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How to tame dinosaurs in ARK: Survival Evolved
Master the art of taming dinosaurs with our ARK: Survival Evolved tips guide.
One of the biggest selling points of Studio Wildcard’s ARK: Survival Evolved is the chance to tame and keep your own dinosaurs. Not only is this aspect of the game deliriously fun, it’s also massively useful.
Dinosaurs and other creatures can be used to gather resources, attack enemies, and defend your base against intruders. On top of this, they also offer another layer of customisation to the game as you can level them up and decorate them with cool new skins.
For newcomers to the game, it can be pretty intimidating to know where to start with the taming process. It takes a long time to accomplish and the correct foods for each animal are different and can only be found through trial and error.
We’ve put together a handy ARK: Survival Evolved taming guide to ease you into the process. It will help get you started and give you some tips on how to look after your animal.
1. Pick the right animal
All the dinosaurs have special skills
© Studio Wildcard
The type of animal you should tame depends on what you’re going to use it for. For example, if you’re looking for something that’s easy to get and offers light protection, go for a Dilophosaurus. They’re able to carry extra gear, and can act as guard dogs that protect your base against raiders.
If you need something to harvest precious stones, then an Ankylosaurus is probably the best animal for you. They’re excellent at mining materials like metal and crystal, which you’ll need for crafting recipes later on.
Pretty much all the creatures in ARK: Survival Evolved have special skills to take advantage of. This could be harvesting certain resources, defending yourself against enemies, or helping to navigate obstacles like rivers or cliffs. Learn more about each animal by collecting the explorer notes spread around the map and observing their behaviour in the wild. It pays off.
2. Pack the right equipment
You may need to knock out dinosaurs to tame them
© Studio Wildcard
You can tame certain animals simply by feeding them from your hotbar. You’ll recognise these creatures by the onscreen prompt that appears above them whenever you’re nearby. If no message appears, then you’ll need to try a more violent approach to taming. This involves knocking the animal out first.
Wooden clubs and slingshots are the perfect tools for immobilising smaller creatures like Raptors and Dilophosaurus, while bigger creatures will require tranquilliser arrows, darts, crossbows and longneck rifles. These costlier items will give you a greater chance of knocking the animal unconscious, but require way more materials to build.
Once you’ve knocked the creature out, narcoberries and narcotics will help keep the animal unconscious, so make sure to pack some. Just move them over from your inventory to theirs, and their torpor will increase gradually, giving you more time to work.
3. Choose the right location
Stay hidden when taming
© Studio Wildcard
Taming can take a long time to pull off, so it’s vital that you pick your location wisely. Choose somewhere near cover, where there are no settlements and you’re less likely to come across other players. You’ll be extremely vulnerable while taming, so staying hidden is your best defence against ambushes.
Another consideration you should take into account is to position yourself near a place that has a lot of plants. This will allow you to harvest additional narcoberries, preventing you from having to do a frantic, last-minute search if you run out and need to lengthen an animal’s torpor.
4. Cook with the right ingredients
Experiment with ingredients
© Studio Wildcard
There are a few ways to speed up the taming process – using the correct ingredients is arguably the most effective.
Most creatures have a preferred type of kibble that you can feed them to increase their taming effectiveness. Kibble is made when you put different types of animal eggs inside cooking pots or industrial cookers with advanced crops, mejoberries, some fibre, and a waterskin that’s 25% full.
These recipes can be found on the body of large carnivores, like Megalodons, Spinosaurus, and Carnotaurus, but you’ll need to do some experimenting to find out which kibble works best with what animal.
If you don’t have access to a cooking pot or any of these ingredients, raw prime meat and mejoberries are the best alternative. For carnivores, collect the raw prime meat from Stegosaurus, Paracer, and Mammoths. Meanwhile, for herbivores, grab some mejoberries from your environment to feed the creatures.
5. Join a tribe
Teaming up makes taming easier
© Studio Wildcard
An easy way of making taming more manageable is to join a tribe. There are a number of benefits to this approach. For example, you can team up to help find the necessary resources and pool them together. You can also position one player nearby for protection, to watch your back and ward off anyone trying to attack.
The most useful part of this arrangement, however, comes when stunning the animal to begin with. Teaming up reduces the amount of effort it will take each person to knock out an animal. This means you can get down to the taming part a lot sooner.
6. Protect the asset
Build an enclosure for your dinosaurs
© Studio Wildcard
So you’ve got the animal you wanted and you’re taking it home – what next? The most important thing is to keep it safe.
One way to do this is to build an enclosure for them with a stone or metal wall and a dinosaur gateway. Another is to keep flying animals out of reach of danger by leaving them on your roof.
The idea is to make it as awkward as possible for players to reach your dinosaurs. This means making raiders use tons of resources to knock down your walls and breach your defences.
7. Level up your mount
Forage for resources to level up
© Studio Wildcard
Defence isn’t the only thing you should be concerned with – you should also try to level up your mount.
There are a few ways to do this. Arguably the best option is using your animal to kill difficult prey. This will give them a lot of XP, depending on the level and the type of animal you attack.
There are less violent solutions, too. You can have tribe member sit on your mount while you craft to share experience, or use your mount to forage for resources. All of these will allow you to gain the necessary experience to increase your creature’s abilities.
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