How to start playing ARK: the first things to do
You wake up naked on a beach, nothing in your hands, something moving not far off. Nobody explains what to do, and that's why many people close ARK within the first hour.
You don't need to know everything. You only need to know what order to do the first things in.
The first five minutes
Gather bare-handed, nothing else needed:
- bushes give berries and fibre
- trees give wood and thatch
- stones on the ground give stone
A few minutes is enough material for your first tools. Don't wander while you gather: stay where the ground is open and you can see what's approaching.
The tools, in this order
- Pick and hatchet: these change everything. From the same tree, the hatchet gives more wood and the pick more thatch; from the same rock you get different things. Gathering bare-handed beyond the first few minutes is wasted time.
- Campfire: cooks meat and keeps you warm at night. Without one, night is a real problem.
- Spear: your first actual defence. It doesn't make you strong, but it stops you being helpless.
Eating and drinking without dying
Berries can be picked bare-handed and fill your stomach. The coloured ones, red, purple, blue, are fine as food.
Watch out for two in particular: narcoberries make you drowsy, and stimberries clear the drowsiness but drain your water fast. They aren't food: they're for other purposes. If you feel odd after eating some, those are the ones you picked.
Cooked meat feeds you far better than berries. Raw meat harms you: always cook it on the fire.
Water matters as much as food. Drink from rivers and lakes every time you pass one, not only when the bar is running out.
The thing almost everyone forgets
Place a respawn point. A sleeping bag or a bed, as soon as you can.
Dying in ARK is normal, it happens to everyone and will keep happening. The difference is enormous:
- with a respawn point, dying costs a few minutes
- without it, you wake up on the far side of the map having lost everything
It's the single act that separates the people who keep playing from those who uninstall after two hours.
Where to settle
The early hours go better near the coast, where creatures are milder and you can see trouble coming. Inland is full of things that kill you in seconds, and you have nothing to defend yourself with yet.
Look for a spot with water nearby, plus trees and rocks within reach: it saves you walking back and forth for everything.
Levelling up
Each level gives you points to spend in two places: your character's stats and engrams, the recipes for what you can build.
Early on, favour what keeps you alive and gathering: carry weight, stamina, and the engrams for basic tools and structures. The impressive things come later, and you'll have the points for them by then.
The three early-hours mistakes
Wandering too far. Every metre inland raises the risk, and with almost empty hands you have no margin.
Not placing a respawn point. We covered it above, and that's exactly why we're repeating it.
Trying to tame too early. A tame attempted with no supplies, nowhere safe and no idea what you're doing almost always ends with losing the tame, the time, and often the character too. Base first, creatures after.
Your first useful tame
When you're ready, the first one isn't the most impressive: it's the one that gathers for you. A creature that harvests berries or wood changes the pace of the game far more than a predator you can't handle yet.
When the game changes
Past the early hours the problem is no longer surviving: it's keeping track. How many creatures you have, where they are, which are hungry, what's running out in the boxes while you're logged off.
ArkHive reads your server's real data and shows all of it on your phone, warning you before it becomes a problem. You don't need it in the first hours, you'll need it when what you've built becomes too much to hold in your head.