Hawthorn Thistleberry

No. ARK itself does not provide any mechanism that I know of for a server to update whenever there's something to update. You either restart it on a schedule, or restart it when you choose to. There's no "push" notification of updates for the server to react to, nor any mechanism by which it could answer such a push if there was one. I know that there are third party programs that periodically pull update notifications and reboot the server, but I don't think survivalservers.com supports any of them. I never looked into it myself -- I wanted to be the one in charge of when my server restarts.

Be sure to shut the server down before you edit the settings. Otherwise, the server is overwriting them with what's in memory.

You can still use Ragnarok, it'll just be specified in the launch parameters too. For instance, here's mine (slightly redacted) for a Scorched Earth: ScorchedEarth_P?NoBattlEye?Multihome=999.999.999.999?Port=18115?QueryPort=18116?SessionName=Almost Paradise: Newbie-Friendly PVE 3x SE?MaxPlayers=30?listen?ServerPassword=?ServerAdminPassword=redacted?RCONEnabled=True?RCONPort=18117?AltSaveDirectoryName=SavedArk99999?ForceAllStructureLocking=true?GameModIDs=731604991,793605978,655261420,725398419,670764308?OverrideOfficialDifficulty=5.0?AllowFlyingStaminaRecovery=true?bAllowUnlimitedRespecs=true?PreventSpawnAnimations=true I don't know what the magic word for Ragnarok is there at the start, but if you are set to Ragnarok and then you tell the control panel to switch to a custom map, it should fill in the launch parameters automatically, then you can add stuff to the end as you need to. Then, from then on, if you change password, mods, etc., you'll have to do it here. (I do it here and in the other fields too, just in case I ever switch back or something.) You can see this is also where I set a few other parameters that maybe have to be set there (or at least used to when I first set them): ForceAllStructureLocking, AllowFlyingStaminaRecovery, bAllowUnlimitedRespecs, and PreventSpawnAnimation.

Just don't set it to reboot. ARK Update: Only when needed ARK Update (Automatic): Enable Restart Interval: Never Now whenever you manually stop and start, or restart, it will update ARK and any mods, but it won't ever restart until you tell it to (or system crashes etc.).

You shouldn't need to add it to the GameUserSettings.ini if you're adding it to the command line in GameModIDs. Just having it in the command line is enough.

The ?OverrideOfficialDifficulty=5.0 has to be in the launch parameters, so you have to set Map to Custom, then adjust your launch parameters in the new box that appears.

It's not bad enough that you put this in the wrong forum, now you have to repeatedly bump it too? You're asking for a post delete and a forum block if you keep behaving that way.

Add ?bAllowUnlimitedRespecs=true to the end of your custom launch parameters. (I don't know if there's a way to put it in game.ini or gameusersettings.ini at this point.)

There have been a few reports of this on the main ARK forum on Steam. Might be a bug in the recent release.

Your base may happen to be at a supply drop, If so, you also want to set PvEAllowStructuresAtSupplyDrops=true to allow building there, or just move.

No, it's not. "Official" means "provided by Wildcard". I wouldn't say "run by Wildcard" because they don't really run them, they just spin them up and then ignore them.

You can use FTP to make a copy of your save file and keep it on your own computer as long as you want. So in theory, yes. However, over a period of months it's theoretically possible that there will have been updates that changed the format of the file in some way and then taken out the code that does the update to the file. I don't think that's happened yet but I wouldn't bet the bank it won't ever.

I don't think there's any way to prevent it entirely. There seems to be a flaw in the ARK server code itself that makes it time out on loading updates to mods while it's loading up. It happens more often if you have a lot of mods, especially large ones, or if several mods and/or ARK itself are having updates at the same time. But it's always possible if you have mods at all. You can avoid losing everything, though. Just always do it this way: 1) Force a SaveWorld (e.g., via ARKON's Save World button) 2) Use an FTP client to copy the BlahBlah.ark file from your saved folder to your local computer. 3) Then and only then, restart the server. 4) Log in. If everything's fine, you're done. 5) If stuff is gone and the engrams for the mods are missing too, restart again until you see the engrams. 6) Log off, shut the server down, then use FTP to copy the BlahBlah.ark file back up from your computer to the server. 7) Start the server. Everything should be back to how it was.

If you just want to be able to restore the result of a SaveWorld, you only need to download the most recent .ark file right after doing that. (The full filename depends on your map -- e.g., for me right now it's ScorchedEarth_P.ark but it used to be TheCenter.ark.) That contains pretty much everything in the game (pretty much!) so it's all you need to recover from things like "the update went badly and I need to roll back to just before the update".

Use FTP to copy the .ark file to your computer, then whenever you want to restore it, use FTP to copy it back.

Hmm, I don't have it there, I have it in GameUserSettings.ini and it works fine. But whatever gets the job done! (There are a few other settings that still only work in the launch parameters though.)

Make sure it was added to GameUserSettings.ini (as opposed to Game.ini) and is below [serverSettings] but above any other bracketed line

I don't use the built-in configuration manager, so I don't know how to do this with it. But if you learn how to use FTP and are willing to edit your game.ini file directly, just add this to the bottom: NPCReplacements=(FromClassName="BoaFrill_Character_BP_C",ToClassName="")

I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, but one thing I will suggest is to be sure that you issue a SaveWorld command before you shut the server down. It ought to be doing that anyway when you click the Stop button, but it's best to do it yourself just to be sure. You can do it in the command prompt while logged in and with cheats enabled, or do it from ARKON (there's a button for it on the Admin page).

I haven't really gotten a clear idea of those either. I use this to increase the ovis spawns: DinoSpawnWeightMultipliers=(DinoNameTag=Sheep,SpawnWeightMultiplier=100.0,OverrideSpawnLimitPercentage=true,SpawnLimitPercentage=1.0) I'm guessing you could get a pretty good increase like this: DinoSpawnWeightMultipliers=(DinoNameTag=Mantis,SpawnWeightMultiplier=100.0,OverrideSpawnLimitPercentage=true,SpawnLimitPercentage=1.0) and if you get too much just try reducing the SpawnWeightMultiplier? It's a weight, so it's unclear just what value will have what effect. I've seen examples with 2.0 and 10.0 and 100.0 so probably you can just tweak values and guess.

There's no space in the heading part. Should be [StructuresPlus] <your S+ config items here> For instance this is the bottom of my GameUserSettings.ini: [StructuresPlus] EnableQuickClimb=false ResourcePullRangeInFoundations=30 GardenerRangeInFoundations=25 ItemCollectorRangeInFoundations=40

Most of that can be done in the configuration editor. Not sure about the "extra 100 levels" part -- that may not even be possible right now, and it's certainly problematic on a regular basis, so I never did it.

You'll be looking for a folder named SavedArk##### (the number will depend on your account number) and a file named TheCenter.ark or TheIsland.ark or ScorchedEarth_P.ark in that folder. Back up a copy and then delete it.

You won't be able to do it in the control panel directly. You'll need to LRN2FTP to use an FTP client to do it.

I would pick a day and tell everyone the server will be down, then on that day, make a save and back it up remotely via FTP. Then take out half of the mods, start the server up, log in, and try doing things just a little bit. See if it crashes. Then try the other half the mods. Whichever half causes it to crash, try taking out half of those, and so on. In a few hours you should have identified which mod, if you remove it from the set of eight, stops the crashing from happening. Odds are it's just one of them which will do it (because of a conflict with another, perhaps). Then decide if you can live without that mod. Remove it, restore the backup, and tell your players they can get back in.