Summer Bash Is Live

Break out your shades and catch some rays in the 2020 Summer Bash event. If you ever needed an excuse to celebrate summer and soak in some sun, we’ve got you covered.  From June 25th to July 14th the second Summer Bash event will be underway.  Spend your time relaxing by the beach in the new Hawaiian shirts or have a fight your tribe using the new water-gun skin. However you choose to spend your summer in ARK, Summer Bash is bound to cook up a lot of entertainment. 

Server Settings

• -activeevent=Summer

Event Start

• PC: 10AM PDT
• XBOX & PS4: 1PM PDT

Rate Boosts

• 3X Breeding (mating interval, egg hatch speed, and maturation)
• 4X Player XP
• 4X Harvesting
• 4X Taming

New Emotes

• Guitar Riff
• Drum Solo
• Head Banger

New Skins

• 4 new Hawaiian-style shirt Skins
• 3 new Swimsuit Skins
• BBQ-themed Grilling Spatula (Club Skin)
• Frisbee Skin (Boomerang)
• 1 Sunglasses Skin w/ customizable lenses
• Super Soaker style Squirt Gun Skin (Flamethrower)

New Chibi Pets

• Manta
• Ammonite
• Cnidaria
• Plesiosaur
• Astrocetus

Event-Colored Wild Creatures

• Dino Dark Blue
• Red
• White
• Dino Sky Blue
• Dark Red
• Blue
• Light Grey
• Cream
• Cammo
• Orange
• MediumTeal
• DarkBlue
• LemonLime
• Peach
• Coral

The event kicks off at 10AM PDT for PC and 1PM PDT for XBOX and PS4.

UPDATE: We’ll be rolling out an patch to greatly reduce the cost of prime jerky for Summer Bash items later this evening. In the meantime, start stocking up that jerky for your chibis and emotes!

Breeding Performance Improvements

With the start of the 5th Anniversary event, we implemented some changes to the way our servers calculate growing baby dinos. By distributing these calculations we can recover some of the performance costs related to breeding calculations, which is quite cost-intensive.

In more technical terms, we have done this by measuring the stress on a server with each tick and batching the actors to process their breeding calculations over the course of several ticks rather than all of them on every tick. For a server that is already in a stable state not much might be noticed, but for a server under intense stress players may notice that breeding calculations, and the initial start of mating may be a little delayed.

The good news is that players should notice less performance issues during boosted breeding rates. Servers will always be put under extra strain during event rates, especially so in regards to breeding rates but we’ve sought to minimize that with these changes and we’ve noticed some positive improvements.

If you are on a busy server and experiencing some delays, this is why and we’re currently iterating on this so these response delays don’t feel like as much of a disruption.

Our Community Crunch Is Moving

We’re moving the Community Crunch back to Friday’s!  In addition to moving the Crunch back to Friday’s we’ll start to feature community content in the Community Crunch rather than its own separate day.  If you are creating or sharing ARK content, be sure to tag it with #playARK for a chance to be featured!

ARK Summer Sale

Kick back enjoy a great start to your summer with the ARK Summer Sale.  For a limited time, ARK will be up to 80% off!

ARK on Steam

ARK on Epic Games Store

EVO Event

While Summer Bash is active from June 25th to July 14th, there will be no special EVO event rates.

Summer Bash Rates

• 3X Breeding (mating interval, egg hatch speed, and maturation)
• 4X Player XP
• 4X Harvesting
• 4X Taming

Community Fan Art

Crystal Griffin by @bluedragonark

Fire Reef by @ProjectTiamat

ActualBlack Megatherium by @TiiaAurora

Argentavis on Genesis by @PicturesofArk
 

Epic Viking Longhouse by @ThePilgrimz

Wyvern Drawing by @RunsWithPencil

See you next week!

Studio Wildcard 

Twitter: twitter.com/survivetheark
Facebook: facebook.com/survivetheark
Reddit: reddit.com/r/playark
Instagram: instagram.com/survivetheark
Twitch: twitch.tv/survivetheark
Steam: steamcommunity.com/app/346110
Youtube: youtube.com/survivetheark