our Extinction Chronicles V event is going on right now, including new Corrupted skin, Explorer Notes, and Tek dinos. You can read all about it in yesterdays announcement:

https://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791438250696/announcements/detail/2931173216371980922

Tomorrow there will be a client and server side update that will bring Extinction Chronicles V 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!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1540093443
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.
* In Extinction Chronicles IV we released three Explorer Notes, the Corrupted Shirt and the Tek Parasaur.



And now, tomorrow we're excited to bring you three new Explorer Notes, the Corrupted Gloves and a new Tek creature, the Tek Quetzal!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1540094608
In addition, special colored dinos will be populating the ARKs. You'll be able to find creatures sporting black, red, green, purple, and white up until the launch of Extinction, 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.


Here are the full fixes and notes in Extinction Chronicles V update.

- Extinction Chronicles V
- Added Tek Quetz
* New breeding line
* 5% chance to spawns
* 20% higher base level
- Added new color set (black, red, green, purple, white)
- Added 3 new Explorer Notes and matching unlock (Corrupted Gloves)
- Increased maximum player level by 1

- Climbing pick meshing fixes
- Better handling for low fps server dino attacking
- Fix for failure to cleanup structure placers
- Pre-emptive API for server structure cleanup improvement
- Increased damage range for players/dinos on surface of Aberration

Be sure to check out todays Community Crunch post on our website for the full Crunch announcement post.

On October 16th Extinction Chronicles V 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!


This weeks diary entry is brought to you by Lead Programmer, Chris Willoughby. This weeks dev diary is about undermeshing, a hot button issue within our official server community. Rest assured that we’re listening and are hard at work on the issues that you have surfaced through our various channels. We thought it would be worth taking an opportunity to share our thoughts on the issue, some of the reasons it exists, and why it’s so challenging to resolve.

Undermeshing refers to the ability to get to where you aren't supposed to by moving outside of the playable space. Almost every game is susceptible to undermeshing in some form. Most speed runs rely on undermeshing, for example. It's effectively impossible to solve completely, at least automatically. The approaches taken to prevent it are usually a tradeoff between how much freedom you want the player to have, how complex your world is, and how much processing time you can afford to spend on physics. Generally, when there's an instance of meshing, it's caused by bad collision setup, improper level geometry (holes), or a problem with the algorithm used to move the character through the world. In some instances, you place kill volumes in locations that you want to guarantee that the player doesn't end up, but that isn’t a global solution.

The collision setup for our objects varies based on their complexity. For very simple objects, we use a basic primitive shape (box, sphere, capsule) that matches the shape of the object. It's very good if you're able to take this approach, because natively the physics system can treat that individual object as water tight - ensuring that another physical object will never end up inside of it, and that you'll always detect it if you're already inside. When constructing a modern game, however, it's very likely that you need to use shapes that are more interesting to look at and interact with than a simple box or sphere - so you use mesh based collision. Mesh collision treats the surface of the mesh as the collideable surface, but it cannot be treated as watertight, and the physics system cannot guarantee that you don't pass through it. You might ask why, then, don't you try to represent that larger object as a bunch of smaller watertight ones? We do that in a small number of instances, but quantity of primitives is also a major concern, so it is not feasible to do this for the entire world. Take the ground under your feet, for example, at any given moment you'd be surrounded by thousands of primitives to approximate the surface of a natural looking ground, and yet it'd be less smooth than the pure mesh shape. In addition, a guarantee to not end up inside of a single body isn’t a guarantee that you won’t end up between them even if they’re tightly clumped, leading to more instances of getting stuck.

When we lay out our levels - we construct them in the way that is interesting and optimize them for efficiency so that we can maximize quality and quantity. What that means is generally the world outside of the space you're meant to play in is empty - we spend our resources on the spaces where players are at. In addition - we reuse assets many, many times - rotating a rock different ways to make it look different before shoving it into the terrain at various depths to mask the reuse and keep it visually pleasing. Technically, the physics for these objects overlaps, and if you get past the surface of one, you'll stand on the next one down. While that sounds like it would help, it’s actually the meat of the problem. Adding more meshes doesn’t help, because once you can get past one, you can get past the next one. That said, there have been many instances where we’ve flagged the collision on an object incorrectly, or left a minute hole that we can and do address through Level Design.

Nearly every game uses custom physics for characters. Much of ours is built on the out of the box simulation that you get from UE4. Fortunately for our players, our game is one where the world is vast and complex, and players have the freedom to build many objects and have many dinos. Unfortunately for us, this pushes all of these algorithms to their breaking point. We've had to augment, rework, and add additional tests in many places that affect the simulation to improve our core player experience. In addition, we've built many gameplay mechanics that don't exist out of the box. Wall climbing, for example, requires a completely new set of physics tests to understand and hug the wall surface. When we set these up, we build them to be as flexible as possible, but it can be difficult to predict how the player base will use something when they get it in their hands. In many cases, this is a good thing - we’re delighted with the creative things that our players do, but sometimes they’re able to abuse mechanics in unintended ways. When we find problems with them, we have to find solutions that won't break the mechanic completely for the many other use cases, sometimes an impossible feat! This is also why we aren’t quick to completely disable a feature - we evaluate how much harm versus good it is doing across the entire experience.

We do use kill volumes at a broad scale - usually high in the air, or far below the surface. Far outside of the playspace, to segment specific areas. The reality, though, is that when someone is meshing, they're usually not out in that empty space around the world, they're running around on the insides of overlapping shapes or physical surfaces that are just below the real surface. In order to implement kill boxes in these places, we'd have to go back to every location in the map and place a kill volume just below the surface that will kill someone that touches it. As with the terrain example above, it would require entirely too many objects to cover the entire world in these accurately. In addition, a major downside to this approach is also the fact that it will detect and kill something that may have a good reason to be below the mesh - on a Basilisk? You just got killed by the kill volumes. Misjudge where the surface is, and a bunch of players are being killed erroneously and losing their stuff.

As with all aspects of making a game, it's all a balancing act. We try to spend our time on the things that are most valuable to as many of our players as possible - which means attacking holes in the world in waves and making algorithm changes when it's become obvious that they're having a large enough negative effect on the experience for our players. The reality is that there is no silver bullet, no automatic solution - so it continues to be a problem that our game (and many others) continue to fight throughout their lifetimes. Recently, we’ve fixed a bunch of holes across all of the maps and did a pass at removing Climbing Pick exploits. Going forward, our best bet is to remain diligent about resolving issues as they arise and improving the experience over time. The good news is that we like solving hard problems - and exploits like these are some of the more interesting ones to try and tackle!

Today marks the start of a two-week streaming schedule to spotlight all of the mods entered into the contest. You can vote now for your favorite mods as they compete for a Grand Prize of $15,000!

https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/modding/voting/

You can follow the rankings with hourly updates as well!
https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/modding/contest-home/

Meanwhile, I will be streaming from the ARK twitch channel showcasing all of these mods, every weekday for the next two weeks! You can find the full schedule here:

https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/forums/topic/371532-ark-modding-contest-stream-schedule-october-2018/

Come check out some mods and support your fellow community members that give so much of their time to make these fantastic creations!




This Thursday October 11th 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.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1391754339
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, October the 11th at 1pm EST! We hope to see you there :)


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1532287707




Survivors across ALL Platforms will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 12th of October at 1 PM EST until Monday the 15th 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 please get in touch and be sure to follow us on:

Community Hub: www.survivetheark.com
Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark
Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark
Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark
Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark
Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark
Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark

What an intriguing discovery survivors, can you guess what this creature is?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVF5S4yBNX0

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.

https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/forums/topic/370188-wildcard-workshop-15-bitmasks/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCM5uIFkpmg



Survivors 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 please get in touch and be sure to follow us on:

Community Hub: www.survivetheark.com
Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark
Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark
Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark
Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark
Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark
Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark

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.


- 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.


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.


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!

Extinction Chronicles IV is now live!

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, 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!


Here are the full fixes and notes in Extinction Chronicles IV update.

- Extinction Chronicles IV
            - Added Tek Parasaur
                * New breeding line
                * 5% chance to spawns
                * 20% higher base level
            - Added new color set (green and black)
            - Added 3 new Explorer Notes and matching unlock (Corrupted Chest)
            - Increased maximum player level by 1
- Hole fixes on The Island, Ragnarok, Scorched Earth, The Center, Aberration
- Windmills are no longer affected by electric storms
- Decreased Cliff Platform build radius by half

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!

Be sure to check out yesterdays Community Crunch post on our website for the full Crunch announcement post.

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!


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.

Hello Survivors! Today, I'd like to talk today about what goes into designing and building new gameplay mechanics. For brevity, I'll focus on the Scout, a creature that we've revealed as part of our upcoming Extinction expansion.

When we approach designing gameplay mechanics we start by brainstorming interesting ideas that would make a compelling addition to our sandbox. The Scout started as a desire for the ability to fly around the battlefield with a drone. We have several members of the team who enjoy flying drones, so collectively we fell in love with the idea of remote piloting early. We also had another gameplay mechanic that we were interested in that finds its origins in another franchise - the ability to tag enemies to reveal them to your allies. This idea was also high on our list, and through further brainstorming, we found it was a natural fit for the Scout, so they came together in the brainstorming phase.

From there we seek to match those abilities up with concepts that fit well into the world we're building. This one was pretty easy. We knew that we were building a futuristic city for Extinction, and immediately we latched onto the idea of some kind of automated security force that patrols it. It took several more sessions to land on the idea of the interplay between Scouts and Enforcers, and the way that the Scout is deployed, but we're happy with where it landed.

Next, we'll build the mechanic and iterate numerous times, using multiple weekly gameplay review sessions to nail the fine details. The Scout was deployable from a grenade and had remote viewing baked in pretty early on. Originally it's tagging mechanism was a projectile that it fired. This was very difficult to use, so we switched to more of a raygun. The tags originally lasted a very short time, so they weren't very useful. We've since upped the time that they last - making the Scout a key target for the other team to take out. In addition, we didn't originally allow the tagging of allies, but this slotted in naturally as a way to give a more complete view of the battlefield.

Finally, we turn our experienced set of player testers loose to hammer on the mechanics until they fit well. This process is underway for the Scout and for Extinction as a whole as I write this. We've got nearly all of the mechanics playable and we're iterating on the roles that they play individually and collectively within Extinction and within the larger game. As such, the abilities described above represent a snapshot of where they are as I'm writing this. These can and likely will change before launch! This is part of the reason that often times when we talk about something early on it doesn't match up with what the final product becomes. However this iteration process is necessary to deliver the best playing experience that we can.

Thanks for reading, survivors!

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.


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:

https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/forums/topic/345036-modding-tutorial-bounty-board/

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!




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.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1391754339
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 :)


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1504244666
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1504249202
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1504246010
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1504247549
We would like to give a special shout out this week to creature paint artist Sharkcat for their Jurassic World raptor paints!




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 please get in touch and be sure to follow us on:

Community Hub: www.survivetheark.com
Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark
Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark
Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark
Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark
Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark
Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark