When does Ark save progress?

[Stretchytall]

I'm not so ashamed in my single player games to terminate the Ark game when I made a bad decision and will lose tames. That being said, when is Ark programmed to save progress? Is it only when you die? Is it whenever a tame dies? I'd like to know when to terminate the game to prevent loss.

[𝔇ave]

you know you can roll back to a previous save right?

[zerassar]

"terminating" the game is asking for a corrupt world file.
It automatically saves on a fixed schedule I think every 15 or 30 minutes by memory, and when you quit the game.

But it automatically keeps backups, as touched on by Dave. Just revert to one of those.

[Schrader]

Just exit to title before you do something risky, and if it goes to ♥♥♥♥, task manager and end the game, and it won't count as a save.

[𝔇ave]

Originally posted by God Himself:

Just exit to title before you do something risky, and if it goes to ♥♥♥♥, task manager and end the game, and it won't count as a save.

force quitting the game could result in corruption. not advised

[zerassar]

Force quitting anything, unless it's the absolute last ditch effort to get out of a freeze, is asking for problems. Astounds me how quick the general public is to task manager things away or force shutdown their PC's.

Suppose it keeps the IT helpdesk in the job dealing with the fallout eh ;-)

[Xargock]

So, as some folks have mentioned - force quitting Ark may cause problems - but none of these problems can't be fixed. All you have to do is periodically validate your files. (Which, admittedly, does take a while, as Ark is ridiculous in the way it handles downloads/updates. Even with an SSD, it takes a while.) I run my PC as a dedicated server for some friends, and every now and then something bad happens and they ask me to shut it down, and I'm happy to do it for them and it's always fine.

You can also maintain some backup saves, but given the time-consuming nature of Ark, it's pretty nice to only roll back 15-30 minutes of effort. Though, sometimes the autosave took place just seconds after the "bad thing," and they just need to deal with it. Or, they were in the middle of combat, and by the time the server comes up and they get back into it, they've been eaten. So it is kind of a mixed bag for online play, but the latter bit doesn't happen in single player.

[necaradan666]

Forcing single player to shutdown is one thing, a dumb thing to do imo, but still...

It should be totally unnecessary for a home dedicated server.. don't you have backups running? Personally I'm sitting on a couple months of auto-backups saved every 30 minutes by ASM.
Which is a good thing since I just discovered my entire SS base had disappeared on The Island, apart from Homestead pieces. I had to roll back about 2 days before it reappeared, odd since nothing changed between now and then, hadn't played on the server in a couple weeks, there was no corruption the map still worked fine and all my other servers which are set up exactly the same didn't present any issues.

[Gran]

Lets speak about the Elephant in the Room. It's a singleplayer game, use the darn console commands (God Mode / Infinite stats / Enemy invisible) instead of force quitting the game.
source: https://ark.gamepedia.com/Console_Commands

Else use this Mod to recover Dinos that died instead the force quit.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1609138312

[necaradan666]

^^ Combine that with the Death Recovery mod to get your gear back and dying would basically have no effect.

[NesputanaMumia123]

You can type saveworld in console when you want to save manually

[Xargock]

@necaradan666 It honestly takes more time and effort to shut down the server normally and then change the settings to reload a specific backup than it does to just force quit and have it automatically restart with the most recent save. So... yes, it could be done that way, but I see that as just adding extra unnecessary steps and taking extra time.

[necaradan666]

More time and effort? It takes me a couple of clicks to restore a backup and be back in game. But I'm sure the time saved is worth it for the risks involved in forcing an ongoing task to end.. lol.

[D#]

The game only saves during the interval set in one of the ini files. The default is every 15 min, I have personally changed mine to every 10. The game also saves every time you quit.

[Stretchytall]

Originally posted by 𝔇ave:

you know you can roll back to a previous save right?

I wasn't aware of this. Your comment prompted me to learn about changing the save file names to cause the game to load an earlier save. Is there anything else I should know about managing rollbacks?