First time Modder!

Development Modding ARK: Survival Evolved
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So, this is my first attempt at making a mod and while I may ask for help later (after I’ve tinkered a bit, maybe broke a few things!), I’m more looking for guidance and/or information. I’m not even sure I need to make a mod to do some of this as I know much of it can be done in the .ini files.

I am not looking to reinvent the wheel with my mod. I merely want to change certain aspects of the current game to make it more challenging and more rewarding. Here goes:

  1. Remove the high tech - basically a primitive server; however, I want the high tech items to drop from higher level beacons and as an admin I want to be able to spawn them in so I can place them in caches I manage and also use them in events on my server. This should be a fairly easy change (assumption!).

  2. I want dinos to be much tougher, but tame quicker. Eat much more too.

  3. While I like the PvP aspect of the game and I find that playing on a PvE server removes much of the challenge - I’m not a fan of the people who flatten whole bases for the fun of it. With that in mind, I want to make certain structures much tougher, while making others weaker (dunno about this).

  4. New items - skinning knife (used to get hide) and butchers knife (used to get meat) and remove those things from the hatchet and pick. Not sure why this isn’t already a thing. :stuck_out_tongue:

Pretty sure only 3 and 4 will require a mod to be made, while 1 and 2 can be done via .ini. Thoughts, suggestions, etc etc!

2

All of that requires a mod. My exposure to the Ark Dev Kit is recent so take anything I say with a grain of salt, but the first 3 should be simple variable edits. #4 isn’t significantly harder depending on your experience, but will take some time, and patch 185.

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All 4 of these ideas require a version 185 mod to be made. Removing primitive is a lot of changes, in many many places. Editing the dinos will be easy variable edits, it’s just that you can’t affect how much they eat etc with ini tweaks, ini tweaks only affect dino xp. Structure changes would be much the same, depending on exactly what you want to do - it sounds like more stat/variable editing will work for you. The new items will require new meshes and textures, adding some linking files and such, and some edits to existing tools, but should also be totally doable, once we get 185.