A new Dino Dossier has been revealed, this one is everyone’s favorite dangerous deep-ocean jellyfish, the Cnidaria!


Welcome to the seventeenth issue of the ARK Digest! For those who missed the previous issues, check out the Announcement forum section on the Steam Community Hub and be sure to catch up with what you’ve missed as there is tons for you to catch up on!


Great news Survivors! Steam have got back to us and worked their magic on their backend to allow us to now enable VAC for ARK: Survival Evolved! As you can see on our storefront page, it’s turned on which means in due time all cheats, including ESP, will result in automatic VAC bans!

Starting from tomorrow, VAC on clients will be required to play on our Official Servers. What this means is that if you prevent VAC from functioning, you’ll not be able to connect any longer. We’ll also be enabling this setting by default for Unofficial Servers, however if they would like to run it without VAC, they will need to include the following commandline when they launch their servers:

-insecure

This is not recommended of course as we encourage all server hosts and admins to make use of the VAC system and enable it for their servers! Wildcard will continue its fight against cheaters with proactive GM administration, alongside the VAC system, so keep on making use of our reports system!






Hope you guys haven’t forgotten about the epic modding contest we’ve got going with Alienware! We encourage any and all survivors interested in modding and currently working on their own version of the ARK to submit their mods to the contest! We’ve got loads of prizes up for grabs and are super excited to see your envisions of ARK come to life!

We’ve also recently extended the original deadline, so check out this thread for all the extra details!


Be sure to check out our two-weekly running contests! ARKitect and ARKArt where we check out the best bases and the best pieces of art in the game! If you’d like to submit your base or something you’ve created in the game, you can check out the entries thread here which will fill you in on all the rules too!

Community Crunch Contest Submissions


Just a reminder Survivors that we’re still running our Survival of the Fittest: The Last Stand open preliminary qualifications! We’ve got a mega-thread on the progression of the tournament, including updates, rules, server-status and patch notes that will be regularly updated when things happen that need to be brought to your attention. This weekend we’ll post the Official Results from the matches thus far, for all to see and gawk at! Don’t worry, if you’re following us on other forms of Social Media you’ll be made aware of the changes too - but this is the best place for it, so definitely keep your eye on it!

Survival of the Fittest: The Last Stand


So we’ve had some pretty massive patches lately, but it doesn’t stop there! We’ve still got loads more to do and much more to add into the game :)! Patch 217 will add quite a few things to the core-game, as well as include some qualify of life, security and optimization changes!

Trophy System

We’re super stoked to announce that we’ve finally ready to push out our Trophy System which will include the new Survival of the Fittest trophies! So if you’ve won a Survival of the Fittest Championship, you’ll be able to show off your awesome new trophies engraved with your personal handles to the whole ARK universe. And of course, The Last Stand Tournament will have its own massive awesome Trophy set -- the victors’ rewards aren’t only cash prizes! :)




Horn-less female Megaloceros

We’ve heard your requests and we did have these planned! These should hopefully be ready to go out with the 217 patch. The Doe, unlike its male counterpart, will not be able to attack however it will run at a quicker pace! We want to introduce other alterations to the game when it comes to gender diversity with creatures of the ARK. We already have the frill and frill-less Boas and now we’ve got the Megaloceros.



As we progress further into EA, we’ll be sure to have more cool alterations like this!

Primitive Club

The cries for melee weapons have not gone unnoticed! We’ve got the primitive club ready which is the first of a few melee weapons and defenses in the game! These are great for bopping people on the head and taking them out! Really brings that caveman feeling to the game.

You can check out the rest of the notes here


For those of you who don’t know, we’ve got a twitch channel! You can check it out here[www.twitch.tv] and now that we’re more comfortably set up in our new Offices we’ll be able to do much more community-interaction with the stream!

Some of the things you can expect to watch are;

Community Hosted Survival of the Fittest Tournaments
Developer Q+As
Daily Mod Showcase!


And now for the Q+A and complete Digest!