Is there a compendium of all ARK API calls and ARK Primal asset files and a usage definition?

Development Modding ARK: Survival Evolved
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I am a newer generation of aspiring ARK mod’er and though I understand UE4, I am not so fluent with ARK DEV KIT and their files. So far, most tutorials I am being pointed to are grossly outdated and virtually irrelevant to the current state of UE4 and ARK Dev Kit functionality. The Ark Blueprints and assets are poorly documented (from info I have been provided thus far) and almost anything useful seems so cryptic and hidden from us. It feels like us mod’ers are simply left in the wild to figure everything for ourselves and those in the community seem to covet their precious snippets of code as I rarely see open-source mod repositories.

Is there a compendium with current information about the ARK DEV KIT and the file usage contained? It seems that for anything I change/adjust there are many other associated files that override my changes and this is so cryptic as to where to know what all needs to be adjusted to reflect any change. For instance, when you adjust the Pawn, it seems that there are in fact several places where your changes will be lost/overwritten but how would I have logically known this in advance?

First Request:
I am currently confused on how I can begin my mod with a small icon appearing in the Global Game HUD system so that when the game starts the user will see an extra icon to click, maybe appearing at the end of the current official game’s hot-bar. My dilemma is that there is not enough information available to explain how/what files I need to copy to my mod directory and when in them to make my adjustments.

Second Request:
I am also trying to figure out how one would adjust the text appearing in the player’s HUD. Specifically, the “Crafting Skill” heading that appears in the HUD. I would like to replace the text “Crafting Skill” to be “Magic Points” instead. I will configure the behind the scene functionality for everything related to the original “Crafting Skill” stat on the back-end. I just need to know how to override the HUD to reflect the verbiage change. How can I go about this?

inventory_stats_UI.PNG.jpg

If you have/know of any recent tutorials specifically composed for ARK Modding, whether free or for a fee, please let me know. At this point, I am willing to learn but time is money, so I am very willing to pay for a really good, well thought out and delivered ARK Modding, tutorial series. (**Hopefully this will motivate some of you very talented and knowledgeable folks out there as I bet there is a decent market for quality tutorials.*)

Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you very much,

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Unfortunately, there is no fully comprehensive compendium. The community did try to do this once at wiki.arkmodding.net (Which does have some useful information and some articles written by the community on the main arkmodding.net page) but this became a very difficult and time-consuming task. A lot of the community participates in active discussion on the discord channel. (discord.arkmodding.net)

There should also start being more tutorials and conversation happening here on the forums soon.

For your first request, there have been some individuals who have managed to make UI changes like this they might be able to help you, but it’s not something I’ve done for an interactive element.
You can add a widget to the screen by starting with a widget (It’s parent must be PrimalUI) and adding it to the viewport, just take care to experiment with the area of the screen space it takes up so that it blends with the active UI.

For your second request, I would look at the lantern pet parent BP. the lantern pets (Bulb dog, featherlight, etc) have different names for these stats so you should be able to look at their BPs to see how Wildcard did it.

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Unfortunately, there is no real compendium or documentation aside from tutorials/guides, communication between the community, and looking at how they did stuff in graph throughout the BPs.

For your other two questions:

  1. To add to the Main hud you can simply create a new widget that is a child of “PrimalUI” and add it to the viewport.

  2. I would refer to the “Lantern Pet” character BP (The parent of the bulbdog, featherlight, glowtail, and shinehorn) as these creatures rename those stats. you should be able to look at modified values to determine how they did it.