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lovelyg4m3r

Ultimate Breeding Guide

19/4-2016 Made edits

Hello there! It has recently been brought to my attention that some people around my server needed a bit more help in understanding how breeding works. I will try to make this as short, but informative as possible. Don't get me wrong though, its still going to be long so buckle up!

#FAQ

Q: Is Breeding Worth It?

A: Short answer, yes. Breeding can yield you some incredible dinos, far stronger than you would get via taming. The real answer here lies in what kind of server you are on. If you are on an official server where it takes 2-14 days to mature something, its not for beginners and you are better off waiting until that "End game" period. If you are on a server, like mine, that has increased hatch/gestation and mature timers, you can start much earlier!

Q: Is it hard?

A: That depends on what kind of dinos you are breeding. Mammals require no air conditioning, while eggs do. Some dinos take longer than others, etc.

Q: What stats does breeding pull from?

A: The stats that can be passed on will be post tame stats that you have not put any points into. Say you tame a direwolf. You knock it out and see it has 1000 HP. You tame it and it ends up with 1800 HP. You then level up the dire until it has 2400 HP. When you breed it, the baby would pull from the 1800 HP stat.

Q: What dinos do you tame for your breeding stock?

A: Depends on the day. Sometimes I only bother with 116+ other days 100+. I got a ptera a few days ago, base level 100 and got 1596 hp which was my old high stat before I got my like 1636 or whatever it is currently. It started with hp in the 1200's and my new high hp bird started at 1134 so its all in the luck, but if you're going for stats. 100+. My 104 beaver got my high weight.

What you need

Getting Your Breeding Stock

If you are going for the best dinos, you will want to tame things level 100+. However, if you are only trying to improve what you currently have, or just reproducing for more egg laying females for kibble, taming is irrelevant.

The way dinos get stats is just by random distribution when they spawn. A level 100 ptera can end up with 35 points into its health post tame while a 120 could end up with 20. When you tranq out a creature you can either go to the wiki and calculate yourself how many levels it has into each stat, or you can use a calculator. The general consensus is that anything over 30 points (post tame) is worth breeding for big dino projects.

If you notice that the pre-tame stats say the dino has 12 points into every stat except oxygen, which is like 30, then you may want to stick out on wasting your kibble, UNLESS you are going for a dino that will be needing to swim, as oxygen makes you swim faster. Or if you are boosting your "glamour levels" As I call them.

Food can be useful in raid/PvP situations where you need to survive longer without meat.

There are also "hidden levels". A creature can get a point into movespeed in the wild HOWEVER it will NOT boost their movespeed. It just serves as a hidden value in the end that boosts your overall level.

NOTE: When you breed in melee, the first generation of babies can come out with a boosted melee stat, I personally don't understand the "why" behind this but you can have a mom with 200 melee,, a dad with 310 melee and get a baby with 312 melee in the first generation. (For me it seems to not affect any generations after that). Explanation

Glamour Levels

Since I mentioned it above, I will make a quick blurb. On my pteranodons we focus on our Hp, Stamina, Weight, and Melee. Once those are perfectly bred in, however we work on breeding in the food and oxygen stats. While Oxygen doesn't do anything for a ptera because they cannot touch water unless unconscious, it will boost the final level of the babies. This meaning we could have a 230 ptera instead of a 213 ptera by going from low food and o2 stats, to high ones. These levels pretty much mean nothing and thus we call them our "glamour levels".

Choosing what to Breed

You will need to first determine what you want to breed. If you only have one male and one female, it is simple. However if you have more than one you may want to consider a stat sheet. (Or you can use this But personally I like my spread sheets and I use a physical as well as an electronic spreadsheet.) Your stat sheet can include just basic information, or it can include lots of information depending on what you care about. Besides stats you can include colorings, names of parents if bred, etc. I keep a status column so I can keep track of what I have sold. And if its been sold to a friend I can breed with, I will also make that notation.

I have far too many dinos to give each a unique name (I'd go insane) so they have notations such as "RD155" For me, this stands for Red Doe Level 155.

Lets say I just want a more battle oriented deer. Our best bet would be WB166 and RD173. The red doe has high health, and the buck has high melee. If I wanted more of a farming deer, I would go for WB166 and SF173 or SF173B as they have weight for the farm.

Now, this is not just fool proof. Just because I chose my highest health and melee does not mean the baby will get them. The baby has a 70% chance to get the higher stat, however often they roll the lower stat, and if I am real unlucky, I could get the worse health and the worse melee on a baby that could have had the chance for the best health and melee. So for example, looking back at the spread sheet. RD has 1920.1 HP and WB has 1500.1. There is a 70% chance the baby gets the 1920 HP and a 30% chance it gets the 1500. Its basically rolling the dice.

It does this for each stat.

Mating

Once you have chosen the animals you want to breed, one male and one female if you didn't figure that out, you need to put them close to each other and then enable wandering (Hold E on the dino and select "Enable Wandering"). Now, the animals will try to walk away from one another so you have two options.

  • Build a small pen where they cannot get very far from eachother whilst wandering.
  • Spam the U key (Stop All command)

The mating bar will start at 0 and climb up to 100%. Once it hits 100% the female will either a) start a gestation timer or b) lay a fertilized egg.

Difference between Mammals and Egg Layers

There is one key difference between egg layers and mammals that you must remember. Eggs you can pick up and stop incubating at any time. But once you get a mammal pregnant you have to commit.

Birthing a baby

On mammals, the gestation bar will start at 0 and slowly work its way to full. Once the bar is full, the baby will be born. Basically, the dino will do the poop/egg lay animation but instead of poop, you will have a tiny baby!

Hatching an Egg

Eggs need to be incubated and each egg differs on what it likes. Some eggs, like the giga, prefer to be hot. While other eggs like the quetzal prefer the cold. You can see more information here (Image pulled from ARK Wiki). If the writing on the egg says "incubating" you have it at an appropriate temperature, though health may still be affected. If it says "too hot" or "too cold" You will need to add more temperature control.

Toss the egg down on the ground near your temperature control to start incubating. DO NOT PRESS THE USE ITEM BUTTON!!! This will cause you to eat your egg, instead chose to drop it or simply hover over the egg with your cursor and press O.

Eggs will have an incubation timer that will start 100% full, and deplete over time. Once it hits zero it will hatch.

Babies and Feeding

Babies will be born unclaimed. You must press E to claim the baby, but remember. This baby counts as a tamed dino not under your control so if you have ANY turrets in the area that are set to "All Targets" or "Players and Tamed Dinos" turn them OFF. I lost my first direwolf pup due to this mistake.

Once you have claimed the baby, you must immediately begin to feed it. Now, babies will have an invisible cap on their weight, Food, and HP. These caps will slowly raise as they get older. So when its born it can hold 5 berries or 5 pieces of raw meat. You can see how long a baby phase will take on your server here.

During the baby phase you must hand feed it by placing food directly into its inventory. If it runs out of food, it will start to starve, once its food hits 0 the HP will drain and it will eventually die. Don't let your babies go unfed! The baby will exit the baby phase at 10% to which it will turn juvenile. It is easy to calculate when this will occur. My procoptodons are born with a max 783 weight, once the baby cap reaches 78.3 that it is able to hold, it will turn juvenile.

Until fully matured, babies will not attack anything and will flee from dangers. If someone were to come in and kill you while you were taking care of a baby, it would try to flee, much like a parasaur.

Juveniles, Troughs, and spoilage

Once an animal his juvenile stage (10% of its total maturation), it can feed itself from a trough. You can now toss all your food in the trough and forget about it for a while. You will have to make sure, however, that they do not run out of food. And remember there are spoil timers on the food.

One piece of raw meat lasts about 30 minutes in a trough and with 20 per stack, they will all spoil in approximately 10 hours, give or take. If you will be gone longer than that, fill up with cooked meat as well which will last about an hour per (I think) and stacks up to 30. In which case it would last 30 hours. (But again, make sure there's enough!)

Raw meat will restore 50 points of food, whereas cooked meat will only restore 25 points. Keep this in mind when deciding what food to give your dinos. It will take twice as much cooked meat to feed a baby as raw, but cooked meat will last longer. I usually do a mix between the two. Raw to start and cooked incase it runs out of that.

There is a trough calculator on the crumple corn breeding page linked above.

Example written here

Adolescent

There really isn't anything different between here and juvies. They will hit the adolescent stage at 50% maturation. Food consumption slows down after this point.

Cooldowns

Once you have bred a female, it will have a cooldown timer which will prevent it from breeding again for a while. On 1x servers (I.e. Officials) its about 36 hours for a ptera. Whereas the server I am on it is about 15-16 days.

The amount of times you have bred a male will also affect the timer. If you breed one male with several females, their timers will vary as well.

Keep this all in mind when deciding what to breed.

Useful Tools

Ill just go ahead and link everything I know of for taming and/or breeding.

Crumplecorn Breeding Calculator

Crumplecorn Taming Calculator

Survive Ark Stat Calculator <-- Retarded link won't link right!

Survive Ark Taming Calculator

Survive Ark Breeding Calculator

Spreadsheets not including my nice notebook!

Then there's this Ark Breeding Application

Let me know if there is anything I may have missed! I hope this helps someone :)

Posted Apr 19, 2016, 12:02 AM UTC · edited

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