How to Install ARK: Survival Ascended and Join a Server

The first thing almost everyone does after installing ARK: Survival Ascended is open the graphics settings and start turning things down.

This is not a badly optimised game so much as an extremely hungry one. It was rebuilt on Unreal Engine 5 with lighting and geometry that were never going to be cheap, and the result is a survival game that will happily eat a graphics card which handles current shooters without complaint. Knowing that before you buy saves an argument with yourself later.

What you get in exchange is the same game a very large number of people have already lost years to, rendered properly. You wake up on a beach with nothing and punch a tree, and eleven months later you own a base with forty dinosaurs in it and a grudge against a tribe on the other side of the map. Listings for it collect on the game's hub, while the original ARK: Survival Evolved keeps a separate population of its own.

Step 1: buy it, install it, and clear the space

ARK: Survival Ascended is a paid Steam game. Buy it, install it from your Library, and be ready for one of the larger downloads on your drive.

If Steam is unfamiliar, our guide to installing it covers the account side first.

Two things worth checking before you commit. The remake and the original are separate purchases with separate servers and separate saves — owning one does not get you the other, and a friend playing "ARK" may be playing either. And the map you want may not be the map the game shipped with; the remake released its worlds over time rather than all at once, so check which ones are in the version you are buying if a specific map is the reason you are here.

Step 2: fix the settings before you judge the game

Launch it once and go straight to the video options.

The game is built around upscaling — rendering at a lower internal resolution and reconstructing the image — and the settings for it are in the menu. Turning that on is not cheating, and every frame rate figure you have seen quoted for this game assumes it. Lower the shadow and foliage settings before you lower resolution; foliage in particular is expensive and, on a PvP server, dense grass is actively working against you.

The other setting worth finding on day one is field of view. The default is conservative, and on a wide monitor it makes the game feel like you are looking through a letterbox.

Step 3: learn the loop somewhere safe

Start a single-player world before you go near anything shared.

The reason is not difficulty. It is that ARK expects you to know a hundred small things it never explains, and learning them while a stranger on a flying mount watches you from above is worse than learning them alone. Punch a tree, work out that stone comes from the small rocks rather than the big ones, build a thatch hut, discover that thatch does not survive a night. Tame something small. Watch it starve because you did not know what it eats.

An hour of that is enough. You are not trying to finish the game solo; you are trying to arrive on a server able to feed yourself.

The single-player world also lets you find out how your machine behaves before your performance becomes somebody else's problem in a raid.

Step 4: understand what kind of server you are choosing

This is the decision that determines everything, and it is where most people go wrong.

Official versus unofficial. Official servers run at the developer's settings, which is to say slowly and unforgivingly. Unofficial servers are run by players and communities, and they change the game substantially.

PvP or PvE, and the arrangements in between. On a PvP server, other players will eventually take your things. That is the game. On PvE they cannot, and the conflict becomes about land and pillared-off spawn points instead. PvPvE servers exist as well, with safe zones marked out against contested ones.

Rates. Unofficial servers publish multipliers — harvesting, experience, taming speed, egg hatching, creature maturation. This is the biggest single difference between two servers that otherwise look identical. Base rates mean a large tame is an evening spent watching a health bar. Boosted rates mean it is twenty minutes. Neither is the real game; they are aimed at people with different amounts of time.

Offline raid protection. On PvP servers, this determines whether your base can be flattened while you are at work. Servers that have it say so prominently, because it is the single most common reason people quit a PvP server. Servers that do not have it are aiming at a harder audience.

Wipe schedule. Some servers reset periodically so that the map is not permanently owned by whoever arrived first. Others have been running for years and the good spots are all taken. The second kind can still be fine if the established tribes are welcoming, and disastrous if they are not.

Any listing that does not state its rates and its raid rules is telling you something about how it is run. Our notes on what makes a server listing trustworthy apply directly, and the Rust comparison between modded and vanilla is the same argument in a different survival game.

Step 5: mods, and why they arrive on their own

ARK: Survival Ascended does not use the Steam Workshop. Mods come through a separate platform built so that console players get them too, and the practical effect for you is that the game handles the downloading itself when you join a server that uses them.

You do not need to install anything in advance. Pick the server and connect, then wait while it collects what it needs.

The first connection to a heavily modded server takes a while. It is downloading a mod list that may be substantial, and the screen will sit there looking unresponsive. That is a one-time cost per mod, not per session.

What the mods do is worth knowing before you pick. Almost every unofficial server runs building improvements and stacking changes of some kind, and many add creatures on top. The building mods are the ones you will notice immediately, because base construction without them involves a great deal of fighting the snap points. A server's mod list is the honest version of its description — read it rather than the advertising copy.

Step 6: connect

The in-game server browser is where most people start, and it is not good. The list is long and the filters are fussy, and it has a habit of showing you nothing at all until you widen something you did not know was applied.

Three things make it workable.

Search by name, not by scrolling. If you know which server you want, type part of its name into the filter box. This is dramatically faster than paging through a list.

Use the favourites. Once you have found a server that suits you, save it. ARK server names are long and similar, and finding the same one twice by browsing is a chore.

Copy the whole address. ARK-style servers advertise more than one port — one the game itself talks to, another the browser uses to ask the server how many people are on it. The number a listing shows you is not always the number a direct connection wants, so take the address exactly as it is given and do not assume the default.

The Steam client's own server browser, under the View menu, keeps a favourites list that accepts an address directly, and it is a reliable fallback when the in-game list is being difficult.

The listings on this site are queried directly rather than repeated from what an owner typed into a form, which is the difference between a player count that is measured and one that is claimed.

Latency is worth caring about here more than in a slower game. Taming is forgiving of a poor connection; being rubber-banded off a cliff on a flying mount is not. Pick something in your region where you have the choice, and our notes on where a server is hosted explain why the map on a hosting page matters.

Tribes, and the part no guide covers

You join a tribe or you are prey. That is the honest summary of ARK's social structure on any server with other people on it.

A tribe is a shared ownership group — shared structures, shared tames, shared everything, with a rank system for who is allowed to do what. Joining one means trusting people you met an hour ago with everything you own, and the classic ARK disaster is not being raided by an enemy but being emptied out by somebody you invited.

Set tribe ranks properly. New members should not have permission to unclaim tames or demolish structures. Every long-running ARK server has a story about the day somebody's cousin joined the tribe and took the entire base apart in ten minutes.

Server communities in this game mostly organise on Discord, and the ones that run applications rather than open doors tend to be the ones that last. If you end up running a server of your own, running a whitelist people actually apply to is the relevant reading.

Problems you will hit

Frame rate collapses in a base. Structure count and light sources. This is the most common performance complaint in the game, and it is a base design problem as much as a hardware one.

You cannot find the server your friend is on. Filters. Then spelling. Then ask them for the address rather than the name.

Kicked back to the menu during the mod download. Retry. A partial mod download is a routine failure and a second attempt usually completes.

Everything you built is gone. Either a raid, or a decay timer. Unofficial servers set how long structures survive without you visiting them, and a fortnight away is enough to lose a base on some of them.

Your tame will not follow. Whistle commands and the radial menu control tame behaviour, and the settings persist per creature. Somebody set it to passive.

The neighbours

If ARK's shape appeals but the dinosaurs do not, several games take the same building-taming-raiding structure somewhere else. Conan Exiles does it with thralls and a harsher combat system. Myth of Empires does it with ancient Chinese siege warfare and recruited soldiers.

And the original ARK: Survival Evolved is still there, still running, on hardware requirements from a decade ago. For a lot of people that is the sensible answer — the same game, a much larger server population, and a machine that does not sound like a hairdryer.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. ARK: Survival Ascended servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.