Why the ♥♥♥♥ is Ark 400 gb

[Vanimur]

This is ridiculous, for the longest time I had pretty much no space on one of my drives. I go through my steam library thinking of stuff I could get rid of and remembered I had ark installed, and I knew that it was like 120 gb or so, so I picked it. Then I checked to see the space and it was 433 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gb. What the hell

[🦊 Hermit]

That's if you have all DLCs installed. You can go into your Steam menu and delete maps you are not currently playing on, just install the ones you specifically want, to reduce the overhead a great deal.

[Vanimur]

Originally posted by 🦊 Hermit:

That's if you have all DLCs installed. You can go into your Steam menu and delete maps you are not currently playing on, just install the ones you specifically want, to reduce the overhead a great deal.

I recognize that but still, why the ♥♥♥♥ is it so unoptimized. No other game I know of is that god awful with managing the storage

[william_es]

Every DLC is pretty much a duplicate of a bunch of the same assets. Just the way the game is made. No way to fix it, short of a time machine. Go back to the past, tell their developers to come up with a better system for managing assets. Let me know how that works out.

[Evono]

Use this tool https://github.com/Freaky/Compactor
Compact it with Express8k for around 40-60% reduction in size.
Xpress16k will reduce it 50-70% ( need a CPU from the last 4 or 6years )
its based on win11 and win10 features
Wont obviously work on win7.
No quality loss , and faster loading no performance Loss.
no Anti cheat issues because its a Official OS feature based on Windows Compact.exe
My ark is only 48% of the Original size with that tool.
https://i.imgur.com/8ikCoYh.png

Everytime ark patches the changed files need to be Recompressed.

ark is for some reason just not compressed at all like most other games are.

[DarkFaceGlow]

If I had a nickel….

[skyguard]

You be rich

[₵ⱤɄ₵ł₣łł]

filthy... my install is...150gb

[Wolfie]

uninstall the DLC maps you aren't playing on, it will slim it down to around 100, which is normal for large games, GTAV, shadows of war, vermintide and destiny are a few games with around 100, it's a large game, big maps, lots of dinos, lots of mechanics, high res textures with every color in every color region, various LOD models for all those dinos, it adds up

[Crazy Work]

apparently its our fault and we shouldn't dl all maps and dlc....

[Kazaanh]

Lots of DLC maps with creatures, sounds and free maps too. And multiple post launch updates.

All of these are quite expansive

[Inkslinger98]

Mine shows 775 GB and I don't have but a few DLC maps. Don't even own Genisis.

[Inkslinger98]

Bad thing is most of that space is just allocated for the maps even though they aren't istalled.

[🦊 Hermit]

If you're getting almost 800GB then something is definitely wrong. Ark should only be a maximum of 400ish with all maps and DLC installed.

And I'm afraid you're a little mistaken about the game preallocating space for things which aren't installed - I only have a handful of maps installed, and my files are only around 250GB. If the game did preallocate then everybody's game directory would be 400GB across the board, with no lower value at all.

How many mods do you have? Mods can bloat up the size considerably, especially large ones like map mods or total overhauls. And unlike DLCs, mods do not uninstall themselves when you unsub from them in the Workshop, so their files stay on your computer. Perhaps you have a lot of old mod files stored which you no longer use? Deleting those could free up a lot of space.