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Shiny! Dinos

Are you bored with the constant dreary colors of Ark Dinos? Make your life more Shiny!
That feeling when you walk over the Ark, and you see a pretty Dino you absolutely must have? That's Shiny!

Shiny will populate your Ark with a number of rare and special Dinos, which you can tame for their colors, their special abilities, or just their higher level. Or you can hunt them for the rewards.

Shiny Dinos are made from over 40 unique and distinct color sets, drawing from all available colors in the game, including the new Genesis colors and Dye colors, which were carefully arranged to produce beautiful Dinos which still look natural, but very different from what you are used to on the Ark.

On top of fancy colors, every Shiny has a chance to either spawn as an Aberrant, or as a Genesis X variant - no matter which map you are on. And to top it all off, there are numerous rare special abilities that Shiny Dinos can be born with, among them Frozen, Burning, Spectral, and more - and many more yet to come!

Shiny is compatible with every map, and specifically designed to be compatible with other mods that add new Dinos or modify existing ones. And the best part, Shiny Dinos are not "new" Dinos, they remain entirely their original self, which allows them to breed with their not-quite-so-Shiny kindred, and enjoy their company in combat through mate boost.

To help in your search of Shiny Dinos, you can use the included Tracker - although it may not be perfectly accurate, it'll point you in the right direction!

You can read here about all Shiny special effects!

Killing Shiny Dinos can also be very rewarding. Not only do you get rare resources, kibble, and other assorted goodies, it'll also unlock a bit of extra knowledge and teach you a Tek Engram.

Did you miss a holiday event, or did you start a new server, and are yearning for some Chibis to call your own? Killing a Shiny has a chance to reward you with any one Chibi currently available!

Of course, if you don't want to get Tek Engrams, this behavior is fully configurable! And all the loot can also be entirely customized to your liking!

Shiny comes pre-configured with sane default settings, which means you can install the mod and it's ready to go! New Shiny Dinos will spawn regularly and you will be notified - or you can use the Tracker to spot existing Shinies.

Shiny is very configurable, and we recommend to read over the available options to tune Shiny for your liking.

All Configuration & Admin commands can be found here.

Are you playing in Single Player, or have any other questions?
Check our F.A.Q. over in the discussions!

Due to the advanced nature of Shiny Dinos, it should be avoided to put them into Cryopods. Unfortunately, Cryopods will not manage to preserve their Shinyness. Colors will be preserved, but special effects will sadly be lost.

To solve this problem, we strongly recommend using Lethal's excellent Dino Storage v2, which not only preserves Shiny Dinos when put into Soul Traps, but is overall a vast improvement over the functionality of Cryopods.

Beware: Various Genesis Gauntlet missions will automatically cryo your Dinos and place them in your inventory. Be careful not to have this happen to one of your Shiny Dinos, or they will be lost.

The same limitation applies when uploading your Dino through an Obelisk or other transmitter. The dino will come through fine, but any special Shiny effect will be lost. Luckily, Dino Storage can also help here - simply upload your Shiny Dinos inside a Soul Trap, and it should be perfectly preserved!


Shiny! Dinos is part of the Sponsored Mod program from Wildcard! We're very excited to have the opportunity to push a lot more updates out soon!

We welcome any of your feedback, suggestions and bug reports - we only ask to submit them to the appropriate places!

And if you want to support the mod, don't forget to like and favorite!


- Feedback & Suggestions
- Bug Reports

Or join us on Discord!
[discord.gg]


All resources are original creations by Nevcairiel and the other authors, unless otherwise noted.
Additional Skeletal models created by Zythara, used with permission.