Ark: Survival Ascended - Complete Taming Guide (2024)

In Ark: Survival Ascended, you're stranded on a treacherous land filled with roaming dinosaurs, mythical creatures, and other prehistoric foes, all while navigating natural hazards and trying to do what humans do best: conquer the wilderness. Quickly, however, you'll find that you can't do it alone.

Each creature you successfully tame offers unique strengths, whether that's in resource gathering, combat prowess, or other special abilities. While anyone can feed berries to a lystrosaurus, the taming process can get intense, especially when dealing with creatures that would rather have you for dinner. This guide will show you every taming method for creatures on the Island, and arm you with tips to streamline your taming endeavors.

How Does Taming Work In Ark?

Each creature in Ark requires a specific method of taming, though the vast majority require the Knockout Taming method, which will be explained further below.

For most taming methods, you want to keep Taming Effectiveness of the creature as high as possible, while feeding it its preferred food until the taming progress bar fills up.

This is done when the creature is unconscious during the Knockout Taming method, or while the creature is conscious during the Non-Violent taming method.

Taming Effectiveness Explained

Taming Effectiveness, in essence, determines the amount of levels and bonuses the creature receives once it tames.

Taming Effectiveness always starts at 100 percent, and decreases each time the creature eats, as well as each time it takes damage while unconscious.

If a creature is at 100 percent Taming Effectiveness when it tames, it receives exactly 50 percent of its level. As the Taming Effectiveness goes down during taming, it will receive progressively fewer levels.

These bonus levels are automatically assigned to random stats after taming. As such, when trying to obtain a strong tame, you'll want to keep Taming Effectiveness as high as possible.

On default settings and Official ARK servers, the maximum level of creatures you can find in the wild on the Island will be 150. This number can change depending on your server or game settings.

Preferred Food Explained

Most creatures will accept a variety of food during taming. For instance, a carnivore (meat-eater) will usually accept Prime Meat, Raw Meat, Cooked Meat, Fish, etc.

However, each food type has a hierarchy of preference that is as follows:

• The specific kibble for each dinosaur will usually provide the highest tame progress.
  • Each dinosaur requires a different type of kibble, so ensure that you're feeding it the right thing.
• Mutton, only obtainable from the Ovis, performs better than any other kind of meat for carnivores.
• Prime versions of each meat (Prime Meat and Prime Fish Meat) will give better taming progress than the regular versions of each meat.
• Mejoberries are generally better liked by herbivores when compared to other berries.
• While usually carnivores will eat fish and piscivores will eat meat, it is generally quite bad for taming effectiveness and should be avoided if possible.

Ark: Knockout Taming

For the vast majority of creatures of Ark, this method of taming is required.

The gist of the Knockout Taming method involves tranquilizing, sedating or otherwise knocking the creature unconscious by inflicting Torpor. Weapons that inflict Torpor are as follows, ranked in order of ease to obtain:

• Club
• Slingshot (Stone)
• Bow (Tranq Arrow)
• Crossbow (Tranq Arrows)
• Long-neck Rifle (Tranq Dart / Shocking Tranquilizer Dart)
• Harpoon Launcher (Tranq Spearbolt)

Each hit from the above will inflict "Torpor" on the creature, the amount depends on the quality and type of the weapon. The amount of torpor it takes to knock out a creature depends on its level and creature type.

After the creature is unconscious, place its preferred food in its inventory. Each time its hunger drops enough (how much depends on the food being provided), it will automatically eat and fill up the taming progress bar.

As noted above, though a creature will generally accept a variety of food, it will also usually like certain foods more than others.

The following creatures on the Island require the Knockout Taming method to tame.

*While it can be knock-out tamed, the Diplodocus can also be tamed passively—and in fact, non-violently taming it will yield a better Taming Effectiveness. Details are described in the "Non-Violent Taming" section below.

**The Titanosaur is unique in that it cannot be knocked out by traditional means, and instead requires a turret knockout to tame.

Turret Knockout Taming

Some particularly hardy creatures cannot be knocked out by tranquilizers—much less stones or arrows. As such, you'll need a siege weapon such as the cannon to knock them out.

As of Early Access, the only creature that falls into this category is the Titanosaur. Note that the Titanosaur will starve itself to death by refusing to eat on default server settings and on Official Servers, making it a temporary tame that can only be used for raiding.

Ark: Non-Violent Taming

Almost all other tames fall into the Non-Violent Taming category.

For most of these tames, you'll need to follow the creature around and feed them their preferred food without angering or scaring them.

For docile creatures such as the Lystrosaurus, this can easily be done. However, several of the creatures on this list are skittish (such as the Mesopithecus) or aggressive (such as the Araneo), and should be approached with caution.

Exceptions to this taming method do apply, and are noted in the following table.

Ark: Raise-Only Taming

Some creatures cannot be tamed, and must instead be raised from infancy instead.

Currently, on the Island—the only map available on ARK: Survival Ascended, there is only one creature that requires a Raise-Only taming method to tame: the Rhyniognatha.

In order to tame the Rhyniognatha, you must first do the following:

• Kill a male Rhyniognatha and obtain a Rhyniognatha Pheromone.
• Get a female Rhyniognatha down to approximately ten percent health.
• Use the Rhyniognatha Pheromone on a creature of at least 300 drag weight.
  • Note that the bigger and higher level / stats of the creature, the better the resulting stats. As such, a drag weight of 900 is recommended for optimal taming.
• The female Rhyniognatha will then inject the creature with a gestating baby.
  • During the gestation period, the creature will ask for various imprinting foods. To maximize the resulting baby's stats, you'll need to provide them.
• At the end of the gestation period, the "impregnated" creature will die and a baby Rhyniognatha will emerge from it.

Tips For Taming

• Make sure to knock your creatures out in a safe area, as unconscious creatures are vulnerable to predators and scavengers.
  • Beaches are generally the safest areas on the Island.
• Do not knock non-aquatic creatures out over water, as they will drown.
• To lure a creature somewhere else, you can use Rare Flowers to emit a scent that will cause them to turn aggressive and follow you.
  • This works on all creatures, including normally-passive ones.
• Take careful note of torpor! Some creatures, such as the Therizinosaur and Gigantosaurus have notoriously high torpor decay rates.
  • There's nothing worse than a taming creature suddenly waking up, becoming aggressive again and resetting your progress.
• Most creatures on the Island either outrun, out-range or out-damage you. Use bolas for smaller creatures (generally anything as big as or smaller than a raptor can be bola'ed), or traps wherever you can for larger creatures.
  • The following video demonstrates some common traps for creatures of varying size.

NEXT: Ark: Survival Ascended - Metal Farming Location Guide