Ark Survival Evolved has a huge island filled with massive wilderness, rideable dinos, and more. Despite the game’s appeal looking targeted toward multiplayer audiences, you can very well enjoy it solo. And that is where the single-player comes in. In this guide, I will explain how you can play Ark single player and how you can save the game.
Ark Survival Evolved Single Player Guide
While most people enjoy playing this game with other players. You can still very much play this game by yourself and for that, you need to modify your settings. Here are the best settings to play Ark single player.
Best Ark Single/Solo Player Settings 2022
Firstly, select “Host/Local” once you open Ark if you want to play in single-player mode. You can find these settings under the General tab along with the other two tabs in the menu. Now you can keep these exact settings or tweak them around as you see it fit best to your play style.
Thanks to u/Peacelovefleshbones on Reddit for these settings:
- Difficulty: 1
- Dino Resistance: 0.5 (This will make dinos take half damage. This sounds bad, but on top of making wild dinos a little tougher, it also makes your dinos tougher as well. This makes the gameplay more interesting in my opinion. It also helps prevent you from becoming overpowered.)
- Player Resistance: 0.5 (Originally I didn’t want to give the player character a proportionate resistance as dinos since we have the benefit of crafting armor, but after playing for some time I realized that there’s a difference between being a vulnerable human and being made of paper. You’ll thank me when you’re getting pinned down by a bunch of raptors or troodons in the jungle.)
- XP Multiplier: 10 (This is actually really high but I explain my reasoning behind why it’s so high in a comment down below.. Feel free to adjust this setting to your liking.)
- Taming Speed: 5 **(more if you desire, see below)**
- Dino Harvesting Damage: 3
- Harvest Amount: 2
- Player Character Food Drain: 2
- Dino Character Food Drain: 3 *(These two stats make you and your creatures need food more often, but because the harvest amount has been increased you will always have enough food to deal with this)*
- Maximum Difficulty: This is a checkbox. Check it to enable maximum difficulty. This will allow creatures in the wild to sometimes spawn with higher levels, the highest wild level being 150 (180 for tek dinos). Higher-level creatures make the game more interesting because the closer to level 1 a creature is the more identical they are to other members of their species. Stats are randomized for wild creatures, so the higher the level, the more unique their strengths and weaknesses are. This will not make the game much more difficult on its own.
- Disable Structure Placement Collision: Check this box
- Allow Multiple Platform Floors: Check this box
- Allow Unlimited Respecs: Check this box
- Show Creative Mode: Check this box. Creative mode is an option available in the pause menu. It will make you invincible, allow you to craft and build anything for free, and it can be toggled on and off at any time. You want this option to be available for when you experience a bug, even if you don’t plan on using it to cheat or experiment or anything. Turning creative mode on and off in the pause menu will also temporarily teach you all of the engrams (crafting recipes) in the game until the next time you exit and reload the game.
How to Save a Single Player Game in Ark
The saving feature in Ark will auto-save your world every 15 minutes. Furthermore, you can also save your game manually when you are exiting the game. Although, there are some things to keep in mind while saving manually. First thing is that whenever you are trying to save a game manually you have to exit the game through the menu and not exit the game by closing the window. Abruptly closing the window does not save the game. The second thing to keep in mind is that in an unfortunate scenario that your game crashes your game will not save. Lastly, you can also save the game by pressing Tab to open the admin console and type “Admincheat saveworld“. This will hard save your game.
How to Save Ark in Xbox One
- Press the Menu button on your controller to bring up the pause menu.
- Next, press RB + LB + X + Y. You will see a new admin console on top of your screen.
- Here type “Admincheat saveworld” in the textbox.
- Click on the Admin Command button on its right.
- If you do it correctly you should see “Saving” on the bottom right corner of the main screen.
That sums up this guide. But we have many guides on several other games. Check out our other guide on how to light a campfire in Ark as well.
