Why is the game 170 GB in storage?

[Joftus]

I really love this game, but recently the amount of storage needed is getting bigger every month. I keep wanting to download it again only to see it will take up the rest of my hardrive and more than a day to download. Does anyone know why it recquires so much storage?

[Joftus]

Just started the download, it first said 4 days now its 3 hours and 20 mins. So not that bad, still takes a lot of storage

[Dj DNA]

the game is actually 223 GB on my disk so .....

[Joftus]

maybe it has something to do with the expansions, like scorched earth. Or save files

[cfowler7]

Originally posted by Joftus:

maybe it has something to do with the expansions, like scorched earth. Or save files

Or mods

[BortekThePigeon]

U download 50 gigs now but then it repacks itself and takes 215 gigs

[Joftus]

Or mods [/quote]
♥♥♥♥, why didn't I think of that, thats a good one thank you

[Rafael Fuchs]

All those high res textures and huge maps take a toll on storage space.

[Joftus]

I just went and unsubed to half of the mods I subed to (which were like 5) and I dont know if it allready said this before, but the download says its downloading 42 GB.
But the confusing part is its still taking more than 100 GB in storage. Which is fine but im confused

[Auto]

Go to Library, right-mouse click on Ark, select Properties, click on the DLC tab. You will see that included in the download is every single DLC you own. You can uncheck any of the ones you don't play and they will uninstall themselves. Saved quite a bit of space by doing this.

[Joftus]

Originally posted by Rafael Fuchs:

All those high res textures and huge maps take a toll on storage space.

Thats true

[Joftus]

Originally posted by Auto:

Go to Library, right-mouse click on Ark, select Properties, click on the DLC tab. You will see that included in the download is every single DLC you own. You can uncheck any of the ones you don't play and they will uninstall themselves. Saved quite a bit of space by doing this.

Wow i'll try that, thank you :D

[Cataclisto]

There are many reasons...
1. The engine is out of date (2015), they had to add stuff to it to simulate features. Due to the mass amount of custom changes they forced themselves into a spot to where they cant update it.
2. Maps, Each map possibly takes around 4-20gb of space
3. Creatures: Even if you don't own the DLC ark adds the DLC creatures to the base game files, these are more then half of the games current size and are needed for people without dlc to see/use/attack creatures on all maps.
4. Unoptimized files... They could compress some files but since they need to make new builds all the time for every single patch its probably not worth it.

Unrelated issue with number 4: Every major patch either adds or replaces code in existing files (we are still not sure which) anyway this means steam needs to unpack and rebuild existing files which makes these 4gb downloads actually need 20gb of temporary space to unpack/replace. If its a major patch today we might need even more free space just to use as a buffer to unpack these files. Sometimes its bad enough that you can expect the game to need the games current size worth of free space + patch size to unpack the patch. (we saw something close to this with aberration)

[cybercomplex]

263gb for me because of so many mods and mod maps

[lory]

I was told that this game is not optimized well. That is why it takes up so much space on my computer.

[Cataclisto]

Originally posted by Joftus:

Just started the download, it first said 4 days now its 3 hours and 20 mins. So not that bad, still takes a lot of storage

Ark has a major patch in 2 hours at 11am eastern time to add the new free dlc content and several more creatures to the base files. Your going to need to do another download after that download is done.