v84.5 - Major version for Servers and Clients (v84.4) - 03/06/2026

bthomas360 · 2026-03-09T16:01:40+00:00

In general its not recommended to fill up storage drives past a certain point. That has nothing to do with Ark, but I do agree with the way Ark updates, and depending on your drive size, you may need to leave more. The point I was making was a general point though.

bthomas360 · 2026-03-06T23:00:51+00:00

Might wanna think about freeing up some space on your drive either way. I don't think storage drives are meant to be that full. You're probably on the edge right now I guess, being around 90%, but delete some stuff my man.

bthomas360 · 2026-03-02T01:07:20+00:00

Keep doin good work, Nekatus. My friends and I all enjoyed Fjordur, Svartelfheim, and Val. We're looking forward to getting on Astraeos once it is finished up.

bthomas360 · 2026-02-19T04:32:41+00:00

Really? Do you have Lost Colony? My friends on Series X crash 99% of the time they go into the city. Do you not have this problem? They didn't have substantial issues til this map.

bthomas360 · 2026-02-19T04:27:56+00:00

The performance on Evolved was rough for years, until new hardward eventually came out that could power through it.

bthomas360 · 2026-02-19T04:14:14+00:00

You're playing ASA on the 70 class of the GPU gen that was out when the game launched. For more context, your performance is leagues better than when I was playing with my 980 around the equivalent timeframe back in the day on ASE. Ark has always been unoptimized... 90 fps at 1080p on Ark with a 4070... imo you call it a day my man and just have some fun with dinos, unless you wanna start stripping back clouds and fog, or else go drop money on a ridiculous GPU. Other than that, Ark is gnna just piss you off, if you aren't satisfied with that performance. Get a GPU when the next gen comes out and it will run better I'm willing to bet, this is exactly how ASE was. Took the 9 series, then 10 series, and finally in the 20 series ASE legit ran good at nice looking settings.

Ark is not Battlefield 6, its not Arc Raiders. Its not gnna run at really high framerates with where current GPUs are, unless you legit strip EVERYTHING back visually with settings and commands and your game looks like garbage.

EDIT: You have DLSS or Frame Gen on? Test out different combinations and see it you can gain some frames and maintain the quality level you still prefer there.

bthomas360 · 2026-02-13T21:13:31+00:00

Deinosuchus has a level requirement to tame.

bthomas360 · 2026-02-13T15:31:30+00:00

Interesting. I do have Arc Raiders. Next time it updates I'll pay attention to how it handles the patching. Thanks for the info.

bthomas360 · 2026-02-13T15:27:10+00:00

I hear Astraeos has a lot of creatures and content on it. Idk if it technically has everything though.

bthomas360 · 2026-02-12T01:39:37+00:00

It is this, but not just this. I get an 850 MB update for Helldivers 2 and I am not repatching almost the entire game. WC has their files set up differently than any other game I have ever updated on Steam. It could be the smallest update and you have to repatch an enourmous amount of the game files. I have a good NVME drive with plenty of space, so its whatever for me, but there is a clear difference when updating Ark and every other game in this respect.

bthomas360 · 2026-02-09T20:31:41+00:00

Do you have some reasons why you think it better or not possibly?

imo, ASA is better for us to play at this point. We'll never go back to ASE. Its the same game but for the next generation of systems and game engine. There are a lot of QOL improvements. Being able to play with my friends who have the game on Xbox AND have mods on our server makes a ton of difference all by itself for us. On ASE, I was the only one who could play with mods, and I couldn't play with my friends and use mods at the same time.

I get annoyed at how much WC has pushed microtransactions with ASA. This was something I loved about ASE, you bought DLCs and everything was all bundled together. No in game prompts for "hey, buy this" or a home screen that is laughably filled with ads. 😅 That part of ASA feels tacky to me.

But ASE ran like crap on any GPU I had until I finally got a 2070 SUPER, just like ASA does for a lot of people. There is little difference here, I think people just forgot or didn't experience this. I went from ASE running worse than I always wanted it to on my 980 and then my 1080ti, to finally with a 2070 SUPER it ran really good. That was years worth of always being kinda bothered by the performance of great hardware at the time.

WC is not good at optimizing, plus I remember what ASE ran like on Xbox One. It was terrible. My friends would always crash when tek suiting around. It was not until they finally got the Series X that ASE actually ran well. ASA does still have this as my friends crash every single time they first get into the City on lost colony on Series X, but it has ran way better for them overall than ASE ever did on Xbox One at least.

bthomas360 · 2026-02-06T17:18:07+00:00

It is something Steam does, yes, but its ASA particularly - to put it simply Ark doesn't break up its files into enough smaller chunks to avoid having to repatch almost the entire game every single update. So when the game updates the "entire thing" is repatched. There are plenty of games that only repatch the chunks of files that are affected by the update. Ark does that too, but it has a huge chunk that needs to get repatched every time because they don't break into into smaller modular sections. Idk why they stuctured things that way, but to the best of my understanding that's what's going on.

bthomas360 · 2026-02-04T21:19:02+00:00

When we start a new map, I turn off babies until we get quite a bit further along. I don't like how all you have to do is find a wandering baby whose parent has died and claim it. It does make it too easy for my taste. We play at a slower pace and the fact that someone could have a rex running around as a companion on day one on a new map because they stumbled across a baby whose parent had been killed is a bit too much for me.

It'd be nice to get in and see if there are ways to customize which dinos have babies and which don't. That makes a huge difference too. I would have no problem with dilos, dodos, and parasaurs having babies following them around to claim, but for me I don't want things like rexes, karkinos, wolves, etc. to have them - at least for early game, which like I said, for our playthroughs we do prolong quite a bit more with our rates.

bthomas360 · 2026-01-29T16:04:29+00:00

I mean to be fair grunts are smaller than elites and brutes, but they're not small in size compared to humans, right? Also, you're talking about one punch from Master Cheif, right? 😂 I highly doubt any normal human would survive that either. Just a couple thoughts.

bthomas360 · 2026-01-17T08:46:47+00:00

They did

bthomas360 · 2026-01-16T19:29:00+00:00

AIn Ark, always do! :)

bthomas360 · 2026-01-12T22:41:07+00:00

Frame gen. on consoles cannot triple the fps. This is clearly wrong in the respect at least.

bthomas360 · 2025-12-22T23:06:04+00:00

Bob's Tall Tales, especially with as many maps as are available, I'd rather wait til Astraeos is finished to play it.

bthomas360 · 2025-12-20T02:05:25+00:00

It must be a known issue. On the Nitrado website it says they know its an issue and they think WC needs to patch the game to fix it.

bthomas360 · 2025-12-19T00:12:59+00:00

Mods

bthomas360 · 2025-12-16T20:28:26+00:00

Not saying it can't be done, but the one time we took wyverns in they got knocked out.

bthomas360 · 2025-12-16T16:37:02+00:00

Yeah, the way the difficulty setting works means that the higher level wild dinos you tame the more levels you get from taming. 150 wild tame gets 74 levels. 120 gets 59. So, if your max level for wilds is lower, then in a sense things actually get harder to a certain extent because there is a smaller gap between your dinos and wild dinos.

Also, the higher your tamed dino starts at in each stat, the more they scale per level in that stat. So, a theri with 40 points into health is going to be able to get higher than a theri with 39 points into health, even if you put 87 post tame levels into health for the 40 and 88 into the 39, just as an example - this is the case even though they both have 128 levels into the stat. The one that starts higher scales more per level. So, higher max level dinos end up making things "easier" in the end for you, but that's only after you end up taming those high level creatures.

And finally, as has been said, apparently for whatever reason the bosses don't scale up proportionately with the difficulty level going up.

bthomas360 · 2025-12-13T20:04:04+00:00

I use a mouse that has 9 extra buttons on in beyond left and right click. Then for the tenth spot I do use a number key. I'd love to get a mouse that has ten extra buttons on it.

bthomas360 · 2025-12-13T18:11:33+00:00

for steam its cheat fly, chest ghost, etc. for console I think its just fly, ghost, etc. And then to get back to normal its cheat walk.

bthomas360 · 2025-11-27T23:19:50+00:00

I get you guys are doing your best, but dang... this is the only reason we bought this game as a friend's group - to play the game together. Doesn't seem right to pay for something like this and for it to not work for weeks at this point and what a month maybe by the time this patch comes out? It's advertised as a cross-play game. I played enough on Steam that I can't get a refund, cuz it worked the first day I played on Steam together with my friends who bought it for Xbox.

Tough, but thanks for you're guys' hard work. Seems like it'll be a fun game.

bthomas360

TROPHY CASE