Games
Get ahead of the game and level up quickly with these tips and directions for ARK: Survival Evolved.
Given the multitude of ways available to die and fail, ARK: Survival Evolved isn't the kind of game that offers much in the way of shortcuts and backdoors when it comes to progressing through its dinosaur-infested world. As a new player, it’s essential that you approach the game with an open mind and take every opportunity you can to learn and gain experience. Without experience you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Once you’ve gotten beyond the opening hours and gained the kind of experience that provides you with the tools to take more calculated risks and put yourself on the line you can really start to enjoy what ARK offers.
To that end we’ve put together some core tips and strategies you can use to level up as quickly possible, from approaches to crafting and base building and from playing with friends to focusing on certain enemies.
Explore. Explore. Explore.
You gain experience for coming across and uncovering new areas, making it a brilliant way to level up when you first begin playing. Not only is your character getting stronger, you’re also learning the layout of the land, understanding how the world fits together and gaining environmental knowledge that could help you in difficult situations later down the line.
Do not underestimate the value of this sort of learning. It’s invaluable, and the sooner you absorb it the sooner you can take advantage of it. Exploration is something you should spend a lot of time doing in ARK anyway, so treat the XP as an added bonus.
Don’t be afraid to die early
In ARK you don’t lose your XP progress if you die. This means you should be less worried than you might be in other survival games to put your life on the line if the potential reward is big enough to warrant an aggressive approach.
Once you’ve died you can set about getting back any gear that you’ve lost and reconstructing your base. Whilst this might seem like a pain, the quality of gear and the usefulness of your camp will be limited in the early going and so you shouldn’t feel so attached to it that you remove all risk from your strategy.
Be a killer of bugs
In a game featuring dinosaurs, bugs are not the most interesting or aspirational of prey but we’re here to level up quickly and that means we shouldn’t be turning our noses up at the beasts that are relatively straightforward to kill.
Take down the least threatening dinosaur you can find and leave its corpse out in the open. Bugs will eventually come to it to feed and that’s when you can take advantage of them. Kill them and take advantage of the XP they dish out upon death. Make sure you’ve the means to heal yourself if you’re planning on performing this tactic for a lengthy period.
Join a tribe
Playing with and alongside others gives not only a greater sense of overall purpose and accomplishment, it also rewards you more XP more quickly. Being close to a fellow tribe member when they perform any XP-awarding action results in you getting some of it for yourself.
Being in a tribe also allows you to go out in large hunting parties and kill a huge number of beasts in a single sweep, including the usually intimidating Alphas, which can be a fantastic way to level up quickly. Just make sure you all communicate effectively with a view to staying alive. If one party member goes down then the rest have to pick up the slack and that’s when mistakes start to happen with irritating regularity.
Craft rafts
Early on in your journey you gain the ability to create your own rafts. As soon as you unlock this option you should take advantage of it immediately given that the modest investment of required resources is more than made up for by the return in XP for each raft created. Rafts really do offer one of the best resources-to-XP reward ratios in the entire game.
It makes sense to start hoarding away wood and hide it as soon as you’re able and keep it back for crafting rafts when you can. Yes, building the same thing can get old after not too long, but the reward is worth the early effort in this case.
Create a mega base
Building bases is fun. Building the grandest, largest base you can possibly imagine is more fun and comes laden with massive XP bonuses. When you’re building you’re also crafting, which is where your XP numbers can go through the roof if you set yourself the task of crafting enough to make the largest base that time and imagination allows.
The best thing about this approach is that a genuinely fun task is met with genuinely lofty XP gains. We want to level up as fast as possible, sure, but there’s no reason why we can’t have fun doing it, right? Compete amongst your friend group to see who can create the biggest base and you’ll soon see your character level rise as high as your base.
For more gaming coverage, follow @RedBullGames on Twitter and Instagram and like us on Facebook.
.png)
