Create your first ARK: Survival Ascended server

This page takes you from a connected rig to an ARK: Survival Ascended server your friends can join. If you’re hosting the older ARK, follow Create your first ARK: Survival Evolved server instead. The two games set up differently.

The dashboard uses two words you’ll see throughout. A server is one install of ASA on your rig. A map is a world running inside that server, such as The Island or Ragnarok, and one server can run several maps.

Step 1: Create the server

1. In your dashboard, open your rig and click Add server.
2. Under Game, choose ARK: Survival Ascended.
3. Click Create server. The install starts straight away.

ASA needs about 40 GB of disk space, and the download often takes most of an hour on a home connection. The dashboard shows its progress. You can close the tab and come back later.

Step 2: Answer the setup questions

You don’t have to wait for the install to finish. Click Set up my first map to start the setup wizard, which turns your answers into the game’s settings. If you’d rather edit the settings yourself, click Configure manually instead.

The wizard asks thirteen questions. The answers describe how the game plays, so you don’t need to know what a “3x taming rate” means.

The first five cover how your group plays:

• PvE or PvP, and roughly how many players at once.
• Which platforms your friends are on: PC, PlayStation, Xbox, or a mix of all three.
• Whether to lock the server with a join password.
• For PvE, whether abandoned bases and tames decay away. For PvP, whether bases are protected while their owners are offline.

The next six cover the game itself: how fast taming, gathering, leveling, and raising babies go, how high wild dino levels reach, and whether to apply the standard quality-of-life settings.

The last two set up backups and a restart schedule. By default, the map is backed up every 6 hours and restarts daily at 4:00 AM, with a warning to anyone online beforehand.

Some answers set several values at once. The raising answer sets hatch speed, mature speed, mating interval, and cuddle interval together, so imprinting keeps working at any raising speed.

Step 3: Pick your maps and name the server

After the questions, you pick your maps. The Island is listed first and marked as recommended. You may pick as many as you like:

• The Island
• Scorched Earth
• Aberration
• Extinction
• Genesis: Part 1
• The Center
• Ragnarok
• Valguero
• Lost Colony
• Astraeos
• Club ARK

If you pick more than one, the wizard links them as a cluster, so players and dinos can travel between them. The dashboard assigns each map its own ports.

Next, type the name players see in the server browser. In a cluster, each map adds its own name to the end, so “Dino Camp” becomes “Dino Camp - The Island”.

Click Review my choices to see everything the wizard will set, then Create my server.

Step 4: Change settings and add mods

You can change any of the wizard’s answers later, from the map’s settings. Presets change a group of values in one click. The rate presets are Official (1×), Boosted (3×), and Relaxed (5×), and the breeding presets are Official (1×), Fast (10×), and Ultra (50×).

ASA mods come from CurseForge. Add them from the mods section of the dashboard. Mods update on their own, and the map picks up changes the next time it restarts. Community-made mod maps work the same way.

To run an in-game event, pick it under Seasonal Event. The options include Winter Wonderland, Fear Ascended, and Love Ascended. Set it back to None when the event ends.

Step 5: Start the map

Click Start on your map. The first boot takes several minutes, and later starts are quicker. The dashboard shows when the map is online.

On modest hardware, a first boot can take up to 15 minutes. A map that looks stuck in that time is usually still loading.

Game updates don’t install on their own. To install one, click Update game, or Update & restart if the map is running.

Step 6: Get your friends in

Your friends join from ARK’s own server browser. They open the unofficial server list, search for your server’s name, and join. If you set a join password, they need it too.

The direct address is under Show details on the map. Use it if your server is slow to appear in the browser.

Adding more maps later

Click Add a map to add another map to the server. Each map gets its own settings.

To let players travel between maps, give them the same Cluster ID when you add them. Cluster IDs you’ve already used appear as buttons you can click.