The thousanth post about the file size...

[SweatySweatySweaty]

I've read through a ton, but I can't find a good answer. My "skinny" download 121 gigs, no mods or dlc at all. With all DLC it required almost 170. What's with the people saying it's 50 gigs on their computers? How is that possible?

On another note, When I try to download the beta patch for S+, it tells me it's 9g. When I download it, it takes up about 60g of space. What the ♥♥♥♥?

Any solutions?
Thanks

[KitsuneShiro]

As you update the game it gets bigger and bigger cause the update process isn't efficient. You occasionally have to do complete reinstall to shrink it back down.

Harddrives, even SSDs, are cheap.

[Elgar]

Vanilla game's size without DLCs or mods used to be 66 GB a few months ago. Now it's around 98 GB.

Originally posted by KitsuneShiro:

As you update the game it gets bigger and bigger cause the update process isn't efficient. You occasionally have to do complete reinstall to shrink it back down.

My personal experience is that you never need to reinstall the game. After you unsubscribe a mod, delete manually its leftovers in the ARK mods subfolder. Also, verify integrity of files after each game's patch or any mod's update. That's all.

[SweatySweatySweaty]

Originally posted by KitsuneShiro:

As you update the game it gets bigger and bigger cause the update process isn't efficient. You occasionally have to do complete reinstall to shrink it back down.

Thanks for responding to my rambling late night rage post.
This is my first install of it after a factory reset of my computer, so theres no old versions hiding out.
I'm going to be getting a new HDD soon, but I literally cant play the game right now on a 200g SSD with nothing else on it.

[Elgar]

Originally posted by SweatySweatySweaty:

This is my first install of it after a factory reset of my computer, so theres no old versions hiding out.
I'm going to be getting a new HDD soon, but I literally cant play the game right now on a 200g SSD with nothing else on it.

It can't be 121 GB then. Like I wrote in my post it should be a little less than 100 GB. Why wouldn't it run on a 200 GB SSD ? If you play a DLC just check the one you currently play, not the other ones.

[Gran]

Originally posted by Elgar:

Originally posted by SweatySweatySweaty:

This is my first install of it after a factory reset of my computer, so theres no old versions hiding out.
I'm going to be getting a new HDD soon, but I literally cant play the game right now on a 200g SSD with nothing else on it.

It can't be 121 GB then. Like I wrote in my post it should be a little less than 100 GB. Why wouldn't it run on a 200 GB SSD ? If you play a DLC just check the one you currently play, not the other ones.

Cause most probably the Steam Main Folder is also there that combined with how patches are applied to ARK means the space it needs is at least doubled.

[Loaded Glove]

125gb folder size here. 0 mods, never even tried any.

[Elgar]

Originally posted by Loaded Glove:

125gb folder size here. 0 mods, never even tried any.

Which DLCs are activated ?

[garth033]

Originally posted by Elgar:

Originally posted by Loaded Glove:

125gb folder size here. 0 mods, never even tried any.

Which DLCs are activated ?

Regardless of what you have "active", Ark will download the content of all supported dlc to your system.

This is done to avoid splitting the player base and allow those with access to the dlc maps to bring items to other maps.

[Elgar]

Originally posted by garth033:

Regardless of what you have "active", Ark will download the content of all supported dlc to your system.

This is done to avoid splitting the player base and allow those with access to the dlc maps to bring items to other maps.

I know perfectly that. And what you say is absolutely true, but be aware that you'll still gain space if you deactivate the DLCs you don't currently use. Right click ARK in Steam library -> Properties -> DLC tab. Then verify integrity of files.

I maintain, vanilla ARK's size without any DLC activated is 99 GB. Check by yourself, you'll see. Of course it's huge and hardware requirements on the store page are outdated, we all agree on that. :)

[SweatySweatySweaty]

Okay so I deleted a repetitive seekfreecontent folder (...Steam\steamapps\common\ARK\ShooterGame\SeekFreeContent) and that took the size down from 204 gigs to about 140 gigs. That's with no mods and only Ragnorak DLC installed. I wouldn't call it fixed, but that helped a ton. I recomend everyone delete that trash folder.

[Elgar]

Originally posted by SweatySweatySweaty:

Okay so I deleted a repetitive seekfreecontent folder (...Steam\steamapps\common\ARK\ShooterGame\SeekFreeContent) and that took the size down from 204 gigs to about 140 gigs. That's with no mods and only Ragnorak DLC installed. I wouldn't call it fixed, but that helped a ton. I recomend everyone delete that trash folder.

Don't forget to verify integrity of files after deleting files in ARK's folder. If they were not needed, Steam will not download them again. Should the opposite occur, that's because the game needs them.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2037-QEUH-3335

[Ancient]

Originally posted by SweatySweatySweaty:

Okay so I deleted a repetitive seekfreecontent folder (...Steam\steamapps\common\ARK\ShooterGame\SeekFreeContent) and that took the size down from 204 gigs to about 140 gigs. That's with no mods and only Ragnorak DLC installed. I wouldn't call it fixed, but that helped a ton. I recomend everyone delete that trash folder.

..\ARK\ShooterGame\SeekFreeContent\ is required to run the game. That is the cooked assets the game loads, optimized for faster asset streaming while in-game (reduces pop-in lags, etc.) compared to the compressed, base .uasset files found in the \Content\ folder.

In the past, deleting the folder was causing issues for people:
https://www.reddit.com/r/playark/comments/6ki79i/dont_delete_seekfreecontent_folder_all_willy_nilly/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/2132869574269681512/

The game was since updated to use dynamic content cooking. Now the game will actually just rebuild SeekFreeContent on it's own rather than crashing when it attempts to access something there like it used to.

This is the dynamic 'Content Cooking' feature in the UE4 engine. Content originally exists in big, compressed game files, but after accessing and decompressing them while you're playing the game, it puts individual models/textures/etc in the SeekFreeContent folder so it doesn't have to search and decompress them again.

TL;DR
You can't permanently delete the folder. The game will just keep remaking it and repeatedly deleting it manually before each launch is just going to cost you a ton of additional write cycles on your SSD.

[ShiveringSun]

I installed in late Dec 2018 and it came to 101GB. After installing ONLY Ragnorak it was 127GB. With a few light mods on top of that including S+ it's 128GB right now. Looking to buy the dlcs after deciding what to delete... lol

Edit: OMG... what is this "SeekFreeContent" folder?? It's 62 GB! Thanks for the explaination Ancient! :)

[SweatySweatySweaty]

Originally posted by ShiveringSun:

I installed in late Dec 2018 and it came to 101GB. After installing ONLY Ragnorak it was 127GB. With a few light mods on top of that including S+ it's 128GB right now. Looking to buy the dlcs after deciding what to delete... lol

Good luck with the room making! I highly recomend The Center

[Jewels]

Check out CompactGUI: https://github.com/ImminentFate/CompactGUI

It's a user interface for the built-in windows file compression algorithm. You could theoretically cut the footprint in half with this.