How to Install ARK: Survival Evolved and Join a Server

The first thing anybody tells you about ARK is that taming a dinosaur takes hours. That is true, and it undersells it. You knock the animal unconscious, you sit next to its body feeding it the food it prefers, and you defend it from everything that wanders past while a bar fills. On an official-rate server a large creature can hold you there for most of an evening. Then a raptor kills it while you are making tea.

Understanding that one loop explains almost everything about ARK's server scene. The rates a server runs decide how much of your life the game asks for, and that is why almost nobody plays on the official ones.

Two servers are listed here at the time of writing, which is a thin showing for a game this size — most ARK communities advertise through their own Discords rather than public directories. The hub is where new listings collect, and it is worth checking rather than assuming.

Which ARK you are buying

This is the first thing to get right, because there are two current games with nearly the same name.

ARK: Survival Evolved is the original. It launched into early access in 2015, left it in 2017, and accumulated an enormous amount of content and an enormous amount of jank on the way. Its unofficial server scene ran for the better part of a decade and much of it is still going.

ARK: Survival Ascended is the rebuild on a newer engine, with its own separate everything — separate purchase, separate mods, separate servers. Your Survival Evolved characters, tames and bases do not come with you.

They are both alive. Survival Evolved has the deeper back catalogue of mods and the players who never saw a reason to move; Ascended has the newer content and the better lighting. If someone has invited you to their server, ask which game before you buy anything.

Getting it installed

Survival Evolved is a paid game on Steam. If Steam is new to you, the beginner's Steam guide covers the account side.

Set aside serious disk space. This is one of the largest installs on the store, and the expansion maps are most of the reason. The base download alone will take a while on a domestic connection, and the game is not usefully playable until it finishes.

Once installed, the files sit under your Steam library in steamapps/common, in a folder named for the game. You will want that path eventually — it is where local mod files and configuration end up.

Launch it once before you try to join anything. The first start does shader work and initial setup, and doing that while a server is waiting for you is a poor use of a slot.

The maps are not cosmetic

ARK ships as a set of distinct worlds and the differences run deeper than scenery. The Island is the tutorial in the sense that it is where the game assumes you begin. Scorched Earth is a desert where heat and water management become the main threat. Aberration puts you underground with radiation and creatures that climb. Extinction is a ruined Earth. Genesis splits into biomes with their own rules.

Alongside those sit maps that began as community projects and were adopted as official free content — The Center, Ragnarok, Valguero, Crystal Isles, Lost Island and Fjordur among them. Several are enormous, well built and free, and a large share of unofficial servers run them rather than The Island.

A server advertises its map. Read it. Landing on Aberration expecting a beach is a memorable but short experience.

Finding a server

The in-game browser sits behind the Join ARK option on the main menu. It has filters for official against unofficial, for PvE against PvP, and for map. It is also slow, prone to showing stale results, and inclined to lose your place.

Two things make it workable.

Use the filters properly rather than scrolling. Set the map and the session type first, then sort. The unfiltered list is thousands of entries long and much of it is dead.

And favourite anything you like immediately. ARK server populations are habitual — the same forty people on the same box at the same hour — and a server that looks empty at three in the afternoon has a queue at nine in the evening. Losing a good server because you did not save it is the classic mistake here.

Joining by address

ARK also registers with Steam's own server browser, which is the reliable path when the in-game list is misbehaving. In Steam, open the server list from the View menu, go to the favourites tab, and add a server by address.

One wrinkle to know about: an ARK server listens on more than one port. There is the port the game traffic uses and a separate query port that answers the "are you there, and who is on you" question. The address Steam's browser wants is the query one, and it is not always the number people quote in chat. If an address you were given produces nothing in Steam, that mismatch is the usual reason — ask the server owner for the query port specifically.

Once a server is in your Steam favourites, it shows up under favourites inside the game as well, which is the tidiest way to keep a short list of places you actually play.

Rates, and why they are the whole conversation

Official servers run everything at the designed rate. Harvesting gives you the base amount, experience arrives at the base speed, and taming takes as long as taming takes. It is a coherent design and it assumes you have a great deal of free time.

Unofficial servers adjust that, and the numbers they publish are the single most useful thing in a listing:

• Harvest multiplier — how much wood one hit on a tree gives you.
• Taming speed — the difference between an evening and twenty minutes.
• XP rate — how fast you reach the engrams that unlock decent structures.
• Breeding and maturation rates — the ones that decide whether raising a bred creature is a hobby or a second job.

A server described as boosted is not an easier version of the same game. It is a different game about different things, where taming is a decision rather than a commitment and the interesting part starts sooner. A server at official rates is about endurance, and the people who play there like it that way.

Neither is wrong. Picking the wrong one for your available hours is what makes people bounce off ARK.

PvE and PvP are separate hobbies

On a PvE server nobody can damage your structures or kill your tames. The competition is over land, over resource nodes and over the good spots to build, and it is resolved socially. Building across somebody's only path to the beach will get you talked about.

On PvP everything you own is a target, including while you are asleep. Most serious PvP servers run some form of offline protection — a rule set that hardens your base when nobody from your tribe is online — and the details vary enormously between communities. Ask before you build.

The other structural thing on any long-running server is decay. Structures and tames left unattended eventually become claimable or disappear entirely, on a timer the owner sets. If you plan to disappear for a fortnight, find out what happens to your base while you are gone. It is the most common way people lose everything without a single enemy being involved.

Tribes, and the part nobody explains

Joining a tribe is the single biggest quality-of-life change available to you, and the mechanics around it deserve more attention than they get.

A tribe shares structures, tames and access. It also has ranks, and the permissions attached to those ranks are configurable in more detail than most people bother with — who can claim creatures, who can demolish buildings, who can take things out of which containers. A tribe that has not set these up is one careless member away from an expensive afternoon.

The tribe log is the other underused feature. It records what happened while you were away: what was tamed, what died, what killed it, and who did what. On a busy server it is the first place to look when something has gone wrong, and it settles arguments that would otherwise go on for days.

If you are joining an established tribe, ask about ranks before you touch anything. If you are starting one with friends, spend ten minutes on permissions on day one rather than after the incident.

Mods

Survival Evolved uses the Steam Workshop, and modded unofficial servers are the norm rather than the exception. Joining one triggers a download of everything it runs, handled through Steam, before you connect.

That download is occasionally large and occasionally slow, and it happens once per server rather than once per join. A server with a long mod list will make you wait the first time.

Two habits worth forming. Do not subscribe manually to a server's mod collection unless its owners specifically ask you to — the game fetches what it needs, and a stale manual subscription is a good way to end up on the wrong version of something. And if a join fails repeatedly on a modded server, verifying the game files through Steam's properties menu clears up a surprising share of it.

Popular mods change the game substantially. Structures overhauls, stacking mods that make inventory management bearable, quality-of-life packages that fix things the base game never did. A server's mod list tells you what kind of place it is more accurately than its name does.

Things that will go wrong

You connect and immediately lose your character. ARK stores your character on the server, not on your account. A new server means a new level-one survivor on a beach, every time. This surprises people.

The server appears in the browser but will not accept you. Frequently a version mismatch after an update, where the server has not restarted onto the new build yet. Waiting is the fix.

Enormous load times. ARK loads slowly on any hardware and worse on a mechanical drive. Joining a heavily built server on a large map is the worst case.

Your tames are gone. Check the tribe log before assuming a bug. It records what killed what, and who did it.

Everything looks like it is made of putty. Textures still streaming in. Give it a minute after landing.

Where else this lands

ARK invented a template that a lot of games now follow, and the ones nearest to it are all listed here. Conan Exiles takes the same base-building and thrall systems into a low-fantasy setting with better melee combat. Palworld took the creature-collecting half and made it faster and friendlier. The Isle is the version where you are the dinosaur.

If the survival part appeals more than the dinosaurs, Rust is the harshest expression of it, 7 Days to Die the most structural, and Soulmask the one where recruited NPCs do the tedious work for you.

Whichever direction you go, the ARK lesson carries: read the rates, read the rules, and ask what happens to your things while you are offline. Those three answers tell you more about a survival server than any screenshot will. There is a general version of that argument in how to find a server worth staying on, and the reasoning applies well beyond this game.

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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 Evolved servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page, and ARK: Survival Evolved's own numbers — servers online, players now, activity by hour — are on its statistics page.