Modifying TheIsland Map

Development Modding ARK: Survival Evolved
1

What’s the best practice for making small changes (modify spawn points, levels, etc) to the existing TheIsland map?

I assumed the best practice would be to just duplicate TheIsland.umap (without duplicating the submaps) and move it into my mod directory, but all the submap references seem to get stripped out when I copy TheIsland.umap into my mod directory. Or is there a better way to mod the official map? I’ve also tried to explicitly to copying over all the submaps into the mod directory since that was failing, but the editor keeps crashing when I try to copy all of them over.

Any ideas on how to copy a umap file to another directory but refactor the submap references so they point to “Game\Maps\TheIslandSubMaps” instead of the mod directory?

2

You have to copy the “Island” folder including the files (like sublevels) to your mod folder.

PS. copying the Island folder including all sub items took ages (20+ minutes for me) for my computer, I got the advice here to copy and paste+rename the folder outside of the ADK kit, by using just Windows Explorer. (10 seconds)
I use this way to cut time and avoid ADK crashes.