Hello, I downloaded the dev kit a few days ago and have been watching tutorials trying to make sense of it since. I’m quite surprised at how little information is readily available about modding Ark specifically, all the tutorials I’ve watched seem to tell you what buttons to press in what order to do a very specific thing but don’t really ever go into what the things that you’re dealing with actually are. As there are a lot of buttons in UE4 that it seems to me wouldn’t ever really be touched in modding ark, is there a list of settings and concepts that are the important ones to focus on for modding Ark? For example, what blueprints would I need to make copies of and modify to make an electric prod that fires the lightning wyvern breath effect and deals torpor? How would I access that particle effect and detach it from the type of damage the wyvern does and attach torpor in its place? Perhaps the most confusing part is trying to understand what all the different types of nodes do in the event graph. What types of nodes are important for me to understand when modding Ark?
Thanks in advance.
Hey!
Your assumption that there are a lot of things you would not touch to mod ark in UE4 is not really true. In fact it’s quite the other way around, you got all the UE4 things and the ARK specific ones in addition to that to work with. There’s no shortcut there.
I made a collection of UE4 tutorials here: https://arkmodding.net/ark-modding-where-do-i-start-resources-for-adkue4-beginners/
It’s basically step by step what you need to understand in UE4 to mod ARK effectively(especially the graph/mods that do more than tweak values): Editor -> Framework -> Blueprint Graphing Basics -> Networking
At the moment there is no official documentation on the ARK specific nodes. We try to document the nodes here: https://wiki.arkmodding.net
I feel the same about a lot of the tutorials, on the other hand i see a lot of people demanding these kind of tutorials because they don’t want to go through the effort of understanding how things work/exploring themselves first.
So my final advice here if you don’t want to rely on those “click here” type of tutorials: learn the basics of the UE4 framework and graphing, then explore all the variables and functions in the ADK yourself. If a question pops up and you need to search online try to find the answer on how to do it in UE4 first then apply it to the ADK.