435GB of Space required...

[Wicksta]

Damn, I miss when ARK pre-release many many moons ago and wasn't bloated. I loved the game it's just not feasible to install even on a 2TB drive...

[zerassar]

Pick and choose which DLC you're playing on. Base game is 125GB. 435 is with all DLC.
Surely you're not playing on all of the maps concurrently?

[123]

pre-release? you mean only the island map? is it a fair comparison? each map is roughly 50gb

[Wicksta]

Originally posted by zerassar:

Pick and choose which DLC you're playing on. Base game is 125GB. 435 is with all DLC.
Surely you're not playing on all of the maps concurrently?

Well back when I originally bought it in pre-release it was only The Island Available. But also yes, I would have myself on all of the maps as DLC came out because some maps were cool to experiment on and play on. But I also spent most of my time on single player just doing ridiculous stuff like building a turret boat, dinosaur death pen that my brothers and I would do gladiator matches and see who could survive the longest, ridiculous tree forts, bridges between islands, bridges between the two peaks of herbivore isle etc,

[Wicksta]

Originally posted by 123:

pre-release? you mean only the island map? is it a fair comparison? each map is roughly 50gb

Yep long long time ago when it wasn't officially released I want to say back in 2015 or earlier.

[zerassar]

Originally posted by Wicksta:

Originally posted by zerassar:

Pick and choose which DLC you're playing on. Base game is 125GB. 435 is with all DLC.
Surely you're not playing on all of the maps concurrently?

Well back when I originally bought it in pre-release it was only The Island Available. But also yes, I would have myself on all of the maps as DLC came out because some maps were cool to experiment on and play on. But I also spent most of my time on single player just doing ridiculous stuff like building a turret boat, dinosaur death pen that my brothers and I would do gladiator matches and see who could survive the longest, ridiculous tree forts, bridges between islands, bridges between the two peaks of herbivore isle etc,

What I was suggesting... Was surely you were not "experimenting" on all of the DLC at the same time. You can add and remove DLC as you desire to help keep the game footprint smaller if thats your objective.

[Rainbow Dash]

yes it's hard to manage for most people. and it's almost impossible on 500GB spaces or lower unless tweaking and allocating that space for ark itself, and/or either tweak an install process with compressed install files and/or hashed. you can also cut the size of the game by about half by getting rid of some duplicate files like in SeekFreeContent folder, but it's still big

what i do and would recommend :

- if you don't play all the dlc at once, then untick the ones you don't use in the dlc manager in the steam library interface. typically running the base game + 1 dlc at most

- compress the already installed files of the game, the whole folder (typically in the steamapps folder). if having other games installed, then compressing them could help a lot too. ark comes uncompressed and you can gain, again, around 50% space by doing this. you can set windows 10 (or 11) to have specific folders to automatically have their contents compressed, including when files are modified or new files are added. if i remember right it saved over 60GB of install files for me. if you got only low space storage (500 or less), you might want to use another, larger one to download the files on and then look up how to move them and have steam recognize their existence, or simply add the larger storage as a steam library in the steam settings to have it installed as any other game, and then use the steam library tool to have steam move the files itself between storages and have them cleanly recognized as installed (it can bug sometimes, and in various ways with different games, but usually it works). it's also typically not slowing the games loading or the running of the games themselves down, and it can actually even speed the loading times up. look up the files properties with right click on the game's folder and in the general tab (default one), click "advanced details" and then check the option to compress the folder and then click OK. two blue arrows will be marked on the folder and each sub-folder to mention that the folder is compressed

- look up for informations about the SeekFreeContent folder. personally i have read from users that it's only used as an attempt to increase performances in multiplayer and that it's not used in singleplayer, and someone said that they played singleplayer and they just deleted that folder and did not have any issue doing so

[demonofshoes]

have the devs said if the new ascended version will use less disk space? if so would make me more eager to get it (as a lower price upgrade rather than a full price game though)

[Wicksta]

Originally posted by Rainbow Dash:

yes it's hard to manage for most people. and it's almost impossible on 500GB spaces or lower unless tweaking and allocating that space for ark itself, and/or either tweak an install process with compressed install files and/or hashed. you can also cut the size of the game by about half by getting rid of some duplicate files like in SeekFreeContent folder, but it's still big

what i do and would recommend :

- if you don't play all the dlc at once, then untick the ones you don't use in the dlc manager in the steam library interface. typically running the base game + 1 dlc at most

- compress the already installed files of the game, the whole folder (typically in the steamapps folder). if having other games installed, then compressing them could help a lot too. ark comes uncompressed and you can gain, again, around 50% space by doing this. you can set windows 10 (or 11) to have specific folders to automatically have their contents compressed, including when files are modified or new files are added. if i remember right it saved over 60GB of install files for me. if you got only low space storage (500 or less), you might want to use another, larger one to download the files on and then look up how to move them and have steam recognize their existence, or simply add the larger storage as a steam library in the steam settings to have it installed as any other game, and then use the steam library tool to have steam move the files itself between storages and have them cleanly recognized as installed (it can bug sometimes, and in various ways with different games, but usually it works). it's also typically not slowing the games loading or the running of the games themselves down, and it can actually even speed the loading times up. look up the files properties with right click on the game's folder and in the general tab (default one), click "advanced details" and then check the option to compress the folder and then click OK. two blue arrows will be marked on the folder and each sub-folder to mention that the folder is compressed

- look up for informations about the SeekFreeContent folder. personally i have read from users that it's only used as an attempt to increase performances in multiplayer and that it's not used in singleplayer, and someone said that they played singleplayer and they just deleted that folder and did not have any issue doing so

Yeah I was thinking of doing that but I own all the DLC. So by default steam tries to download all of the DLC as well when I install ARK. I can't untick DLC in the manager until It has downloaded and installed everything then afterwards yeah I can untick it but its still going to pull and allocate the space all the data. and on my current 1tb nvme I don't have the space anymore to do this.

[william_es]

I have ark installed on a 500 GB ssd, and it works fine. I play on 8 different maps simultaneously (though 2 i'm pretty much ignoring right now).

So saying it wont fit on a 2 tb drive is a little bit melodramatic. But hey, you do you.

[Wicksta]

Originally posted by william_es:

I have ark installed on a 500 GB ssd, and it works fine. I play on 8 different maps simultaneously (though 2 i'm pretty much ignoring right now).

So saying it wont fit on a 2 tb drive is a little bit melodramatic. But hey, you do you.

Its makes a difference... I have a 1 TB NVME drive with 300GB left on it, and a 1 TB Sata drive for backups. If I was to download ARK Steam will allocate the 435GB between the two drives, the different drive types together would not perform as well as either would individually. After steam downloads it will then install the 435 GB Ark Game and then it will clear the temporary files. But during the process of downloading/installing Ark it will be utilizing more than the 435 GB of space. Up until its installed I wouldn't be able to alter the DLC selections I don't want to use and even at that point, parts of those files will still be spread across the two drives and it may not perform as well together it would go as slow as the SATA speeds instead of the NVME speeds.

Assume worst case 435 GB * 2 you could need up to 970 Gigs to install it and its crazy to think even TERRABYTES of space are still chomped so hard by one game HDD requirements.