As we all know by now ARK: Extinction will be launching tomorrow on November 6th. We are expecting the download to be approximately 10-20gb in size for PC. The information below pertains to PC ARK servers that will be brought online tomorrow at approximately the same time as the expansion pack becomes available. 

On launch you'll be able to transfer your existing character from your current server into Extinction. You will not be able to transfer items or tames. You can however transfer characters, items, and tames out of Extinction onto other maps. If you were around for the release of Scorched Earth or Aberration this is the exact same process those servers underwent. 

There are no disabled engrams in Extinction like there was at Aberration's launch, meaning things such as Tek Teleporters are allowed. Creatures like flyers are also enabled on Extinction.

We will be introducing North American and European Extinction servers first. We will be releasing an initial start batch of servers, and bringing more servers online as needed so please be patient for us during this period. The servers will be the standard 70-player cap. Extinction will be included in all CrossARK clusters (except 'TheHundred'), as well as Conquest and Small Tribes servers. Extinction will not be supported in Primitive Plus on launch, but it is something we will consider looking into at a later date. Extinction will also not have NoTek/NTek-NoTaming, Primitive, or TheHundred servers for those currently playing on those subsets of gamemodes. The legacy network will get a few servers, however they will be in small supply. 

ARK: Survival Evolved will be free to play for a week, starting November 6th 10AM PST through November 11th! On-board your friends and family who have not experienced to give them a taste of The Island, Ragnarok, or The Center yet for no cost during those few days. And consider buying it if you enjoyed your time on the ARK to keep on surviving!


25-hours later, our Extra Life charity stream has come to a close and thus another chapter of our Extra Life journey does as well.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/331846172

There were so many great and funny moments throughout the stream. Members of the ARK dev team battled it out in several games that resulted in the loser receiving a penalty. There were wigs, there were hats, there were costumes and hair adornments. There were a special unicorn that managed to steal the show on multiple occasions as well.

There were also special previews and discussions regarding our upcoming expansion pack, ARK: Extinction. We showed off taxidermy, Ice Titan taming, Cryopods, Orbital Supply Drop gameplay, and a few creatures that you'll be able to get your hands on soon.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1558017754
This is our fourth year participating in this event and it also happens to be the 10th anniversary for Extra Life as a whole. We were thrilled to learn that on this 10th anniversary we were able to surpass our total donations raised in the past four years to over $100,000! As an individual member (not including team member contributions) we've reached $112,246.44 and counting! As a team we have raised $188,782.75 over the last 4 years (and counting as today is still on-going!).

This year was our highest ever personal amount raised. Previously our record was $23,805 and we are sitting at $45,122.27 at the time of writing this post. This was also our highest ever team goal. Previously we had raised $62,004.01 and right now we're sitting at $76,536. Our original goal when we began the stream was hoping to reach $30,000 and we more than doubled that amount, with $11,000 raised before the stream had even begun at 9AM. With all of those numbers, we're currently sitting at rank 7 globally as an individual and rank 6 globally as a team for donations to Extra Life this year!

We would like to give special recognition to our top streamers and top individual donators who were a big help in assisting us to our goals this year. We could not have done this without you!

Top Streamers (in order of amount raised):
LazyCat
Xastus the Mad King
RoyaleWithCheese
Ryan S.
FistofTheWalrus
Belle
Syntac
Kara_dee

Top Donators:
Pavan
Fred316
vl_darkangel_lv
Helldiver,
Anthomnia
SurvivalServers.com
Eric K.
Jerryn
tribe of bozo
JustPixie
Pac-Man443 family
KageRamen
Pip, Acidic
songtao ke
Eric P.
Jesse P.

If you want to contribute to the campaign it's not too late, you can do so right here!



Congratulations and thank you again to all of the survivors who joined us at any point during our stream. We'll see you again next year!

Be sure to tune in to the Xbox channel on Mixer at 11am PST tomorrow (Tuesday) to see a teaser of one of the creatures coming in Extinction during their ARK stream!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1545824930
Last week we introduced you to our adorable giant sloth friend, the Gacha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHLPGQHB_RQ

Thank you for all of your questions for this digest, Survivors! Here is our question and answer session with Lead Programmer Chris Willoughby. This week we've covered some of the very popular questions we've received regarding Extinction.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1516371542
Survivor Asher asks, "Will extinction have an ocean, or at least a large body of water for some bigger aquatic creatures?" and survivor Alex asks, "All Extinction related pictures you've published were mostly on land. Is Extinction is going to be a map like Scorched Earth with no sea or is it a map with water creatures?"

Extinction does not have a large body of water. As you can imagine, the surface of the Earth has undergone some dramatic changes, one of which is that most of the water has dried up. That said, we did build the Extinction creatures with water in mind, and there should be a few surprises waiting for you when you take them to other maps!

Survivor Caleb asks, "Is the dev team currently working on a long-term solution to improve the quality of life/tame cap issues on PVE? If so, could the team provide us with some details?"

We think that Cryopods coming in Extinction should help with this problem directly. When a creature has been captured into a Cryopod, it does not count against the tame cap of the server. In addition, Cryopods can be kept forever in a Cryofridge with power, arming players with a powerful tool to work around the limitations of the cap.

Survivor Nattix asks, "As you mentioned in the previous digest, titans are going to be temporary tames. Will titans have more uses for PVE players who aren't looking to go to war or are they going to be solely for PVP like titanosaurs?"

Our hope is that Titans bring a new type of PVE encounter to the game with in-world boss fights and interesting new mechanics that are interesting in themselves. Once tamed, Titans are very powerful. They can clear space and take down lots of dinos quickly making them good for area cleanup or meat runs. In addition, we’ve worked to make each of them fun to ride. I enjoy exploring the various maps on them for that reason.

Survivor Thomas asks, "In a previous teaser we saw some Defense Units roaming the land, this time without their supreme leader summoning them. Could this be the time we finally are able to get our chance to befriend the buggers instead of ripping them apart limb-from-limb (or at least, put them back together again :P)?"

The Defense Units found within Extinction are part of the automated force that served and defended the city before it fell into disarray. These days they like to roll around and punch Dodos. They aren’t craftable like the other Robots found within the city (such as the Scout or Enforcer), but we felt like they brought a missing piece to the ecosystem there, namely punching Dodos.

Survivor Thomas asks, "Since we already have seen a glimpse of some Wyvern-action on the land below, can we then confirm that Extinction will have some more creatures from previous expansions living on earths crust and if so, will they be living under similar conditions as they were on their respective arks accordingly?"

There are a number of creatures that make their return in Extinction, and they exist in biomes/environments that you’d expect to find them in. In addition, a number of existing creatures have been corrupted by Element and they roam the wasteland. These creatures will not behave as they would traditionally, instead destroying anything that gets in the way of their hunt for additional Element to consume.

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


There won't be a community livestream this coming Thursday, but it's because we're super busy poreparing for our TwitchCon event coming up this week, and our yearly Extra Life stream AND the launch of Extinction falls shortly after! These next few weeks sure will be busy. Jen will be present at our special TwitchCon event this year along with ARK producer John. To those of you that RSVP'd to attend we look forward to seeing you there and we hope you enjoy getting to be the first to play Extinction!

In case you've missed our last couple of mentions of it, Extra Life this year is on November 3rd and we'll be streaming for 24-hours straight to raise money for sick kids hospitals. We'll be dropping some Extinction teasers along the way and boosting our official server rates as our Extra Life team gets closer to our goal. Be sure to tune into our Twitch channel on the 3rd and we'll have more details about this next week.


Over the last two weeks, we managed to spotlight almost every mod in the contest. If you missed any and would like to see what all of the mods have to offer, the streams have been sliced and put into convenient episodes, all of which can be found in this Twitch collection.

Public voting for the Mod Contest has concluded but technical evaluations are still being finalized so rankings may still continue to change until the winners are announced on November 1st. The current Rankings can be found here:

https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/modding/contest-home/

The start date for the next contest has not yet been determined, the management system will be taken offline during the winter months for some updates and adjustments based on feedback from the current contest. Once a date is determined everyone will be made aware of it.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1541038695



Survivors will be receiving a special Evolution Event perk this weekend! It will be active from Friday the 26th of October at 1 PM EST until Monday the 29th 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

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!