Ark: Survival Evolved Bug ridden goldmine

Ark: Survival Evolved(Hereafter referred to as ARK) is a game with a rather long and… horrifying history, with problems ranging to building under maps (Affectionately known as “Undermeshing” by the community) to duping dinosaurs on Official servers with only the assistance of a friend, to Official servers lagging to the point that players receive Blue Screen of Death on their PC’s! However, in the midst of all the controversy, there have been some diamonds showing through the dust, primarily the modding community, giving us mods like Structures Plus, which fixes the horrendous number of building based problems such as Structures being stuck there once placed, even if the item was placed incorrectly due to ARK’s Vanilla (Unmodded) snapping system, leading to huge resources losses and hours of extra work, recollecting and re-crafting everything, another mod that gained huge popularity was the Upgrade Station, which allowed players to upgrade their tools to do more damage, harvest more resources, have higher durability or weigh less.

For players who aren’t aware, ARK has a questionable system where tools come in 6 Tiers: Primitive, Ramshackle, Apprentice, Journeyman, Mastercraft and Ascendant, with Primitive being the highest you can craft in Vanilla Ark, the rest need to be found from Dino/Boss drops, Beacons and Reward Caches in dungeons, it sounded like a great idea to begin with but as always happens, the Dev’s refused to ask the playerbase before they committed to anything, which led to Tiered tool/weapon drops being found in barely 1 in 5 drops with the heaviest item tier found being “Ramshackle”, now, ARK did compromise and give us the chance to find Blueprints in caches, with significantly higher drop rates than the actual tools themselves but that led to an entirely new problem: the higher the tool/weapon tier, the more expensive it cost to craft, with primitive tools costing 6-50 ingots each but with Ascendant tools costing nearly 3000-4000 for a tool with barely increased stats, this led to the devs behind Upgrade Station stepping in and creating a wondrous mod in which you can put a tool into a simple station and, using the resources that are required to craft it originally, upgrade it through the tiers, but the fun doesn’t stop there! Once the item has reached Ascendant level, you can continue to upgrade it by using “Augments”, effectively tokens, to upgrade individual stats, such as Damage and Durability for Weapons and tools or Hyperthermic and Hypothermic protection for Armors! Yes, the game is worth the purchase, even though it’s filled to the brim with bugs, glitches, terrible optimizations and constant game crash errors, however, Don’t buy it for the sake of the developers, instead, purchase it purely for the modding community, who have uncompromisingly saved this game in its entirety, and given it a fresh new outlook on life.

Yes, the game is worth the purchase, even though it’s filled to the brim with bugs, glitches, terrible optimizations and constant game crash errors, however, Don’t buy it for the sake of the developers, instead, purchase it purely for the modding community, who have uncompromisingly saved this game in its entirety, and given it a fresh new outlook on life.