

If you’re too slow (or, worse, manage to lose your corpse in the undergrowth), your items will be gone forever.

Incidentally, once you die, you’ve around 20 minutes to return to your corpse and loot it for any items that you were carrying previously. However, once you’ve crafted a Bed or Sleeping Bag, you can re-spawn there directly, making life considerably easier. Early on, you’ll have to rely on the game’s random re-spawn feature and track down your possessions manually - which can be a tortuous endeavour. Next, you’ll need to choose a place to re-spawn on the island. If (or, more accurately, when) you die in ARK, you’ll have the option to either create a new character or continue on with your current one, maintaining your accrued levels, skills, Engrams and privileges. Generally speaking, if you’re new to the game, you’ll want to begin your adventure on the south coast, where resources are plentiful and deadly predators are less of a concern. ARK’s default island map is a vast place, with many distinct, deadly habitats - meaning that your starting location can make all the difference between a successful first few hours in ARK and instant, repeated death. That means that you’ll need to choose a location to begin your adventure. Once you’ve selected your server type and gone through the character creation process, it’s time to get stuck into the game proper. As such, you might prefer to start your ARK career on a PvE server, until you’ve got to grips with ARK’s sometimes confounding systems. However, you’ll have to contend with people - not just prehistoric creatures - intent on killing you if you opt for PvP. You’ve one crucial decision to make before you even begin your ARK adventure for the first time: namely, should you join a PvP or PvE server (that’s Player versus Player and Player versus Environment if you’re not familiar with those terms)? The basics of survival in ARK are roughly the same, whichever option you choose. To see this content please enable targeting cookies.įor more Ark Survival Evolved advice, check out our island guide, resource, recipe, and crafting guide, base building guide, and Ark taming guide.

Don’t worry! We’re here to help! This small collection of internet pages will guide you from the preliminary stages of your prehistoric survival adventure in ARK: Survival Evolved right through to the, well, point where most of your deaths won’t usually be your own fault. So, you’ve just woken up on the shores of a deadly dinosaur-infested island everyone is trying to kill you (or randomly offer you berries), and you don’t know what to do next.
