When playing Ark: Survival Evolved, it’s a time of panic, joy, and sadness. From building your first base, to realizing you built it next to a rather angry Rex, and you’re about to be homeless again, there’s plenty to see and do. However, the game can be somewhat boring and your joy in progressing can be stifled if you’ve done it all before. That’s where the handy mod community comes in to help. Ark has a lot of mods for player to enjoy, so many that it can be overwhelming for anyone starting out. In this guide, we’ll list the ten top mods for players in Ark: Survival Evolved from best to worst.
Structures Plus
S+ was and is a staple of the Ark Community, whether it be through the PvP or the PvE side. So much so that the Ark Devs took inspiration from the mod to improve their vanilla building systems slightly. Despite this, however, Structures Plus or S+ as it’s known in the community hasn’t lost any of its popularity.
This building mod grants players access to a variety of different convenient building and construction tools in the game. Players will be able to build more easily, as well as have access to items that make the base game much easier to play through. The downside to the Structures Plus mod is that it is enormously overpowered in PvP settings. Players hosting a PvP server will want to ensure that specific items and structures are disabled or banned from the server to prevent infinite frustrations.
Related: Beginner’s guide to Ark: Survival Evolved
Awesome Spyglass
Awesome Spyglass adds a new spyglass to the game. The Awesome Spyglass provides an overlay to your HUD, and will show what Dinosaur or Player you’re looking at, its HP, and the taming food needed as well as its amount if relevant. The creature’s outline will turn red if aggressive and targeting you, remain green if passive or non-violent towards you, and yellow if they’re fleeing. Enemy players will always be in red unless the server settings have been changed, which if you’re playing on PvP server would mostly likely be the case as it would give an unfair advantage during fights.
Primal Fear
Primal Fear is what happens when Ark players get bored of the usual amount of pain and suffering that occurs in the game, and up it a level. With new creatures and boss fights that challenge the RAM of your computer, and a whole new set of items, gear, and terror, Primal Fear is for any player looking for a challenge. Players will need to beat increasingly more difficult tiers of mini-bosses, tame fantastical new creatures, and figure out how to survive all while learning a whole new taming food system. It’s definitely not an easy time, but well worth the many deaths.
Classic Flyers
While some servers have enabled the Flying Speed modifiers, there are cases where you want to have that overpowered feeling when flying on your Wyvern. Classic Flyers provides all the speed and the stamina boosts in a single handy mod which doesn’t require players to breed out speed mutations in their creatures.
Death Recovery Mod
A staple mechanic for survival games is inventory loss upon death. It is to lightly punish dying without ruining the entire game. There are a lot of inventory keeping mods available. Death Recovery Mod places a gravestone that when activated recovers your inventory for you. It will not work if something has taken your items. Sure you could use something like Death Inventory Keeper which just automatically keeps your inventory, but why not shame yourself with the panicked sprint to the gravestone instead? Plus, for PvP purposes, the inventory stays where it is until collected or it despawns, giving enemies a chance to take your items, no matter how short that time is.
Dino Storage V2
Dino Storage V2 is similar to vanilla Ark’s cryopod, but improved. Like cryopods, tames can be securely stored inside a small compartment, similar to Pokeballs. The soul traps, as they are called in Dino Storage V2, allow players to keep their stored dinos in place and they’ll passively generate their resources as well as eggs if you’d like. The storage container can also automatically trap any babies born within a certain range, and you can use a paintball gun-like tool to nab up your dinos with ease. The Dino Storage will also allow you to throw out multiple dinosaurs at once with no limitations, but this can be altered for your PvP servers.
Eco’s RP Decor
Eco’s RP Decor is one of many from Eco. The mod maker has several excellent decor mods including Eco’s Terrariums, Eco’s Aberration Decor, and Eco’s Extinction Foliage. They also have an Empires series that adds different decor, saddles, and tools based on historical cultures. So far that series has Vikings, Tokugawa, Babylonian, Inca, Roman, and Khmer. Eco’s decor series is a great addition for themed PvP servers, as well as for any and all PvE servers looking to stand out from the crowd.
Creature Finder Deluxe
There’s nothing more frustrating in Ark: Survival Evolved than having to search endlessly for a dinosaur that you know is somewhere in the general area but are unsure of where. Creature Finder Deluxe is one of those mods that fortunately allows players to bypass the general frustration of the search process and instead obtain a GPS-like directional system to find what they’re looking for. Able to incorporate the creatures from mods, Creature Finder Deluxe is the ultimate lazy man’s tool for those who hate figuring out the coordinates in the game.
Those looking to use it on their single player games will have to make sure that they’ve edited their .ini files correctly or it won’t work.
HG Stacking Mod
Carry weight has always, and will always be an issue to the average Ark Player. Without exceptional server settings, the fact that carrying a stack of Stone will always be impossible can be highly irksome. It becomes even more irksome when you’re attempting to craft and farm resources, and your dinosaurs are slowed down by even a minimal amount of the resource, resulting in multiple trips. The HG stacking mod allows players to stack many more resources, as well as lowering the weight of some resources to make farming much easier. There are various versions that increase the amount per stack, but the base starts at 1000 with a 50% weight reduction.
ARK Additions: The Collection
This mod adds a ton of new creatures to Ark. While the mod is still under development, and there are new creatures inbound, such as the Lindwurm and Gorgononpsid, there are several already included, such as:
- Deinosuchus
- Archelon
- Xiphactinus
- Brachiosaurus
- Acrocanthosaurus
- Concavenator
- Cryolophosaurus
- Helicoprion
- Deinotherium
So for those players looking to get their fill of unique and amazing creatures, this mod is for you. Just be aware that there are updates that will have to be loaded on occasion.
