While Ark: Survival Evolved has a plethora of content that it wants to throw at players, there is also a sizeable amount of options available to them which helps customize how the game plays. The settings range from much time it takes to tame a dinosaur to how long the night cycle lasts, and everything in between.
While players will ultimately want to experiment to find the settings that make them the happiest, these are generally the best single-player settings for Ark: Survival Evolved.
Related: Does Ark Survival Evolved have a single player or story mode? Answered
Concept
Players should note that Ark has been designed with the idea of bringing players together and playing in groups called tribes. This is reflected in everything — some tame timers can last over a dozen hours (so tribes can bring multiple people in to babysit the tame), harvest rates are naturally low to slow progression, and experience is an absolute slog past level 70.
While balancing Ark: Survival Evolved for the single-player experience, bear in mind that the game expects multiple people to be working in harmony. Don’t second-guess nudging that bar as far as necessary so you spend more time enjoying the game, and less time waiting for the game.
Settings
Note that all settings are the default unless otherwise stated in this guide; if the setting is skipped, players should leave that value at default to accurately follow this guide. Secondly, values can be stretched beyond the sliders: entering numbers into the boxes allows default maximums to be surpassed.
General
- Player Damage — 1.25
- XP Multiplier — 2
- Taming Speed — 5
- Harvest Amount — 2
- Player Character Water/Food drain — 0.75
- Dino Count — 2
- Note that this will enact a greater toll on the system running the game, and increase the density of dinosaurs. While many prefer to have a higher number of dinosaurs, thus increasing opportunities, it can introduce both additional latency as well as increased hazards.
- Use Corpse Locator — On
- Allow Flyer Speed Leveling — On
- Studio Wildcard did away with flyer speed leveling as it makes it possible to zoom across the entire map within a minute. It gets ridiculously fast when you’re specializing your dinosaurs for speed, which apparently had undesirable results on official PvP servers.
Advanced
- Non Permanent Diseases — On
- Some players may enjoy that, upon respawning, they are still inflicted with a debuff that requires special resources to fix. In play, it can become annoying, more so at lower levels.
- Mating Interval — 0.5
- Egg Hatch Speed — 2
- Harvest Health — 2.5
- Resource Respawn Period — 1.5
- We’re increasing the timer for resources to respawn as we’ve greatly increased the amount of resources that can be gathered from a single node (such as a tree). In practice, setting this too low results in static player movement, which can result in game stagnation.
- Day Cycle Speed — 0.5
- Night Time Speed — 1.5
- While we’re slowing down the overall speed of each day, we’re slightly increasing how long night time lasts. When under-equipped, nighttime is oppressive, but it still offers unique gameplay opportunities that shouldn’t be missed.
- Corpse Decomposition Time — 2
- Crop Growth Speed — 2
- Crop Decay Speed — 0.25
- Fuel Consumption Interval Multiplier — 0.5
These settings should be a pleasant introduction to the wonderful world of single-player Ark. Don’t be overly concerned about needing to shift values to better suit your playstyle — Ark: Survival Evolved is after all a game, and one that players should enjoy their time in.
