What are the best settings for solo?

[DreamSword Souty]

thanks in advance!

[Majormother]

lots on Youtube for solo settings.

[william_es]

That's highly personal.

What one person considers necessary, another person might consider cheating or making the game way too easy..

Overall, the biggest help in solo/singleplayer would be adding helpful mods. Structures plus or some variant I would consider necessary in this game. That mod was used so frequently by so many players that many of it's features were added to the base game. But not ALL of them. There are a lot of things you can build in structures plus that help automate some tedious parts of the gameplay. There are structures for picking up unfertilized eggs and other resources dropped by creatures, another feeds young babies and imprints them, gather crops and stores them, collect dung and moves it to dung beetles (which turn it into oil and fertilizer), and other very very very useful things.

And the other big issue in solo/singleplayer is that you won't have enough engram points to learn all the things you need to unlock. On normal settings, you will reach a point where you are constantly out of engram points, and can't even unlock things you were eligible to learn 20 levels ago.

The game was designed around large groups of players, with different players specializing (one guy knows all weapons, another learned all the saddles, etc). It's a requirement to know many other engrams in order to keep unlocking new ones. Armors unlock in sequence: you can't learn one level of armor unless you already know the level below... and the level below them, and the one before that. Same for building parts. Unlocking stone stairs requires you to know wood stairs. You can't just buy stone stairs engrams.

The normal amount of engram points is over 4000. I use server settings that give myself over 8000. I may have to up that a bit since they added new stuff in genesis 2.

There are mods that also just unlock all engrams, completely.

[🦊 Hermit]

As William says, this is very dependant upon the player. For example, I personally would disagree with his take on adding engram points - I really like the logistical strategy of having to choose which engrams to unlock early on, which ones would give you the best survival chances in your current situation, and also a lot of blueprints for gear and structures can be found in supply drops, thereby negating the need to learn them on the character. So I prefer to keep my engram points very low at the beginning, and only add in a lot of them very late in the endgame where it doesn't really matter any more. That's not to say that William's approach is wrong, it's just a difference in how we prefer to play...both methods are legitimate.

But it illustrates the point he made that what one person may think is a perfect balance, others may feel is very unbalanced and spoils the game. So really, we can only suggest what works in our personal preference - you would have to play the game yourself, get a feel for what you like about it and what you find boring/difficult, then fine-tune the settings accordingly.

I'll give you an overview of some of my settings, which you can use as a rough guide for what you might want to consider if you like. But these are only one possible method of playing, so feel free to adjust them as you see fit. I personally play the game in a much more forgiving manner than most players, so many would say my settings are far too easy.

Firstly I'd recommend upping gathering and taming rates to around 3.0 or 4.0. This makes the game a little bit less grindy, but not to the point that you can tame everything with prime meat and special kibble taming food is useless.

I would recommend turning the xp multiplier down, however. By default the game throws xp at you far too quickly, meaning that you can skip the early and midgame completely and jump right to endgame in just a few hours. But the earlygame is where the most fun is, surviving with low tier tames, living by your wits and employing dangerous strategies. So if you drop xp down, it forces you to play those early levels for longer, and have more fun. I go so far as to lower the multiplier all the way down to 0.1, but you could just reduce it to 0.5 if that's too extreme for your tastes.

I like to extend the daytime a little, and make night pass slightly quicker:

NightTimeSpeedScale=2.0
DayTimeSpeedScale=0.5

I undo the oxygen swim speed nerf the devs added in a while back:

OxygenSwimSpeedStatMultiplier=5.0

I have also played with increasing player damage resistance against attack... in my main game I had the setting PlayerResistanceMultiplier=0.75. Back when I first started this was very helpful to me, however now that I am more experienced I would probably remove this from my current games, however if you are new you may wish to try it until you have gained more experience.

You could adjust the SupplyCrateLootQualityMultiplier to make better loot appear in supply drops. You could go as high as 10.0, which would make almost every item in them have stats which are close to the maximum cap, but this will make you insanely overpowered come the endgame. So I would recommend limiting it to just 2.0 or 3.0.

You may want to extend the decomposition time of corpse bags, so if you die you have more time to get back to your stuff and reclaim it before it despawns.

I use these settings for breeding dinos...they give a decent balance between creatures growing up quickly, but still being able to get 100% imprint on them without the aid of a mod structure like the S+ Nanny. Also, they allow breeding for mutations much easier as the females do not need to wait a long time before being able to mate again:

LayEggIntervalMultiplier=0.3
MatingIntervalMultiplier=0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001
EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=120.0
BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier=37.0
BabyCuddleIntervalMultiplier=0.03

I also made a number of other adjustments, like removing the tamed dino hp/melee nerf the devs imposed a long time ago, boosting some other stats for players and dinos like carry weight and stamina, removing many unnecessary items from supply drops to make their loot more focused on equipment I can use, and going through all the engrams reducing the levels at which they unlock slightly as I felt that some of the default level unlocks were needlessly high. I could share these configs too if asked, however they are more complicated and would take up space in the thread, so I won't post them unless someone specifically wants them.

[Alucard †]

Ark has bajilion settings you can tweak both officially (via ingame menu) and unofficially (via ini tweaks and startup commands)

I forgot the half of things i changed to make SP a smooth/less grindy but not too easy of an experience. On top of enabling some features that are off by default especially on certain maps.

So as you can believe it is not an easy question :P

[william_es]

Originally posted by 🦊 Hermit:

For example, I personally would disagree with his take on adding engram points - I really like the logistical strategy of having to choose which engrams to unlock early on,

Oh I agree, entirely. My engram points are set by a config file, with a specific amount per level unlocked. It still requires me to make some agonizing decisions earlier on when starting out. Better weapons? better armor? or skip both to buy better building parts. Keeps the game interesting.

The amount of points my config adds just begins to balloon past about level 70, so I can purchase saddles, all the different building parts needed, and all the stuff from other maps. I bounce between 6 different maps. It's how I keep from getting burned out on the game. But it does mean I need more gear specific to those maps then If I was playing on a single one.

EDIT: my breeding settings make yours look utterly tame. I have where a live birth animals gives birth in less then 30 seconds, and the baby grows completely to maturity in about 2 1/2 minutes. I just realized that watching maturity timers wasn't much fun.

But on the flip side, I use completely VANILLA gather rates, even in single player. Which many people would probably consider mad crazy. It's the one thing I've never changed. I get the right tame for the right resource gathering job: work smarter, not harder. But I won't boost the rates at all.

[Alucard †]

I personally just can't play with default engrams unlocking anymore. There is so much cool and fun stuff that is locked to other maps and bosses from other maps. That i just prefer unlock engram tiers when reaching appropriate level for them.

I am still restricted by the materials needed and the level :P so it doesn't bother me that much.

But that's just me.

[🦊 Hermit]

Originally posted by william_es:

Oh I agree, entirely. My engram points are set by a config file, with a specific amount per level unlocked. It still requires me to make some agonizing decisions earlier on when starting out. Better weapons? better armor? or skip both to buy better building parts. Keeps the game interesting.

The amount of points my config adds just begins to balloon past about level 70, so I can purchase saddles, all the different building parts needed, and all the stuff from other maps.

Ah okay my bad, thought you meant you added extra in right from the start. Perhaps we aren't that different on that front then.

But yeah, as Alucard says, the game's wide variety of settings we players can adjust are quite remarkable, I don't think I've seen another game that is so customisable as this one. One of Ark's biggest strengths imo, and probably why it's been so popular over the years. I know that if I had never found it's config options, I would have given up playing it in short order as the vanilla settings really infuriated me.

[DreamSword Souty]

Thanks everyone for all of your feedback!