Hawthorn Thistleberry

arkservers (dot) net also does it and a bunch of other things, like give you a very nice widget for your website.

No such thing. You could use offline raid protection to make it so bases are not vulnerable when tribes aren't around to defend them, but if you open up PVP, then PVP is opened up, there's no getting around that. Closest thing I could find was a discontinued mod: https://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/594821545177819162/

As of their last comment they had no INI way to do it, just a mod way, but were going to see about giving us an INI way. Given how good they've been about giving us INI control of this kind of thing in the past, this one's a surprising omission.

The Center doesn't appear to support the visual effect; the moon has finally risen and stubbornly refuses to explode. Oh well, disappointing, but at least the countdown might help clue in players.

When I added the GameModIDs (and also, while I was monkeying around, threw in an OverrideOfficialDifficulty for kicks) and restarted one more time, it all came back up. Didn't even have to restore my world data. The extinction countdown does show in the inventory screen, but so far I'm not seeing any meteor in the sky. Might be because the time of day happens to be when the moon wasn't visible so the meteor isn't (so I'm waiting), but might be because that part doesn't work on The Center. The final form of my custom launch parameters is: TheCenter?NoBattlEye?Multihome=167.114.208.24?Port=18615?QueryPort=18616?SessionName=Almost Paradise: Newbie-Friendly PVE 3x Center?MaxPlayers=30?listen?ServerPassword=?ServerAdminPassword=[redacted]?RCONEnabled=True?RCONPort=18617?AltSaveDirectoryName=SavedArk27790?ForceAllStructureLocking=true?ExtinctionEventTimeInterval=1209600?GameModIDs=731604991,719928795,793605978,708257555?OverrideOfficialDifficulty=5.0 Hope this thread might be useful for someone else.

However, the server just doesn't want to start with that added. These are my launch parameters (sanitized of course): TheCenter?NoBattlEye?Multihome=167.114.208.24?Port=18615?QueryPort=18616?SessionName=Almost Paradise: Newbie-Friendly PVE 3x Center?MaxPlayers=30?listen?ServerPassword=?ServerAdminPassword=[redacted]?RCONEnabled=True?RCONPort=18617?AltSaveDirectoryName=SavedArk27790?ForceAllStructureLocking=true?ExtinctionEventTimeInterval=1209600 I wonder if I also need to add GameModIDs there?

The answer to question 1 is simple: "don't forget to scroll down, dummy". That is, once I set the map to Custom, the launch parameters box appears, but it just happened to be right below my scroll so I didn't see it. I had to double-check that other things that I've changed since last time I used custom launch parameters got updated there too (e.g., my admin password) and am restarting with the custom parameters in place now. After a full backup, of course!

My server is going to wipe in a few weeks, and I thought it'd be a pretty cool way to make this visible, and make it obvious to all the new players that wander in, is to start up the Extinction Server countdown on it. So a few questions: How do you even set a SurvivalServers ARK server as an extinction server? Generally you add ?ExtinctionEventTimeInterval=2592000 (replace the number with a number of seconds) to the command line, but I can no longer even find how to get to the command line parameters. I think, once I've started it this way, the line NextExtinctionEventUTC=1468018304 will be added to my game.ini, only with the actual time of the imminent doom of the universe. After that, do I leave the command line parameter in place, or remove it? Is there any problem with doing this on an already running game? Is there any conflict between doing this and running The Center? Hoping someone else has tried some of these things, but if not, once I get an answer on the first one, I'll experiment (carefully, and with lots of backups) and post replies here for the reference of anyone else who wants to do it.

I'm not sure if it's in the config editor, but if not, put this into the box at the bottom for additional gameusersettings.ini settings: AllowAnyoneBabyImprintCuddle=true

I've always done the wipe when no one was online, myself, with a backup made before it. I haven't had it actually crash the server, as long as no one is online when I do it. (Not even me -- I issue the command through ARKON.)

Rollbacks are not generally "to the last backup", they're "to the last save". To be clear: The game server keeps the state of the world in memory Every so often the game writes this to disk; this is controlled by gameusersettings.ini setting AutoSavePeriodMinutes=## Every three hours a backup is made of that file If the server crashes, when it comes back up, typically it comes back up with the last save, which will be some number of minutes old. If your AutoSavePeriodMinutes is 30, for instance, it could be up to 30 minutes old if you got really unlucky and the crash happened mere moments before it was about to save, but it could also be just a minute old if you crashed right after a save. The worst it can be is AutoSavePeriodMinutes minutes of rollback. You can configure that period to anything you want, but there'll be a short hitch every time it saves, where the screen for everyone freezes for a second or two. 15 minutes is probably as frequent as you should ever set it to be. I use 33 myself. The only time the backups will be used is if the server crash also destroys the last save file, or if some other event, like a badly loaded mod, makes the data in it worthless. So a backup every three hours is actually quite reasonable since you'll almost never use them anyway. There is a way to create saves in-game at a time of your choosing as well. The command is SaveWorld. (Don't forget the whole enablecheats thing and prefixing it with cheat.) Better yet, use ARKON and just click the Save World button. Again, there's a performance cost, so don't do it every minute or anything. I actually have done some simple scripts that use FTP to make a save overnight, but not to have them more often, but to have them further back, in case something terrible happens and I don't know about it for a while (or in case SurvivalServers.com vanishes one day). I'd be happy to share them (sanitized without my server details of course) but they're not the droids you're looking for.

I don't think there is a client version v255.4. The things that changed in that version only affect the server.

Note that however you change these, there will be situations where 100% imprint is impossible for some species. This is a fundamental flaw in ARK and the way it calculates how much imprint to give for each cuddle, and how many cuddles fit into maturation. (What I do is offer to use admin commands to bump any imprint that's "as many cuddles as possible" up to 100% for people.) Otherwise, "best" is highly subjective. I use MatingIntervalMultiplier=0.500000 EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=4.000000 BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier=4.000000 BabyImprintingStatScaleMultiplier=1.000000 BabyCuddleIntervalMultiplier=1.000000 BabyCuddleGracePeriodMultiplier=1.000000 BabyCuddleLoseImprintQualitySpeedMultiplier=1.000000 So all breeding-related activities take 1/4 as much time, which means the really long ones like quetzal or therizinosaur still take a few days, but the incubation and baby time can be done in an evening. But I don't change the cuddle multipliers because "about every three hours" seems about right, and since there are no values that ensure you can do 100% on all species (you can tweak to get to where one species can hit 100%, but then others can't).

Changing the max level should automatically also change the increment with it.

I don't think it's currently amongst the things you can set with the Modify Server Config button, and there's no 'custom game.ini' block either, last time I looked. (Hopefully someone will chime in and correct me on this. I don't really use that tool so I don't keep up on the details, I just glanced through it now to make this post.) Which means you need to use an FTP client like Filezilla to connect, browse to the Config/WindowsServer folder, and edit the Game.ini file to add that line to the bottom. It's best to do this while your server is stopped, then start it after you've saved the change. This may seem like a lot of hassle, but it's a great technique to learn. Once you get over the learning curve of learning FTP it will prove a powerful tool for editing your config files for other changes, plus it's a good way to make your own backups of your data files, which is very helpful for peace of mind as well as for things like making a change but being ready to roll back in case the change proves disastrous (particularly important when fiddling about with mods). See the LRN2FTP thread for details on how to learn and use FTP.

Shouldn't matter where it is as long as there's not a line in square brackets above it other than the default [/script/ShooterGame.ShooterGameMode] at the top of the file -- those lines define a "scope" for everything under them, but you don't typically see those in game.ini the way you do in gamesettings.ini anyway. More likely the line is either syntactically incorrect, or contradicted by another line setting the same setting to another value somewhere else.

Oooh, I didn't even know that sub users could FTP. Interesting! Glad to hear it got sorted out.

So far Wildcard has given us no control over "events"; can't avoid them, can't extend them, can't change them at all. Maybe someday.

Don't think so. That's why people made those mods. You can cheat ghost and try flying under the terrain to see if it fell down. (I always put away all my stuff and cheat LeaveMeAlone first just in case something goes wrong down there in the scary under-the-world place.) It's never worked for me though.

Note that reducing the time between "wants care" intervals will not make your burden less -- in fact it'll make it more. If you halve it from ~3hr to ~1½hr then each care will give you half as much imprint so you'll just find yourself having to do twice as much work. Worse yet, if you're finding you can't get to 100% imprints on some species, changing this interval will only make it so that different species can't get to 100% instead, because the way Wildcard did the imprint value rounding, plus the RNG factor in the time between cuddles, simply doesn't work properly on any server with maturation multipliers, no matter what settings you use.

If you click the Game.ini button on your control panel, do you get a "connection refused" error message? If so, it probably means the FTP service on your server is down and needs to be restarted. This has happened to me twice in the three months or so I've had a server. The first time when I reported the outage it was back up within minutes; the second time, within the last two weeks, I had to jump through all the hoops you're jumping through, proving it wasn't that I had the wrong password, before they'd check the service. (If it were me, I'd jump straight to restarting the service, since it does no harm and takes like a minute at most, before I started trying the more difficult task of working through password problems with a user.)

It should only delete the program files; the buildings and tames are part of your .ark data file so they shouldn't be affected. But it's a good idea to make a backup of the .ark file with FTP first just in case the server loads once without the mod (and thus wipes everything). That shouldn't happen, but it could if there's a burp at a bad moment.

If you check the FTP Details part of your control panel, you'll see IP/Host, Port, User, and Pass. IP/Host will be a set of four numbers; put that in Filezilla into Host. Protocol should be FTP - File Transfer Protocol. For encryption, I use Use explicit FTP over TLS if available. Logon Type is Normal. The user and password are those shown on the control panel. No other settings in Filezilla are necessary.

I don't think there was a v254.945 version for the client. There's no patch notes for one either. Probably they did a server-side-only update that was so small they didn't think it worth even telling us what it was.

Also, update to v254.93 as they've made a change: * Server custom "HarvestAmountMultiplier" now works as it used to, to bias towards yielding rarer items. This is more costly for server performance, so if you want a more "optimized" server with high HarvestAmountMultiplier (but less rare items), you can launch with ?UseOptimizedHarvestingHealth=true