Recently started playing this with friends. One of my friends is paying for a server where we do group stuff, and I also play some solo stuff in single player mode to for increased difficulty.
Several things I have learned with the game you will not find out elsewhere very easily. Guess since I started playing, I've been itching to write an actual good guide that isn't full of wrong info like so many other guides I've read. Mainly this guide is best for the complete solo player, but works in multi-play mode too. This is also intended as an intro game guide to help with the beginning aspects of the game.
From the beginning
Pick your gender, looks, and start the game. You'll be deposited in a random location based off a general spawn spot you pick after character creation. The default game map is basically one big tropical island with several smaller islands around it. Other maps have different spawn locations I won't cover in this guide. On the default map there are spawn points on the north side, south side, east side, or west side. There are 3 general spots for each side you can spawn on though roughly. Every location you spawn at will be on a beach. This is because beaches do not spawn high level carnivores. So they tend to be safer to start at. That doesn't mean they are safe because there aren't horde of T-Rex's sitting on the beach, it just means you won't run into a hoard of T-Rex's on a beach naturally. However, as time progresses in the game, some higher carnivores can and do wander down to the beaches. Generally speaking, the south shore is the safest place to start, the west shore second safest, the east shore the next safest, and the north shore the most dangerous of all the new starting spawn points as the beach it narrower and closer to many large carnivore spawns. So I recommend when starting out to start a new game to spawn somewhere on the south shore which tends to be the default spawn point after character creation.
First thing first, find a tree and start punching. Get 10 thatch, and 1 wood from punch a tree of any type. The graphics, i.e. how the tree looks on your screen, for the tree don't matter as all tree's are the same when it comes to resources given. Punch with the left click button. Punching objects will hurt you a little bit so don't over do it. Once you collect the 10 thatch and 1 wood piece, walk along the beach pressing E button. This will pick up stones along the beach. You only need 1 stone at this point right now.
Once you have a single stone, 10 thatch, and 1 wood, press the letter I to bring up inventory. Click the button on the top right to go to craftable tab. This tab lists all the "blueprints" your character personally knows how to make items with. When you start the game you have 2 such blueprints. A stone pick, and a torch. Select the pick and hit the create button.
Once the pick is created, drag the icon from the inventory tab onto your hot bar. Place the icon for the pick where ever you like on the hotbar, but I usually drag it over to the 1 key. Now you can swing a pick to gather more resources effectively.
Once you've done all this, you probably have gained a level. Hit the I key to go back into your inventory. On the bottom right you'll see a bunch of stats that comprise your character. You get 1 stat point to spend per level to increase a single stat slightly. Below is some general info for stat s and my recommendations on spending stat points when leveling.
1) Weight. Increase this to at least 400. You'll need it in this game being this high. It's literally the most important stat in the game. The previous statement is especially true when starting out. Increasing your weight carrying capacity means you can carry more. With the game requiring tons of resources, and many resources weighing a lot; you'll need this stat fairly high. Another thing to note, once you reach 50% of your max weight capacity you'll start slowing down with your movement speed. Also, anything you do draws increasingly more stamina per action when carrying more weight above the threshold points. Once you reach 85% of your max weight capacity you can no longer jump or use the sprint command. At 100% or higher you can't move at all. So weight capacity is very important. You start with 100 weight capacity and every stat point spent increases your capacity by 10. Which means typically for the first 30 levels you'll be spending every point here if you want to make the game a bit easier.
2) Stamina. Every action in this game takes stamina. Once you run out, you basically can't do anything. You move at a crawl pace (slower than walking) when out of stamina. If you continue to over tax yourself once you've run out of stamina can cause your character to generate topor. Topor generation will put your character to sleep which makes you at the mercy of anything in the vicinity of your character. Luckily stamina regenerates very fast if you stop for a moment and don't do anything. Walking while out of stamina, and only walking will allow your character to regenerate stamina still, but at a much slower rate than just standing still. the good side is the game doesn't allow you to complete most actions which drain stamina when you are out. So no sprinting or tool usage allowed, but if you are swimming while out of stamina then the swim action is over taxing. Swimming while out of stamina will generate topor. Which puts you to sleep and causes you to drown. You start with 100 stamina and get 10 points per stat point.
3) Fortitude. This stat affects how much your character can "shrug" off any adverse affect in the game. The game has many adverse affects, and the higher your fortitude, the less stuff effects you. There is diminishing returns to this stat, so pumping it up a whole lot won't be an effective usage of stat point allocation. You start with zero fortitude and get 2 points per stat point spent. At 10 fortitude (5 levels of stat points) you effective gain 20% adverse affects resistance. At 50 points (25 stat point placements) you gain 40% resistance.
What are adverse affects? Well being too hot or too cold are both adverse affects. Being too hot makes your character lose "water" faster. Being too cold makes your character lose "food" faster. Meaning you'll either have to drink more or eat more. Some monsters in the game can poison you which in turn the point will make you sleepy. Fortitude also gives you resistance to that as well. Fortitude also affects stamina drainage. More fortitude, the less stamina any action consumes. So fortitude is a very good stat to get some points into.
4) Run Speed. This is another important stat, but not quite as needed early. It can be skipped entirely, but I find later in the game it comes in handy. It takes 120% or higher run speed to sprint faster than the vast majority of land base animals in the game, but you only need 100% run speed to use the circle strafe tactic to later tame an Argentavis in the game. After which you won't need to kite to tame animals any more. Once you start being able to ride a mount, run speed becomes less of a factor. Run speed is a nice to have with PVE content and a bit more useful if doing PVP content.
5) Oxygen. Don't bother with this. It makes you survive under water longer and swim faster. By the time you are doing the water/ocean content you should be using Scuba gear and riding a good water mount to make this stat useless to put point into.
6) Health. Again I wouldn't bother. In PVE you'll die very quickly to the bigger carnivores if you aren't mounted regardless of your health pool. It's marginally more useful in PVP.
So what do I recommend overall when starting? 30 points into weight, 5 points into fortitude, 10 points into stamina. This takes you to level 41 in points. Everything else you can tailor to your play style after that. I know several friends though that prefer having a run speed increase to 120% including myself. It's more for the convenience factor than anything else. Here is a warning on run speed though. Once you go over 200%, you risk killing yourself often by running so fast that you can launch yourself when running along the ground. Then you land and die.
Okay, once you've spent your stat point, which should be on weight capacity based off this guide, the game will prompt you with a list of crafting recipes that you can spend "engram" points on. Engram points are just like stat points. You get more Engram points per level the higher level you go. Higher tier recipes also cost more points to acquire. You cannot acquire every recipe in the game. In fact, you don't need to do so at all. Here is some info on crafting recipes that you may not find in other guides.
Anything you get from an innate "engram" recipe will always be of "primitive" type. This game, like many other color coded games, has levels of items that have color coded names. Most stuff you use and find in the game is "white" level with the keyword Primitive. So the pickaxe you made at start of the game has the title "Primitive Stone Pickaxe" and is a white normal item. The next title up is the green title "Ramshackle" which has better stats than primitive types. The next after that is Apprentice with blue title. The basic progression of quality is Primitive (Engram quality), Ramshackle, Apprentice, Journeyman, Mastercraft and Ascendant. You get the picture. Same Diablo, WoW, MMORPG color coding scheme that you are used to from other games. The difference is that in Ark you'll more than likely being using "white" items for a very long time. This is because, as noted earlier in the guide, all learned recipes your character knows through engram points spent while leveling can only make white items.
To get better quality items you either have to find them or find the blueprint recipe for the item. Some higher level monsters in the game will very rarely spawn with items on them. Usually the Alpha based animals. Also some items can be passed around to other carnivores as dinosaurs get eaten. Otherwise, the other way to obtain better items or blue prints is through the random spawned loot crates that appear all over the island, or with the special loot crates in dungeons or on the bottom of the ocean floor. Now let's go over loot crates.
General land based loot crates are formed by gigantic beams of light that spawn in random places on the island. Each beam is color coded. The color coding is both a level restriction and a representation of the possible types of items the loot crate can contain. The color coding is exactly the same as the color coding for item quality. White -> Green -> Blue -> Purple -> Yellow -> Red. Here is the level break down for the color coding on loot crates.
White = 3
Green = 15
Blue = 25
Purple = 35
Yellow = 45
Red = 55
Which means you have to be that level to even open the loot crate of that color code. The cool thing about the crates is the fact they can spawn blueprints which you can use to make items. Blueprints tend to spawn more often in Blue or higher crates though. Blueprints never decay or are destroyed by usage. Which means, even though you can't learn every "recipe" in the game through engram points, it doesn't matter. You can eventually find blue prints to make almost everything in the game, and usually making those items of better quality than white through those blueprints. Another warning though is that building higher "level" items from blue prints take more resources. Also, higher level doesn't mean better if it isn't a weapon, armor, tool, or saddle. A higher level pipe fitting does exactly the same as a lower one, but costs more to make. Some stuff, like ascendant saddles are in some cases currently impossible to craft in the game. The required resources cannot be fit into any current crafting table.
At the beginning of the game, you'll see loot crates all over. Most will be of colors you can't open. Even the few white ones you'll see are probably going to far off from where ever you are and getting there will probably entail passing many carnivores which will result in your death.
Speaking of death and dying.... get used to it. You are going to die a lot in this game early on. Most of the time you can make it back to your corpse just fine, but many times you won't.
Continuing with the general beginners guide....
At the Engram window that was opened when you gained your first level, I suggest getting the hatchet and the club. Some players like the spear first, but the club is better in my opinion. It may do less damage, but it allows you to knock monsters unconscious so you can tame them. You can use your fists for that, but many it sucks to use your fists on anything if you don't have to as you have to get into closer melee range and hitting with your fists can hurt you.
Here is a list of recipe engrams you'll want to learn early on up to level 5. Here is a link though to the recipe list and the levels they are unlocked on.
http://ark.gamepedia.com/Engrams
Hatchet
Club
Spear
Campfire
Water skin
Cloth armor (all pieces)
Sleeping bag
Thatch foundation
Thatch wall
Thatch ceiling
Thatch doorframe
Thatch door
Mortar and pestle
Simple bed
Narcotic
Slingshot
Spark Powder
Storage Box
Now these recipes are all useful and key to unlocking higher level recipes. For example, you can't unlock any Hide armor piece until you've unlocked the lower level cloth level item of that same armor piece type. So hide helmet requires cloth helmet. Of course if you are working with another person on an server, you and your partner can split recipe learning duties. Doing this makes the game much easier in some ways. However, if your partner quits or isn't on when you need an item they make then you could be screwed until they get on again. Also, I wouldn't bother wasting points on the architecture recipes that are purely cosmetic right now. Things like Sloped walls or ceiling are cool to build with, but aren't required to actually make a building.
Once you've picked Hatchet and Club, it is time to make those items. To make a hatchet, you'll need a new resource called flint. So now it is time to go over resources and gathering in a bit more detail. Every object in the environment that you can interact with provides some sort of resource. Some resources are used automatically and instantly, like drinking water from a river. Many objects degrade over time like most food. Most resources though are used to build stuff. Every resource you either gather by hitting the E key with nothing in your hand, or by swinging the proper tool while equipped with the left click of the mouse. The type of tool equipped will have an effect on the type of resource gathered as well amount gathered. Here is some examples of resources you'll find when starting out.
Trees = Thatch and Wood. Using a pickaxe on a tree gives you more Thatch than wood. Using a hatchet on a tree gives more wood than thatch.
Bushes = Fiber (if gathered by hand or sickle), and berries. Berries are very important in this game. They are used to tame herbivores, you can eat some of them to gain a bit of water and food satiation, and they can be used to put animals to sleep or prevent being put to sleep.
Rocks = Stone, metal, and flint. Some rocks provide more metal and the more metal veins you see in a rock the more metal it can provide. Pickaxes on rocks provide more Flint, and hatchets provide more stone.
Dead bodies = Meat and hide are typical resources that can be acquired from dead bodies. However, some dead bodies provide other resources based on the monster type. For example many bug monsters can provide Chitin. Most dinos with horns/spikes can provide keratin. Trillobytes provide oil. Using a pickaxe provides more meat and the hatchet provides more of the other materials. Also, really big animals (like T-Rex's) or juvenile monsters can provide a meat called Raw Prime meat. This is a very useful resource for taming carnivore dinosaurs. Only penguins right now have juveniles that spawn in the wild though so I wouldn't worry about trying to track down juvenile animals for Raw Prime.
Those are the basics of resources you can gather from the environment but there are many many more out there you'll need later in harder to reach locations on the map. You'll need things like crystals for glass, or obsidian for electronic components which aren't not found anywhere near the beaches of the island usually. Also, many of the animals that you can mount can also be used to gather resources. As an example, an Ankylosaurus gathers more thatch from trees than wood, but Mammoths can gather more wood than thatch from trees. Also, just about any animal can gather far more resource materials than any tool you can use as a player per "swing" of an attack on the resource node. For example, a player using his fist on a tree might gather 10 thatch and 1 or 2 wood after smacking the tree about a few dozen times and making the tree fall over. With a pickaxe equipped the play may get about 20 thatch and 4 wood per tree, or 20 wood and 4 thatch per tree with a stone hatchet. Better tools also get more materials too. A metal hatchet on the same tree may get 35 wood and 10 thatch which is more than a stone hatchet. However, compared to a Mammoth both tools pale in effectiveness. A Mammoth may get 80 wood and 20 thatch per tree. Not to mention there is no durability loss to animals when gathering unlike with tools the require repairs.
Back to the play through guide. Since you know about bit about resource gathering now and have a stone pickaxe ready, it's time to make a hatchet. Find a big rock and start swinging. You can just hold down the mouse button to keep swinging. You don't need to click for every swing unless you like carpal tunnel. Swinging the pickaxe at a rock should net you mostly flint and some stone. With some fiber you've gathered from bushes, and some wood from trees then you should be able to craft a hatchet finally. Also to note, while any tool can be used as a weapon to cause damage, they aren't very effective at it compared to actual weapons. So a spear per swing is going to cause much more damage than either a hatchet or pickaxe. The reverse is also true. A hatchet or pickaxe is going to gather resources like meat and hide much better off dead bodies than a spear will. Melee weapons can be used to gather resources off dead bodies, but nothing else.
Now its time to make a club! Smack trees and gather fiber to get some more wood to create the club with. Speaking of making clubs. Here is a
Pro Tip. Crafting many items gives EXP once completed. Clubs give 0.7 EXP by default, torches do 0.3, hatchet and stone pick both are 0.4 exps, spear is 0.6 xp, and campfires are 3.5 exps. Campfires take a bit longer to craft and take more resources in comparison to the exps required to make them. However, early on making a lot of clubs, torches, or spears is a great way to level. Just dump the extras on the ground and let them disappear until you have made a place to store them.
With a club and some berries on hand, you may be able to tame stuff! Now for some info on taming.
Not everything in the game can be tamed, but most things can be. Also some monsters are far easier to tame than others. Trying to tame a T-Rex when just starting the game is going to get yourself eaten by said T-Rex. Heck, most carnivores are going to devour your scrawny little character when starting out.The exception being Dilophosaurus. These guys move just slow enough as carnivores to tame easily at fairly low levels. For those reading this guide and don't know what a Dilo is, I suggest this link.
http://ark.gamepedia.com/Dilophosaur
They look like smaller raptors in game but with a frilly mane around their head and on their tales. They also spit green goo at your face that blinds you. Just like how Newman dies in Jurassic park! Luckily they don't have high topor levels which is why they are great to tame when starting the game.
Some info on taming and topor. Topor is the stat every character has in the game, including your character. You start with a max topor stat of 200. Topor works as an inverse stat. Meaning your topor level is normally 0/200. As you take topor damage, your topor increases. If your character reaches 50 topor you'll fall asleep. Dinosaurs don't fall asleep until they reach max topor level. Topor levels degrade over time. Degradation rates depend on the type of dino. Some wake up much faster than others.
Before you go hunting a Dilo to tame, you'll need some narcoberries and some meat. The berries come from bushes. Just use your hands with the E key to gather a good stack of them. Each narcoberry adds 8 topor to a monster when it is forced fed to them. More on force feeding later.
Best way to get meat though is to smack a dodo bird down. Most dodo birds drop with a single hit of anything, including your fist, if the bird is low enough level. Just down a few dodo birds and use a pickaxe on the bodies to get some meat off them.
I recommend about 20 meat and narcoberries to start with. Mainly because some of the meat will spoil before you can find and tame a Dilo, and the berries will go bad too. The meat goes bad faster than the berries, so get the berries first.
Wander around until you can find a Dilophosaur. They do not have a big agro range and you have to be fairly close to them before they attack normally. Which means you can get pretty close before they attack. Speaking of which, most of the time a Dilophosaur's first attack is to spit at you. The Dilo will raise its frilly mane around his head while shaking it. Then the dilo will spit right at you. This spit you can side-step dodged pretty easily. Once it spits, the Dilo can't spit again for another 25 seconds or so. Which is PLENTY of time for you to get into melee range with your club. Even if you don't move into melee range, the Dilo will.
Melee combat in Ark is a bit tricky. All melee attacks have a bit of a knockback component. So if you hit the Dilo with your club, you'll send it backwards a half step or so. If the Dilo hits you, then you are sent backwards a half step. Bigger dinosaurs send you back MUCH farther if they hit you with a melee attack. If you time it right, you can smack the Dilo on the head with a club before it hits you. Which interrupts it's attack, sends it backwards, and if you move backwards at the same time, you'll have enough time to recover the swing and attack again when it gets into melee range. Which means if done right, you can knock a Dilophosaur unconscious without being hit once with a club. However, chances are you are going to die the first few attempts at taming a Dilo this way. Don't get discouraged. Just respawn and restart again like new at making a pickaxe, then hatchet, then club, then gather more berries, and meat before trying again.
Also when it comes to taming it is key to know your weapon and topor levels that the weapons generate as well as the max topor levels of the target. A low level Dilophosaur may have between 100 to 200 max topor. The swing of a club to the head of a Dilo does about 20 topor damage and a much smaller amount of hitpoint damage. Like 5 hp damage. So it takes about 5-10 or so hits with a club to knock a low level Dilo unconscious. Clubs also break after about 20 hits or so. Another thing to note is where you hit with your weapon to generate topor. Headshots count for max damage of either topor or hitpoint damage. Body shots count for some percentage less of max. The percentage amount less for a body shot depends on the dino you are attacking and its armor rating. Tail and appendage hits do the least damage to a target. So always try to aim for the head in this game. Lastly, there are topor based weapons and damage based weapons. Topor based weapons like clubs, or bows using tranq arrows, or guns using tranq darts will do significantly more topor per hit than hitpoint damage. Weapons like spears, swords, and guns with normal ammo will do little or nothing on topor and do lots of hitpoint damage.
Once you've knocked unconscious the Dilo, you can begin to attempt to tame it. This style of taming is called violent taming which works on most monsters in the game. Violent taming is essentially knocking unconscious a target monster, loading it up with food it likes, and forcing it to stay asleep while it eats the food provided. Eating food will make a "taming" meter bar fill up. Once that bar is full, the creature is considered tame and all yours to use with as you like in game.
There are some monsters in the game you can't tame this way. You have to use another method called passive taming. I will explain that later.
Dilophosaurs, being carnivores like raw meat. So after knocking out the Dilo with your club, open its inventory by clicking E when standing next to the body of the Dilo on the ground. From here you'll want to drag over the narco berries and raw meat. Once the meat is in the inventory it starts the taming process. Close the inventory and you should see two bars f you look at the body of the Dilo when standing close to it. The top bar should be mostly solid purple and degrading from purple to gray. That bar is labeled "unconscious" is a measure of when the monster will wake up. If the bar goes fully gray before the taming bar is full, then the monster wakes up and begins to resume attacking you. This also basically screws over the taming process. The other bar is the "taming" bar that fill up over time as the monster automatically eats the food you provide. This is a brown bar that fills up over the gray. Also if you look at the "taming" bar you may see a line of text about taming effectiveness. Any monster you try to tame at level 4 or higher has a chance to gain additional levels at the end of the taming process. Which now leads me into the in depth explanation of taming in this game. Probably one of the most important sections in this guide. As such, here is a new bold header for it.
TAMING PROCESS
As noted above there is two types of taming processes. Violent and passive. Violent is the most common type and requires the player to knock out a target and feed it food to tame it. Passive requires the player to force food onto a target when that target isn't looking at the player. Since it is quicker to explain the passive taming I'll do that.
Passive Taming or shoving food up their butts
The monkeys, both big and small, as well as dolphins all require passive taming. To tame a target passive requires first off, meeting the level requirement. Gigantopithecus (big gorillas) require level 30, Mesopithecus (little monkeys) require level 70, and level 1 for Ichthyosaurus (dolphins) are the taming requirements. To tame any of them you have to approach them from behind with the food on the 0 slot on your hotkey bar. It MUST be the 0 key slot. When you get close enough from behind you can hit the E key while having nothing out in your hands and you'll force a piece of food over. You'll have to keep doing this until they are tamed. If you are close enough from behind the target you are passively taming, you can see a taming bar.
I will state this when it comes to passive taming, be careful. Again you can only pass food off while behind the target. If you get in front of a dolphin or monkey while too close they run away very far and start losing taming meter and taming effectiveness. If you get too close while in front of a gorilla, they just attack. Gorillas are also ridiculous powerful for their level compared with most anything else in the game. A single hit from one, if you aren't wearing armor, will most likely kill you. Even with armor, they tend to break them piece by piece per hit. Gigantopithecus also tends to hit in a small AOE radius around itself when it attacks. Luckily the Gigantopithecus doesn't chase far and isn't fast enough to keep up with you if you sprint away. Still, it screws over the taming bar and effectiveness when this happens.
To make matters worse, most of these monsters move around in fairly random patterns. Which means many times you'll come up to give the target food and it will do a complete 180 at the same time. Also, there is a time frame that has to go by before you can hand over more food. The higher level the target, the longer that time frame is. Dolphins are the quickest eaters. Basically every 5 second or so you can shove more food up their butt. Gorillas take about 30-90 seconds before you can give them more food. Monkeys require 15-45 seconds between feedings. Again this all depends on levels of the target you are taming.
That's the basics of passive taming, now on to violent taming.
Violent Taming or beating them on the head and dragging them back to your cave
As note earlier in this guide, this style of taming is about knocking out your target, shoving food into their inventories, and making sure they stay unconscious by force feeding them narcotics.
First off, the weapons table and topor gains. Here is the wikia link to this info. This info is based on primitive white weapons. Better quality weapons do more damage and more topor damage.
http://ark.gamepedia.com/Weapon_Damage
Scroll down to the table near the bottom for topor damage and levels. Values in this table shown are for head shots only. Body shots receive less damage, and tail/wing/appendage shots even less damage.
Targets are knocked unconscious when their topor levels max out. Low level little dinosaurs may one have 100 to 200 max topor while bigger high level dinosaurs have a max topor level in the thousands.
Once a target is knocked out, you open its inventory by pressing E if you are standing close enough. From here you can shove food or really anything over. If you give over food of a type the target likes at all, it will start the taming process the moment the target eats the first piece. This is key, because the first piece it eats is the person that is taming the target. Other people may shove food in later, but they don't count towards the initial player taming effectiveness modifiers. This makes a difference as I'll explain a little later.
Target will not eat anything it doesn't like. Still you can force feed a dino to eat anything it doesn't like. Once you shove food into its inventory, there is a button on the bottom of the inventory labeled "Force feed item to target" or something to that effect. Clicking that button while having an item in the inventory highlighted will force the target to eat that item. You can force herbivore dinosaurs to eat meat, carnivore dinos to eat berries, or if you really want to be silly force anything to eat poop. Yes you can force them to eat poop. I don't recommend the action though if you are trying to get a good pet out of the taming process. This is because force feeding ANYTHING lowers the taming effectiveness.
Taming effectiveness is the ability to have the target you are taming to gain additional levels when the taming process is complete. The max additional levels a target can gain is 49.5% of the current level of the target. So basically half minus 1. Which means the target has to be level 4 to gain any potential extra levels. Max natural level in game for any dinosaur is 120 and that is ONLY if the difficulty for the game play is set to max difficulty. Max natural level for the normal default difficulty is level 30. So a perfectly tamed level 120 creature can actually end up level 179 if done right. A level 30 could be 44. This is HUGE! as having pets much higher level than stuff found in the wild makes them much more usable. Taming effectiveness starts at 100% and as the taming process continues, it can lower and probably will lower. If you reach 50% effectiveness when the taming process ends, then you'll get about half the bonus levels you could have gotten. Meaning a level 30 that could have been a level 44 is instead a level 37 when you finish taming it.
So what affects taming effectiveness? Many things. Here is the list.
1) Your level is first. Higher level you are, the less effectiveness you lose over time. This is why it is key who starts the taming process.
2) How many times you've tamed that type of target. The more you tame a certain type of dino, the more effective you are when taming future targets of that type.
3) Length of the taming process. The longer it takes to tame a target, the less effective you are. Higher level targets take longer to tame.
4) Damage taken before and after taming starts. In the process of knocking out your target, you are going to inflict hitpoint damage. The more you inflict before knocking the target unconscious, the less effective the taming process is. Effectiveness level massively drops for any damage taken while unconscious. Damage can come from you, another dinosaur attacking the target, of even the ground shaking stomps of bigger herbivores. Make sure to protect your dino under the taming process if you want the most out of it.
5) Preferred food types. This is the biggest part where the player can affect the taming effectiveness outcome. Dinosaurs will automatically eat any food they like. The better they like that food, the more the taming bar increases. The more the taming bar increases, the less time it takes to tame. The less time it takes to tame, the less the effectiveness rating drops. Some foods can also provide more effectiveness rating when eating as well. Read this page and look at the chart there about halfway down.
http://ark.gamepedia.com/Taming
It's mostly correct.
Carnivores will eat any meat except spoiled (unless the carnivore is a carrion eater like scorpions). Cooked meats will automatically be eaten, but progress the taming meter the least. Raw meat is slightly better. Cooked Prime is better than raw meat. Raw prime is better than cooked prime. The appropriate kibble is the best.
Kibble is made through cooking. You can read up on making kibble here.
http://ark.gamepedia.com/Kibble
Making kibble is something most players do later in the game and not something to usually worry about early on.
When a dino eats a food they like automatically, they gain food satiation value. The table above lists how much they gain. The target won't eat again until they lose enough satiation to gain enough to eat what they like again in their inventory. While taming, creatures eat things they prefer over other items in their inventory. Meaning if you stick both raw meat and raw prime meat in the inventory of a unconscious creature, the raw prime will be eaten first over the raw meat.
Most herbivores like their specific kibble first, then their specific agriculture grown food, then berries. Out of the berries, Mejo berries tend to be the most preferred for most herbivores, but not all of them. Still, Mejo berries are usually the best bet to go with when taming herbivores in the beginning of the game.
As mentioned previously, you can force feed a dino to eat things it won't automatically eat. Doing so has the following effects: Reduces taming effectiveness level, reduces food satiation level, slows down taming bar. This goes for anything including narcoberries or narcotics. Unfortunately, most dinosaurs will not eat all the food needed to tame them in the time it takes them to normally wake up. Which means force feeding a dinosaur either narcoberries or narcotics to keep them asleep longer. Narcotics are better than the berries because you get only 8 topor from the berries, but 40 from the narcotics. Which means you force feed the creature less often with narcotics. Less force feeding the better.
So the tips to gaining max taming effectiveness are to be high level, have previously tamed many creatures of that type, use the weapon with the best topor damage versus hitpoint damage ratio, only do headshots, use the most effective food, and protect your creature all times during the taming.
Back to the general guide
Now that we've learned all we need to learn about taming and maximizing taming effectiveness, time to continue where we left off with the guide. After taming a Dilo, time to tame a few more! Seriously, you'll want a few of these guys to protect you from the wander carnivores that may cross your path. Learn the default "whistle" pet command keys. Here is a list of the most used keys I use and their default bindings.
T = hold it down to bring up the pet command wheel.
J = make every pet nearby start following you or the mount you are riding on
U = make every pet nearby stop following
= = make every pet nearby go into neutral mode (yes that is the equal key that does this)
; = make every pet nearby go into passive mode (that is the semi colon key)
If you are taming a creature chances are you'll want to hit the semi colon key first so as to prevent your pets from killing your target before you have a chance to tame it. Otherwise you'll want your pets on neutral mode so they fight back if you or they are attacked by anything. This is important because if you forget to put your pets on neutral and you die, they will not defend themselves. Whatever killed you will kill them all. Chances are, you'll forget this point until you learn this lesson the hard way like just how everyone else does.
Once you have a pet or two, start putting any perishable resource in the inventory of your pet. This is because anything in a pet's inventory lasts much longer than in the player inventory. Actually, the player inventory is the worst place to put any perishable resource that decays over time. The player inventory increases the decay rate the fastest of all items.
You'll want to create a campfire as well soon. Drop some extra wood and raw meat in there to make cooked meat. Cooked meat you can put in a pet's inventory that will last about an hour that way. Cooked meat also provides far more food satiation than berries at a time. Just pop one out of the pets inventory when you need some food. Also, keep the charcoal created by the campfire when it burns the wood.
Eventually you'll reach level 5 and have access now to making slingshots. This makes the game SO MUCH EASIER from here on out. Being able to have range attack to tame dinosaurs with is huge. While you won't be taming anything big yet, you can now tame far more than Dilo's and dodo's.
My first recommendation is to find an Ankylosaurus. These are herbivores with spikes all over their body. They are tough as nails, deal massive damage, hit in a big AoE area, and can carry a decent amount of stuff. Their downside is they don't run very fast. The other downside is that you can't ride them for a very long time. The Engram recipe for their saddle is level 40, and loot crates won't drop their saddle or blueprint for their saddle until you can open the purple crates at level 35.
Still, the Anky is going to save your butt so many times that you'll lose track. It is seriously one of my favorite dinosaurs in the game. It is also the only dinosaur in the game capable of harvesting from bushes, trees, and rocks. Most other dinosaurs only do 1 or 2 of the 4 harvest nodes. The Anky does 3 out of the 4 and just can't harvest dead bodies. This makes them a very versatile pet to have. The last down side though is that the Anky is a bit clunky in its pathing and can get stuck on terrain from time to time. Just don't sprint everywhere or ride a fast mount early on while it is following and it'll be fine.
Speaking of riding, you may be wanting to look into riding one of your pets. At level 10 you can! You finally get access to the Parasaur saddle engram at level 10. Which allows you to ride a tamed Parasaur. My recommendation though is don't. They aren't much faster than you on foot. Their turning radius is horrible. While they can sprint faster than a player in the beginning can sprint, they tire out faster on stamina. Especially a lower level Parasaur sucks for stamina. Meaning you'll spend more time walking while riding them. They walk slower than players do.
They also suck at harvesting. While they harvest more berries per bush than a player can, you have to line up their snout so they hit dead center on a bush to harvest it. Half the time you miss and get nothing. Their clunkiness just makes them annoying to ride. Parasaurs are good for eggs, meat, and hides. That's about it.
You can also create a saddle for a dolphin at level 10 too. Again, I wouldn't bother. Trying to tame a dolphin alone at level 10 is an exercise in futility unless you like being constantly eaten by megladons. That, and there isn't much reason at this level to use one for a ride.
Which means the first real opportunity to ride a tamed pet is level 15. Now you can make a saddle for a Packy or a Raptor. Both are excellent choices. The raptor is better for travel, and the Packy better for taming.
Still, the solo player is going to have a very rough time taming either of these two dinosaurs to use as a steed. Raptors are VERY fast, way faster than the player, they move in packs, and deal lots of damage even as low level raptors. A level 1 raptor by itself is going to kill a 100 hp player in cloth armor in about 5 hits. Of which those hits come about 2 per second.
Pachys are almost as bad in some ways and worse in others. Packys hit harder and deal topor damage. Basically 2 hits from any Pachy and you are going to be sound asleep. Pachys are almost as fast as raptors too so kiting either is not really an option.
Also, both raptors and pachys are small enough in size that they rarely ever get stuck on terrain. Still, it does happen. They are also very good at running up our finding the correct path up cliffs.
Still, if you get lucky enough to tame ones of these by level 15, go ahead and learn the engram to make a saddle. More than likely it takes a group of low level players working together to tame either of these, and the solo player just doesn't have a chance at level 15 again either creature.
Which means realistically the first dinosaur you are going to ride as a solo player is a Trike! By the way, they make good pets too. Trikes are fairly fast for herbivores, deal good AoE damage, have good carry weight and stamina too. They lack a bit on total hitpoints for their size, and their size means they can get stuck on terrain sometimes. They are GREAT early on for gathering berries since they do AoE damage to everything in a large arc in front of them. Which means you'll harvest tons of berries and thatch from bushes and trees. This is key to leveling faster from this point on.
The problem with taming trikes is they tend to be in packs. They don't do huge damage or attack rapidly, but with enough of them, they'll make you into a soccer ball they kick around all over the place until you die. While a sprinting player is faster than a sprinting Trike, it isn't by much. Which makes kiting them very difficult to do. Still since they can get hung up on terrain it is easy to shoot them from on top rocks, cliffs, or through trees since they don't auto bust through trees while chasing you like some other dinosaurs can. This makes taming Trikes a much simpler time than taming either raptors or pachys for a solo player.
The other reason it is easier to tame Trikes at 20 is the player now has access to tranquilizer arrows. The main problem is lack of naroberries up until this point. Up until level 20, the solo player has more likely grabbed all narco berries by hand. Which means not getting that many narco berries over all since you get like 1 narco berry for every 10 hand gathering attempts on a bush. Most of which was used to tame any pet you already found or have perished over time. Tranquilizer arrows require narcotics which take 5 narcoberries and 1 spoiled meat to make. Which is very time consuming to gather enough narcoberries to make a decent amount of narcotics by this time to even make tranq arrows as well as having enough narco to keep the creature you are taming asleep as well.
Still the effort is well worth it. Once you can tame a trike you can get narco berries much easier and faster. This makes taming everything else in the game later much easier too. As you'll be using tranq arrows from level 20 until 65 when you can make tranq darts for guns. The other great thing about being able to gather lots of narco berries is that making narcotics is one of the fastest ways to level in this game. Just load up on narcoberries and spoiled meat. Toss them in the mortar&pestle and start the process. You don't have to wait around either. Just go off and do other things. You'll get the experience no matter where you are. Narcotics don't have a decay timer, so no rush to come back to pick up the product right away either.
Now I've jumped a bit ahead with this guide in talking about Trikes and riding pets. Before you reach that point though, you'll need a base of operation. Which means making a house somewhere mostly safe. Find a safe flat area away from most dangerous dinos to place your initial starting base. This is probably going to be a nice wide beach area with a long view before the jungle starts so you can see any approaching danger. You'll want to start with thatch initially, and then wood. You won't need to go beyond wood for a long time and wood structures are plenty sturdy. Just make sure whatever structure you make is 3 walls high to prevent the tallest of dinos from easily tearing down your house if it attacks. Inside your structure you'll want to play storage boxes, the mortar & pestle, the simple bed, and preserving bins as you can. The bed allows you to respawn back at your base whenever you die, the boxes allow you store extra resources or gear when you die (which you will), and the preserving bins allow you to store perishable food items MUCH longer. This is a huge boon and will make the game much easier in the long run. Note though that preserving bins require spark powder to work. You have to put a stack of spark powder in one of the open 12 inventory slots in the bin and the remaining 11 slots can store food items.
Preserving bins have a preserving factor of 10. Meaning that raw meat that lasts for 10 minutes on a player will last for 100 minutes in the bin.
List of early dino's to tame for the new player.
Dilophosaurus = Main early protection dino. Pros: Decent damage, can keep up with a walking player, range attack, blind helps protect the player, and easy to tame. Cons: low health, can't ride, can't keep up with a sprinting player and can get stuck on terrain.
Ankylosaurs = Main early protection dino. Pros: Excellent damage. Massive tanking ability, good carry capacity, can ride, excellent gathering dino, and very easy to tame if kiting. Cons: Slow speed, can get stuck on terrain, and can't ride until at least level 35 if solo.
Dimorphodon = Great all game protection. Pros: Excellent damage, can fly, can ride on shoulder, small size makes it hard to hit for other dinos, doesn't ever get stuck. Cons: Low health, slower flyer than other flyers, small size makes it harder to hit head for taming, can't ride, tends to like to fly just in front of you sometimes making your attacks or harvesting attempt smack it instead.
Raptors = Great early game protection and steed. Pros: High dps, very fast steeds, can ride. Cons: low carry capacity, low health, hard to tame, not very good at harvesting.
Pachy = Good steed, protection, and taming partner. Pros: Fast steed, can ride, can help tame other dinos by building up topor damage, medium health pool for the level, and has an alternate attack "charge" attack which is fun to do. Cons: Low carry capacity, hard to tame, sucks at harvesting. Note: Top of head for pachy's is armored so top of head "headshots" do reduced damage and topor generation.
Trikes = Good steed, harvester, pack horsePros: Decent sprint speed, great damage, Aoe Knockback, can mass harvest berries, medium carry capacity. Cons: Lower stamina, lowish health pool for size, low topor stat for size, lowish stamina with fast stamina consumption, when out of stamina not the fastest of mounts, can get stuck easily on terrain.
Pulmonoscorpius = Excellent steed, pack horse, and taming partner. Pros: Good sprint speed, can sprint across the top of water, decent damage, sting does torpor damage, eats spoiled meat, good carry capacity, good health pool, can turn on a dime with the best turning radius for any mount in the game, excellent stamina usage, fairly easy to tame Cons: can't ride until 25, can't harvest anything except bodies.
What not to tame in the early levels. Dodo's, Parasaurs, and turtles. Don't bother with fliers, frogs, cats, or the big carnivores early on either. Those are way too dangerous to attempt solo.
This guide should get you through the most difficult part of the game which is basically the first 20 levels and make the levels that follow easier as well. I highly recommend reading more of the wikia for additional info as well as watching a few youtube vids. Be aware that some info is old and this game is constantly patching and making changes. In 6 months I doubt much of this guide will be as relevant as it is today if I don't update it.