Right now, as you can probably gather, the Survival of the Fittest (SOTF) total conversion mod overwrites many content files in the ARK Devkit that you may likely want to also keep for your own projects. I personally have enough space on my SSD for the devkit, but I am fine sacrificing some performance when looking at the SOTF content by offloading that content to a storage drive. I was able to achieve this through the use of a soft symbolic link. You can also apply this same concept without using a symbolic link if you have the extra storage for it, just skip all the symbolic link steps. I am providing the steps below in case anyone else is interested in also doing this:
- Install the ARK devkit through the Epic Games launcher and ensure it is up to date.
- Download the SOTF content provided here.
- Copy the C:\Program Files\Epic Games\ARKDevKit\Projects\ShooterGame\Content folder to another drive.
- Extract the downloaded SOTF into your duplicated content folder (ensure you extract the archive in a way that it is replacing folders, not creating folders)
- Rename C:\Program Files\Epic Games\ARKDevKit\Projects\ShooterGame\Content to Content_Base.
- Open an elevated command prompt and enter the following command changing the first path (if needed) to the devkit’s ShooterGame folder and the second path to be where you offloaded the SOTF content folder.
mklink /d "C:\Program Files\Epic Games\ARKDevKit\Projects\ShooterGame\Content" "D:\Program Files (x86)\ARK SOTF\Content"
Thinking about it after I started making this guide, it was silly to put it in that particular folder but oh well.
You now have the devkit configured to load the SOTF content folder. To swap back, just close the devkit, go to C:\Program Files\Epic Games\ARKDevKit\Projects\ShooterGame, rename the symbolic link Content (has a shortcut icon) to Content_SOTF, and finally rename Content_Base to Content like the picture below.
