ARK Survival Evolved – Basic Breeding Guide

Erste Schritte

Also, breeding. It’s a good way to obtain loot. It can get you the best stats for your dinos. And it can make reproducing rare creatures much easier. But how do you accomplish it?

You follow these steps for gestation breeding:

1. Obtain a male and female of the same breedable species.

2. Ensure the creatures are in close enough proximity to mate.

3. Open the radial wheel on one of the creatures, and advance to „Verhalten“.

4. Wählen „Enable Mating“ on the Behaviors radial menu. This will allow the creature to mate with another of the same species that also have mating enabled. If you completed the enabling correctly, hovering over the creature should display the sentence, „Ready to Mate“. It will be just beneath the creature’s stats.

5. Wiederholen Sie die Schritte 3-4 for the other member of the pair.

6. If correct steps have been taken, an icon showing a bundle of flying hearts will appear above their nametags. This indicates that they are mating.

7. Once mating finishes, the female will have a „Gestating“ meter where, zum Beispiel, torpor and taming progress would display for wild creatures. It will have a timer.

8. Once the Gestating timer finishes, the baby will spawn, unclaimed, at the female’s rear. Claim it as soon as possible-your tames think it is an enemy, and it starves quick.

9. Raise the baby until adulthood-feed it, cuddle it, don’t accidentally kill it. Oder, kill it intentionally because you want its drops. It depends on the species which option is better.

The steps for incubation breeding are somewhat different:

1. Obtain a male and female of the same breedable species. Wieder.

2. Ensure the creatures are in close enough proximity to mate. Offensichtlich.

3. Open the radial wheel on one of the creatures, and advance to „Verhalten“. Can you tell they’re mostly the same yet?

4. Wählen „Enable Mating“ on the Behaviors radial menu.

5. Wiederholen Sie die Schritte 3-4 for the other member of the pair.

6. They will begin mating, wait until it ends. It starts changing a lot after this.

7. Once mating finishes, unlike gestation breeding, an egg will appear immediately at the female’s rear (or that of both dinos, see next section). The egg will have two stats-„Egg Health“, Und „Egg Incubation“. Health is a percent, Incubation is a timer and a percent.

8. Raise the egg by keeping it at ideal temperature and protecting it from the elements.

9. Once the incubation timer reaches 0% of its max, the egg will hatch if it is on the ground. If it is in a Genesis egg incubator, it must be manually hatched-a blessing and a curse, as it helps remembering to claim it but the egg itself might be forgotten.

10. Raise or kill the baby in much the same concept as the gestation breeding.

Now that you know how to accomplish basic breeding, I will explain what creatures have more complex mechanics.

Complex Mechanics for Complex (and sometimes not complex) Spezies

Some creatures have features that make breeding their kind easier, Schwerer, more interesting, or in some cases sillier. To specify…

-Maewings do not have genders. When bred, BOTH parents lay eggs. If you like, you could breed those two children for two more Maewings….then breed those…and it never ends. Zusamenfassend, so long as one can keep at least two Maewings alive, you basically have unlimited Maewings.

-Baby Wyverns only eat a special feed called Wyvern Milk. This milk is acquired by rendering a wild female Wyvern of any non-Crystal species unconscious with the use of tranquilizers. Tamed Female Wyverns have no milk, yet Wyvern infants require milk regardless of their eggs‘ source-breeding or wild. daher, your days of visiting the wyvern trench are not over even if you get a male and female of the same Wyvern species.

-Crystal Wyvern young, Jedoch, eat everyday meat alongside the crystals that make up the majority of their kind’s wild diet. They are capable of consuming the same foods as the adults of their species. Despite the presence of Primal Crystals in the inventory of unconscious wild Crystal Wyvern adults, those items are used only as a more powerful taming food for wild adult Crystal Wyverns. They are NOT required to feed babies, but CAN still be used, as tame Crystal Wyverns can ingest them as well.

-Magmasaur babies only eat Sulfur. No exceptions. The adults can also eat Stone, Jedoch.

-Desmodus children have about as much dietary variety as their parents. Mit anderen Worten, they only eat the bane of singleplayer fans-Blood Packs. Gott sei Dank, tamed adult Desmodus specimens extract Blood Packs from those hit with their melee attacks, making their children easier to feed then they were during the taming process.

-Deinonychus babies eat a LOT. I mean A LOT. They cleave through food supplies like Dodorexes cleave through bases. Prepare accordingly.

-Tek creatures, such as Tek Raptors, Voidwyrms, usw. really shouldn’t be breedable. Yet they are. Whose idea was it to install functioning reproductive systems on robots…?

Good Species to Farm

Some species have loot that makes breeding and slaughtering them useful. This may include resources, taming food, or honestly just pretty much anything.

-Tek creatures drop electrical components, Altmetall, Öl, and element dust. All four are valuable. Voidwyrms also drop Gasoline and Mutagen, which is very nice.

-Ovis drop raw mutton, which is powerful taming food despite spoiling quick. It is also very nutritious when cooked. Das, alongside their pelt and „Slaughter“ option on their „Optionen“ radial wheel, makes them near-perfect farm animals.

-Kariku drop Organic Polymer, which will inevitably be needed.

Do note that slaughtering creatures is rather….complicated when Friendly Fire is off. The only exception is Ovis, due to the previously-stated built-in Slaughter button.

Pros and Cons of Gestation Breeding

Vorteile

-Do not rely on temperature for the baby to exist.

-Are not vulnerable to the baby being stolen by Icthyornis and Pegomastax when held in inventory…because they CAN’T be held in inventory.

-Baby exists immediately, allowing for the baby to be intentionally born near outdoor feeding troughs or Maewings without needing to give it its own food or lead it to the trough/Maewing.

-Typically have less restrictions on breeding and baby diet than egg-layers.

Nachteile

-Baby existing immediately may cause accidental starvation.

-Cannot be used with Genesis egg incubators whatsoever, meaning there is no way to choose when the baby will be born.

-Harder to choose birth location as the mother will need to fit into said location.

-Typically are of less powerful species than egg-layers.

Pros and Cons of Incubation Breeding

Vorteile

-Can be used with Genesis egg incubator, allowing more time to prepare for the child due to the manual hatching of said incubator.

-Are typically of more powerful species than gestation-using species.

-Easier to choose where the egg hatches, as even the largest of eggs are very small and carryable in the inventory.

-Eggs can be eaten for nutrition in a pinch.

Nachteile

-Require to egg to be at a desirable temperature, making it harder for the child to survive the childhood due to the egg being able to die.

-Eggs might be accidentally eaten. Seien Sie vorsichtig.

-Small size of eggs means they might be lost or forgotten.

– Might be stolen by wild Icthyornis or Pegomastax when carried in inventory.

Egg Temperature Techniques

There is a very important mechanic with eggs-if they are too hot or cold, their Egg Health will decrease until they „sterben“ (decompose). Jedoch, there are ways to ensure your egg survives to become a baby without the high-end Egg Incubator, which makes raising eggs easy due to temperature controls.

-Dimetrodon can affect temperature to aid in raising eggs. Jedoch, they are an uncommon find and usually appear very close to dangerous creatures, such as the Titanoboa, Sarcosuchus, and Kaprosuchus.

-Keep the egg indoors. Open air doesn’t insulate very well.

-Use campfires. They increase the temperature around them, and eggs will almost always be too cold before they are too hot.

-Build a dedicated egg-raising structure if you can spare the resources. Design it to fit plenty of campfires, breeding-helper dinos, and feeding troughs if Maewings have not been acquired, and ensure the material is no worse than stone. If the structure sheltering the egg is destroyed, chances are temperature damage will cause the egg to be destroyed right along with it.

Abschluss

While many players probably already know all this and likely more, I’m sure there’s someone out there who needs the information. And that someone needs it a lot-Breeding is one of the best ways to acquire powerful dinos or farm resources. For steam guides exist for the many AND the few, and therefore it matters not how many people already know the information, so long as at least one person doesn’t. Whether you came here just because you’re bored, or because you actually needed the information, thank you for checking out this guide, even if you didn’t really read it.

In case you are familiar with my previous guide on a different game, you may notice major differences. This guide is in a format akin to a step-by-step manual or a collection of lists, rather than the natural format of my first guide. This is for several reasons-one, ARK breeding is easier to portray in such a format, zwei, it is tailored toward the very basics of the concept rather than a large collection of complex information, and three, the general mood I was in while writing it made lists and steps easier than large paragraphs like the other guide (and apparently the end of this one).

Wieder, whether you have encountered my other guide or not, thank you for coming this far, or simply skipping through. It matters not. While there are countless intricacies of breeding that I did not discuss, such as stat inheritance and mutations, it may make it easier to understand for beginners.

One last time, Danke, and happy breeding!