ARK Ascended server ini settings

ARK: Survival Ascended reads its rules from two files in ShooterGame/Saved/Config/WindowsServer/. GameUserSettings.ini holds server-wide settings under [ServerSettings] - passwords, difficulty, harvest and taming rates, decay, structure limits. Game.ini holds the rules the game mode reads under [/script/shootergame.shootergamemode] - breeding and imprinting, per-level stat multipliers, experience sources, engram and level overrides. Put a key in the wrong file or the wrong section and it is silently ignored. Edit only while the server is stopped, because a clean shutdown writes GameUserSettings.ini back to disk. That is most of the job; the rest of this post is which keys matter, which way each one turns, and what they cost.

If you have not got a server running yet, start with the ARK: Survival Ascended setup guide, which covers the install, launch line, ports and the dozen settings everybody changes on day one. This post assumes the server starts and goes deeper into the two files.

Which file a setting belongs in#

The split is historical rather than logical, and it trips people up because the names do not tell you where a key lives. A rough rule that holds for almost everything:

• `GameUserSettings.ini`, `[ServerSettings]`: anything an official server would show in its server list or that the admin might change on a live server. Rates that apply globally (harvest, taming, XP), damage and resistance multipliers, food and water drain, decay timers, PvE and PvP switches, structure caps, the admin and join passwords, RCON.
• `Game.ini`, `[/script/shootergame.shootergamemode]`: rules attached to the game mode class. Breeding, maturation, imprinting, per-level stat gains for players and creatures, separate XP sources, crop and spoil timers, tribe and alliance limits, engram overrides, level caps and per-item or per-creature arrays.

There is one escape hatch. Any key from [ServerSettings] can also be passed on the launch line as a ?Key=Value query argument, and the launch line wins over the file. That is useful on a panel where the launch line is built from fields, and confusing when someone has set ?XPMultiplier=2 on the Startup tab and someone else keeps editing the ini wondering why nothing changes. Pick one place per setting and stick to it. Game.ini keys cannot be passed that way.

TheIsland_WP?listen?SessionName=Longship?XPMultiplier=2.0?TamingSpeedMultiplier=3.0 -log

The other rule worth repeating: the server writes GameUserSettings.ini on a clean shutdown with whatever it had in memory. Editing it while the server is up and then pressing Stop throws your edits away. Game.ini is not rewritten the same way, but changes to it only take effect on the next start, so the safe habit for both is the same: stop, edit, start.

Rates in GameUserSettings.ini#

These are the multipliers players ask about in the first ten minutes. All default to 1.0 unless noted, and all live under [ServerSettings].

A few interactions are worth knowing before you multiply everything by five.

HarvestHealthMultiplier and HarvestAmountMultiplier both raise the yield of a node, in different ways. Raising the amount gives more per hit; raising the health gives more hits before the node is gone. Doubling both roughly quadruples what one rock gives you, which is usually more than intended. Pick one.

TamingSpeedMultiplier changes how much taming progress each piece of food gives, which shortens the tame without changing how long the creature stays knocked out. At high values the bottleneck becomes torpor and narcotics, not food. Pairing a high taming rate with a lower DinoCharacterFoodDrainMultiplier makes tamed creatures cheap to keep, which in turn means more of them, which is the expensive part of an ARK server.

ItemStackSizeMultiplier is one of the few quality-of-life settings that genuinely helps a server's health: fewer item stacks means fewer objects in boxes. It has been reliable on Ascended, but it has had exceptions over time (items with fixed stack sizes, such as some consumables), so test on the items your players care about.

DayTimeSpeedScale and NightTimeSpeedScale multiply the speed of each half of the day, so NightTimeSpeedScale=2.0 makes nights last half as long. They stack with DayCycleSpeedScale, which scales both. Shortening nights is the single most common request on a PvE server and costs nothing.

Difficulty, damage and survival rules#

Difficulty on ARK is not a difficulty in the usual sense. It sets the maximum level of wild creatures, and through that, loot quality from drops and crates.

The wild level cap is OverrideOfficialDifficulty multiplied by 30, which is where the 150 and 180 figures come from. Set DifficultyOffset=1.0 so you actually reach the cap, then run cheat DestroyWildDinos once so the map repopulates at the new levels. Without that last step the change only applies to creatures that spawn from now on, and you will spend a week wondering why the change did nothing.

Resistance multipliers run the opposite way to damage multipliers. PlayerResistanceMultiplier=0.5 means players take half damage. It is easy to set StructureResistanceMultiplier=2.0 thinking it makes buildings stronger; it makes them take twice the damage.

Rules that change how the server plays rather than how hard it is:

• ServerPVE=True turns off player-versus-player damage. On a PvE server, also look at AllowFlyerCarryPvE (picking up other players' creatures) and AllowCaveBuildingPvE.
• ServerHardcore=True resets a character to level one on death.
• PreventOfflinePvP=True with PreventOfflinePvPInterval (seconds) protects a tribe's structures once everybody in it has been offline for that long. It is the main tool for making a small PvP server bearable for people with jobs.
• ShowMapPlayerLocation=True puts your own position on the map, which most PvE groups want.
• AllowThirdPersonPlayer and ServerCrosshair are what they say.
• DisableStructureDecayPvE=True stops PvE structures from decaying at all; PvEStructureDecayPeriodMultiplier stretches the timer instead of removing it.

Decay deserves a decision rather than a default. On a private server for friends, turn it off: nobody wants to come back from a fortnight away to find the base claimable. On a public server, decay is your garbage collector. A base built by somebody who played one weekend is still a few thousand structures the server holds in memory and writes to disk on every save. AutoDestroyOldStructuresMultiplier and the dino decay switches (DisableDinoDecayPvE, PvPDinoDecay, AutoDestroyDecayedDinos) exist for the same reason.

Structure and tame limits#

These are the settings that decide how big your save gets, and they matter more than any rate.

MaxTamedDinos is the global ceiling, and the server refuses new tames once it is reached. On a server with a handful of players it never comes into play. What does come into play is one breeder with a hundred and fifty creatures in a pen, which is legal under every default. MaxPersonalTamedDinos set to something like 300 per tribe puts a predictable limit on that without hurting normal play, and it is far kinder than discovering the problem when saves start taking a minute.

Raising TheMaxStructuresInRange lets people build bigger single bases. That is fine on a server with spare memory and a terrible idea on one that is already near its limit. Each structure is an object on the server, and a mega-base is tens of thousands of them. The ARK memory sizing guide works through what that looks like in gigabytes.

Breeding and imprinting in Game.ini#

This is where most of Game.ini is spent, because official breeding times are measured in real days. All of these go under [/script/shootergame.shootergamemode].

[/script/shootergame.shootergamemode]MatingIntervalMultiplier=0.25MatingSpeedMultiplier=2.0EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=10.0BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier=10.0BabyFoodConsumptionSpeedMultiplier=0.5BabyCuddleIntervalMultiplier=0.1BabyCuddleGracePeriodMultiplier=2.0BabyImprintAmountMultiplier=1.0BabyImprintingStatScaleMultiplier=1.0LayEggIntervalMultiplier=0.5

What each of them does, and the direction it runs:

• MatingIntervalMultiplier - cooldown before a female can mate again. Lower is faster. 0.25 turns an official cooldown of up to two days into roughly half a day.
• MatingSpeedMultiplier - how quickly the mating bar fills while the pair stands together. Higher is faster.
• EggHatchSpeedMultiplier - egg incubation. Higher is faster. Also covers gestation for mammals.
• BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier - the growth from baby to adult. Higher is faster. This is the setting that decides whether breeding a large creature is an evening or a week.
• BabyFoodConsumptionSpeedMultiplier - how much a baby eats. Lower makes raising easier.
• BabyCuddleIntervalMultiplier - time between imprint requests. Lower means more frequent requests.
• BabyCuddleGracePeriodMultiplier - how long a request waits before imprint quality starts dropping.
• BabyImprintAmountMultiplier - imprint percentage per cuddle.
• BabyImprintingStatScaleMultiplier - how much a full imprint boosts stats. 0 disables the imprint stat bonus entirely.
• LayEggIntervalMultiplier - how often unfertilised eggs drop. Lower is more often, which matters for kibble.

The interaction people get wrong is maturation against imprinting. Imprint requests come at intervals scaled to the creature's total maturation time, and the number of requests in a full growth is roughly fixed for a given species. Speed maturation up by ten without touching the cuddle interval, and a large creature may finish growing before it has asked for many cuddles, which caps the imprint you can reach. The fix is to lower BabyCuddleIntervalMultiplier roughly in step with the maturation speed-up, and to raise BabyImprintAmountMultiplier if you want full imprints to stay reachable. Test with one fast-maturing and one slow-maturing species before announcing the rates, because the numbers that work for a raptor do not necessarily work for a giganotosaurus.

AllowAnyoneBabyImprintCuddle=True in GameUserSettings.ini (not Game.ini) lets any tribe member answer a cuddle, not only the person who claimed the baby. Most groups want it.

Stat multipliers for players and creatures#

The per-level stat arrays decide how much each level-up adds. They take an index in brackets.

The arrays that exist:

• PerLevelStatsMultiplier_Player[i] - points a player gains per level spent on a stat.
• PerLevelStatsMultiplier_DinoWild[i] - how wild creatures' levels distribute into stats.
• PerLevelStatsMultiplier_DinoTamed[i] - points per level spent on a tamed creature.
• PerLevelStatsMultiplier_DinoTamed_Add[i] - the flat bonus a creature gets from taming.
• PerLevelStatsMultiplier_DinoTamed_Affinity[i] - the percentage bonus from taming effectiveness.

PerLevelStatsMultiplier_Player[7]=2.0PerLevelStatsMultiplier_DinoTamed[7]=2.0PerLevelStatsMultiplier_DinoTamed[0]=1.5PerLevelStatsMultiplier_DinoTamed[8]=1.2

Weight is the safe one to raise for both players and tames: it reduces trips without changing who wins a fight. Health and melee on tames change the balance of every boss fight and every PvP encounter, so raise them carefully and in small steps. Speed is the one to leave alone; the default speed levelling rules have changed between ARK releases and depend on bAllowSpeedLeveling and bAllowFlyerSpeedLeveling, and raising speed multipliers produces creatures that outrun the server's ability to stream terrain to the client.

Experience, levels and engrams#

XPMultiplier scales everything. Game.ini lets you scale the sources separately: KillXPMultiplier, HarvestXPMultiplier, CraftXPMultiplier, GenericXPMultiplier, SpecialXPMultiplier and ExplorerNoteXPMultiplier. The common use is to make crafting less dominant - on many servers people level by crafting thousands of cheap items, and CraftXPMultiplier=0.5 pushes them back out into the world.

Level caps and engram points are arrays as well, and they are where most broken Game.ini files come from:

• LevelExperienceRampOverrides sets the XP required for each player level and, with it, the maximum level.
• OverridePlayerLevelEngramPoints gives the engram points for each level, one line per level, in order.
• OverrideMaxExperiencePointsPlayer and OverrideMaxExperiencePointsDino cap total XP; they must agree with the ramp or the levels above the cap are unreachable.
• bAllowUnlimitedRespecs=True lets players reset their stats with a Mindwipe Tonic as often as they like.
• bOnlyAllowSpecifiedEngrams with OverrideNamedEngramEntries lock or unlock specific engrams; useful for a primitive-only server.

Writing a level ramp by hand is tedious and error prone. Use a generator you trust, check that the number of OverridePlayerLevelEngramPoints lines matches the number of levels, and keep a copy of the working file before every change. If the ramp is malformed, the server tends to fall back to defaults for the whole override without saying so.

Crops, spoiling and the rest of Game.ini#

A handful of other Game.ini keys are worth a minute:

Two of these affect performance rather than gameplay. GlobalItemDecompositionTimeMultiplier and GlobalCorpseDecompositionTimeMultiplier keep objects in the world longer. On a busy server, leaving them high means more loose objects lying around for the server to track; there is no benefit to raising them beyond making death recovery more forgiving.

A worked example: a relaxed PvE server for eight friends#

A configuration that a small group can live with for a long season, with the reasoning attached.

[ServerSettings]ServerPVE=TrueDifficultyOffset=1.0OverrideOfficialDifficulty=5.0XPMultiplier=2.0TamingSpeedMultiplier=4.0HarvestAmountMultiplier=2.0ItemStackSizeMultiplier=5.0NightTimeSpeedScale=2.0PlayerCharacterFoodDrainMultiplier=0.75PlayerCharacterWaterDrainMultiplier=0.75DisableStructureDecayPvE=TrueAllowAnyoneBabyImprintCuddle=TrueShowMapPlayerLocation=TrueAllowFlyerCarryPvE=TrueMaxPersonalTamedDinos=300AutoSavePeriodMinutes=15

[/script/shootergame.shootergamemode]MatingIntervalMultiplier=0.2EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=8.0BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier=8.0BabyCuddleIntervalMultiplier=0.125BabyImprintAmountMultiplier=1.0CropGrowthSpeedMultiplier=3.0GlobalSpoilingTimeMultiplier=2.0PerLevelStatsMultiplier_Player[7]=2.0PerLevelStatsMultiplier_DinoTamed[7]=2.0bAllowUnlimitedRespecs=trueMaxNumberOfPlayersInTribe=8

The reasoning: official wild levels so the game still has a goal; double XP and harvest because people have jobs; fast taming because waiting at a knocked-out creature for an hour is not anyone's favourite part; no decay because it is a friends' server; breeding at roughly eight times official with the cuddle interval cut by the same factor so imprints stay reachable; extra weight because trips are the tedious part. The per-tribe tame cap is the one line aimed at the server rather than the players. Nobody notices it until somebody decides to breed a hundred creatures, and then it saves the server.

On RE:NODE you edit both files with the in-browser file manager or over SFTP while the server is stopped, and the launch arguments are fields on the Startup tab. Take a backup before changing breeding or stat settings - a backup slot comes with every plan, and restoring is one button - so a rate experiment that goes wrong is a rollback rather than a wipe. ARK has no catalogue line of its own, so check the game server plans for what is currently offered.

Troubleshooting settings that do not apply#

Changes revert after a restart. You edited GameUserSettings.ini while the server was running. Stop the server, make the edit again, start it.

A breeding setting has no effect. It is in GameUserSettings.ini instead of Game.ini, or the section header in Game.ini is wrong. The header is [/script/shootergame.shootergamemode], case-insensitive but spelled exactly.

Wild creatures are still low level. DifficultyOffset is below 1.0, or you did not run DestroyWildDinos after the change.

The launch line and the ini disagree. The launch line wins. Look at the Startup tab or your start script for a ?Key= you forgot about.

Players cannot level past a certain point. A level ramp override with too few entries, or an OverrideMaxExperiencePointsPlayer below what the ramp needs.

A setting from an old Evolved guide does nothing. Some keys behave differently on Ascended or were never carried over. Search the Ascended server's own default files or a current list before assuming the server is broken. When a mod also changes the same value, the mod usually wins - see ARK mods from CurseForge on a server.

FAQ#

Do I need to restart the server after changing Game.ini?

Yes. Game.ini is read at startup. Stop the server cleanly, edit, and start it again; there is no reload command for it.

Why does my ARK server ignore my GameUserSettings.ini edits?

Almost always because the file was edited while the server was running, and the clean shutdown wrote the in-memory values over yours. The other common cause is a launch-line ?Key=Value that overrides the file.

What breeding multipliers are sensible for a small group?

Between five and ten times official for hatching and maturation, with BabyCuddleIntervalMultiplier reduced by about the same factor so full imprints remain possible. Above that, breeding stops being a project and turns into a production line.

Is there a setting for a maximum number of creatures per player?

Per tribe, yes: MaxPersonalTamedDinos. A solo player is a tribe of one, so it works as a per-player cap on a server where most people play alone.

Can I set different rates on different maps in a cluster?

Yes. Each server in a cluster has its own config files. Players will notice and move their breeding to the fastest map, so most clusters keep rates identical - see ARK clusters and cross-server transfers.

Does raising stack size break anything?

Rarely. Some items keep fixed stack sizes regardless, and stack-size mods may override it. It reduces object counts in storage, which is a small win for the server.