Discover Ark Clusters

Hey Survivors,

With the quarter wrapped up, let’s take a moment to check in on ASA—where we are, what’s next, and how the road ahead is shaping up.

So the biggest project we’re working on at the moment is the engine upgrade to Unreal 5.5 -- this is a massive undertaking by the team, and it is taking longer than we’ve anticipated. It’s still our highest priority internally (basically all of the core engineering resources at the company are focused on this) and we are targeting a launch sometime between April 15 - May 15.  We’re primarily still working on eliminating bugs that have occurred as a result of the upgrade on the already existing content.

The patch that rolls out the upgrade will provide immediate benefits to performance, namely around rendering, load times, and we’ll also be structuring the game packages so that maps other than The Island become optional downloads, significantly reducing the size of the base game installation.

We’ll be using the new tools available from the engine to improve our pipelines and workflow which should result in a higher quality product, this will primarily be noticed on new releases such as Ragnarok (which is currently being developed in the 5.5 version of the engine), Valgeuro, and Lost Colony. In the future, we hope that we’ll be able to find the time to go back and take some of the new rendering systems from UE5 to make further improvements to the already released maps and content.

Additionally, we know there are concerns about modders when the upgrade happens and what this might do to the mods, we’re going to do our best to eliminate as many crashes as we can, and of course resolve issues (which will occur as we resolve them ourselves) that impact mods. We intend to make sure that every Premium Mod is functioning for release, along with a sampling of the most popular Free Mods, and the breadth of that should ensure the vast majority of mods work prior to the release. Our intrepid partners at Overwolf will be recooking all the ASA mods automatically for UE 5.5, and while some of the thousands of mods may potentially have new functional issues upon UE 5.5, if there are any modding-specific issues caused by the Engine upgrade, we’ll work to fix them expeditiously (chances are, we may be facing it too).

For future upgrades, we’re going to try and see if they can be done without recooking mods; In this particular case, Material system underwent such an overhaul from UE 5.1 to UE 5.5 that using the old precompiled cooked shaders was not an option. We won’t be doing full Engine upgrades more than once per year, especially as we’re able to pull in smaller critical changes as necessary, and even on the large upgrades we believe in the future it will be possible to use previously-cooked Mods by adding specifically-coded loading logic for the old content.

That pretty much sums up where we’re with UE5.5; there’s more we could talk about, as well as some of the particular features we’re excited about but we’ll leave it at that for now.

• 5.5 Upgrade is still underway, targeting launch between April & May.
• UE 5.5 is the top priority for the team.
• Some immediate performance benefits, more performance and graphical benefits long term as we continue to develop the product.
• Additional maps will immediately become optional downloads.
• All Mods will be automatically recooked by Overwolf, but it is possible some Mods will have new issues. We intend to directly check & verify all Premium Mods and the most popular Free Mods, which should provide a pretty good spectrum of functionality. We’re going to do our best to resolve any gameplay discrepancies and crashes ahead of time.
• Hoping that future upgrades won’t be as painful – will be looking into longer-term systems to, in particular, load old cooked data & shaders.

One More Thing: This summer, a one-click “low-system-requirement mode” will get the game to run on GeForce 1080-level cards, on systems that have 16 GB of RAM. The game won’t look pretty, but it will look intelligible, similar in quality to the “Shader Model 4” mode of ARK Survival Evolved. To all the gaming toaster ovens out there (we have plenty of them ourselves), we salute you!

Speaking of Ragnarok, we’ve an update on that too. As this map is being developed specifically in the 5.5 version of the engine, we’re not able to release it until the 5.5 upgrade itself is live. Also, Ragnarok’s progress has been impacted by the upgrade itself, which means that it’s taking a little longer than expected to release and we’ve locked-in a June 2nd launch date.

We recognize that this is disappointing as we know how beloved this map is, and we’re going to do our best to ensure that it meets your expectations when it releases. We’re also fortunate, and thrilled, to be working with the original creators of the map, who’ve recently rejoined the studio and are helping us get it out the door for June 2nd, ride or die!

We are working on a little Eggcellent Adventure event to take place during April, the only thing is that the precise dates are still being figured out as we’re juggling the upgrade too. It’s possible that the event might get pushed back a little bit to take place after Easter, however we’ll have a clearer idea in the days ahead as we get into the first half of April.

Beyond these, the team is still hard at work on delivering the additional maps for the rest of the year, more bug, balance, and QOL fixes (which you should have seen a number of in yesterday’s patch), and of course ASA’s first canonical expansion pack, ARK: Lost Colony.

Download in full resolution

Complete your animated collection with the new characters and creatures skins based on the ARK The Animated Series, unleash the mighty Deinotherium by Garuga123, and enjoy a major patch with fixes and improvements across the board on all platforms!

ARK Animated Series 109-Costumes Pack includes...

• Jane
• Chava
• Rebel Mei Yin
• New-Armor Mei Yin

Creature Skins:

• Anglerfish
• Araneo
• Archaeopteryx
• Baryonyx
• Basilosaurus
• Carbonemys
• Castoroides
• Chalicotherium
• Compy
• Dimetrodon
• Dire Bear
• Dung Beetle
• Electrophorus
• Gallimimus
• Giant Bee
• Hesperornis
• Hyaenodon
• Kaprosuchus
• Lystrosaurus
• Megalosaurus
• Megatherium
• Mosasaurus
• Onyc
• Ovis
• Pachyrhinosaurus
• Pegomastax
• Pelagornis
• Piranha
• Procoptodon
• Purlovia
• Rhyniognatha
• Terror Bird
• Titanoboa
• Titanosaur
• Troodon
• Tusoteuthis
• Woolly Rhino
• Achatina
• Allosaurus
• Arthropluera
• Beelzebufo
• Carcharodontosaurus
• Carnotaurus
• Coelacanth
• Dilo
• Dimorphodon
• Diplocaulus
• Diplodocus
• Direwolf
• Dunkleosteus
• Equus
• Ichthyornis
• Ichthyosaurus
• Iguanodon
• Kairuku
• Kentrosaurus
• Mammoth
• Manta
• Megaloceros (Male + Female)
• Megalodon
• Microraptor
• Moschops
• Oviraptor
• Pachy
• Paraceratherium
• Phiomia
• Plesiosaur
• Pulmonoscorpius
• Sabertooth Salmon
• Sarco
• Spino
• Tapejara
• Therizinosaur
• Thylacoleo
• Vulture

‍