Hello forums,
I was responding to another poster here on these forums and realized that maybe there should be a quick start guide of sorts for people trying to get into the Ark Dev Kit. The basics are covered elsewhere here in the forums, so I will be focusing on setting up the ADK to allow you to be a little more productive.
The primary thing to remember is that the ADK is a little more than your average computer can handle for major tasks. Getting The Island up and running can be a **** shoot where you aren’t sure if its still loading or long since hung up. I found a quick way to bypass that altogether if you aren’t specifically making a new map.
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(Assuming you have created at least the bare essentials for a mod), you need to ensure that your PrimalGameDataBP is a child of BASE_PrimalGameData_BP. If its not, then double click your PrimalGameDataBP to open it. In the window that opens, go to
File>>Reparent Blueprint
and assign BASE_PrimalGameData_BP as the new parent class. This was a recent change that allows your mod to not overwrite the parent unless something is different and will keep your mod that may only add one weapon from keeping new dinos from spawning or anything new they might add. -
In the default view of the ADK, find the task bar that starts with Save and ends with Steam Upload. It should be located in the top middle of your screen. Click the Settings button, then click on World Settings. A new window will open up, (mine was already docked to the right side of the screen). Scroll down through that window and find
Primal Game Data Override
Click the drop down box next to that line and assign the Primal Game Data that you just reparented as the value here. What we’re doing is telling the ADK that no matter what map we load we want our mod to be loaded as well. -
Open the test map that is included in the ADK. If your ADK doesn’t auto load it when it opens, you can find it in the Content Browser under:
Game>>Maps>>TestMap.
No dinos will spawn on the test map but it works perfectly for things like weapons, structures or item mods.
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Back up in the task bar where you found Settings, find and click on the Play button. This will launch the Ark game on the test map, with your currently assigned mod.
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Once the map loads, (it can take a little while the first time depending on your pc speed), right click anywhere in the viewport where you see your character. This gives the game focus so you can play. Now, a few commands will help you out if you aren’t already familiar with the admin commands.
Hit the TAB button on your keyboard to open the console.
Type each of these things as I type them and hit enter after each one.
addexperience 500000 1 1 true
infinitestats
giveresources
Infinitestats will keep you from getting too hungry ,cold, thirsty, etc too quickly. If you look down and you are already dehydrated or starving you can re-use the command to instantly get rid of those status effects.
Giveresources will put stacks of just about every crafting resource into your inventory. (You can press and hold the o key while dragging your mouse over inventory items to quickly throw away what you don’t need).
You start off with very high encumbrance so you should have no problem carrying that base set of items.
Other console commands that are helpful(items in parentheses are not to be typed):
fly
walk (stop flying)
slomo 5 (speeds up the game clock)
slomo 1 (returns you to normal)
settimeofday 12:00 (in case it starts getting dark, you can make it noon again)
Also, while the console is open, you can use the up and down arrow keys to go back through the things you already typed in case you forget the spelling of some command.
- Once you are testing out your mod, you can Alt-Tab to switch windows and take away focus from the game part of the ADK without stopping the game itself. (the game tells you to use Shift-F1 but the ADK already has F1 assigned to spawn Sloped Metal Roof so it doesn’t work right). This is where the magic happens as you can edit your files and see the changes happen instantly in the game. This will save you insane amounts of time instead of having to Cook your mod, upload it to Steam then get the game running and loaded. I think I had uploaded mine around fifty times before I figured all this out.
Hopefully this will get you into the ADK and prototyping with a lot more efficiency:) Being able to change values on the fly and see the changes sped up my process a lot. If you change anything in the Primal Game Data BP, (like adding a new engram), you may need to stop the game, recompile, save then restart the game before your results will show up. Seems like that one is hit or miss.
Since there are a ton of useful commands, I wanted to post a link to the wiki page on admin commands.
hogs