Create your first ARK: Survival Evolved server

Spin up an ASE server, pick your maps, and get your friends connected.

Your computer is connected, so let’s get ARK: Survival Evolved running on it and your friends in.

Playing the newer ARK instead? Head to Create your first ARK: Survival Ascended server. The two games are different enough that they each get their own walkthrough.

A quick note on words you’ll see in the dashboard:

  • A server is the game installed on your computer (your ASE install).
  • A map is a world running inside that server (like The Island or Fjordur). One server can run several maps.

Step 1: Create the server

  1. In your dashboard, open the computer you connected and click Add server.
  2. Choose ARK: Survival Evolved.
  3. Click Create server, and the install starts.

ASE is around 20 GB, so it’s a decent download but roughly half the size of the newer ARK. You can close the tab and come back. The dashboard shows the progress.

Step 2: Let the wizard set it up

Once the install finishes you’ll see two buttons. Set up my first map is the one you want. (Configure manually is there if you’d rather skip the questions and go straight to the settings yourself.)

The wizard asks eleven short questions, and every answer is written in plain language about how the game feels, not in numbers. Nobody needs to know what “3x taming” means to know whether they want a big carnivore to be an evening project.

  • How you’ll play: PvE or PvP, roughly how many players, where your friends bought ARK (Steam only, or Steam plus friends on the free Epic Games version), and whether to lock the server with a join password. Your PvE or PvP answer swaps in the question that actually matters for it, either offline base protection or whether abandoned bases and tames decay away.
  • The game itself: how fast taming, gathering, and leveling should be, how high wild dino levels go, and how fast babies raise.
  • Comfort: whether to apply the standard quality-of-life settings.

Answers fan out sensibly rather than one at a time. The raising answer, for instance, sets hatch speed, mature speed, mating interval, and cuddle interval together, so imprinting still works properly at any speed. That’s the pile of coupled settings that usually catches first-time hosts out.

Step 3: Pick your maps and name it

After the questions comes the map step. The Island is marked as recommended and is a good place to start, but you can pick as many as you like from the full list, including Scorched Earth, Aberration, Ragnarok, Crystal Isles, Lost Island and Fjordur.

Pick more than one and we link them together as a cluster, so players and dinos can travel between them. Ports are sorted out for you. If you do run a cluster, each map adds its own name onto the end, so “Dino Camp” becomes “Dino Camp - The Island” and so on.

Name it, check the review screen, and the wizard sets everything up so it’s ready on the first boot.

Step 4: Tweak your settings

The wizard’s answers aren’t locked in. From the map’s settings you can change any of it later, and there are quick presets if you want to shift the whole feel in one click.

For rates you get Official (1×), Small Tribes (2.5×), ARKpocalypse (3×), Boosted and Fast (5×). The first three match how those official server types actually play, so they’re a quick way to get a familiar feel. For breeding there’s Official (1×), Fast (10×) and Ultra (50×).

Want mods? ASE mods come from the Steam Workshop. Add them from the mods section and we’ll handle installing and updating them for you. One thing we don’t do yet on ASE is community-made mod maps, so stick to the official map list for now.

There’s also a seasonal events setting, so you can switch on things like Winter Wonderland, Fear Evolved or Love Evolved when they come around, and switch them off again after.

Step 5: Start it up

Hit start on your map. It takes a minute or two to spin up and come online. The dashboard shows when it’s live.

You can also turn on automatic updates so the game and your mods stay current without you lifting a finger, or leave it off and update on your own schedule.

Step 6: Get your friends in

This is the fiddliest part of hosting ASE, and it’s the game’s fault rather than yours. ASE won’t let players type in a server address from inside the game, so your friends add it through Steam first:

  1. In Steam, click View, then Game Servers.
  2. Go to the Favorites tab and click Add a server.
  3. Paste in the address from your dashboard and add it.

From then on your server shows up in ARK’s server list and they can join it normally. If you set a join password they’ll need that too.

It’s worth pasting those three steps to your friends along with the address, because it catches everyone out the first time.

And that’s it. You’re hosting your own ASE server on your own hardware. Welcome to being the host.

Adding more maps later

Click Add a map any time to add another, and it gets its own settings.

If you want your players to travel between them, put them in the same cluster. There’s a cluster option when you add a map, just give them all the same cluster name.

Running into trouble? Most issues are a map still starting up or a setting that needs a tweak. Give it a couple of minutes after starting, then check the map’s status in your dashboard.