If you run an Astraeos server, the phrase that caught your eye in Wildcard's Community Crunch probably wasn't the Boaratos. It was "final update". Their words, in Community Crunch 519: "On August 26, the final update to Astraeos arrives." That's today. And sat four and a half weeks behind it (going more or less unremarked on, as far as I can see) is a second date that matters considerably more for anyone with a server and a player base to keep happy.
So here's the operator version of both, with the creature trailers stripped out.
What actually lands today
The headline is the Boaratos, a fiery boar that Wildcard introduced in Community Crunch 519 and described as a "hot-headed hog" built to "stand tusk-to-toe with some of the toughest creatures on the ARKs". In a fight it's raw physical strength plus fire attacks, with bleed on top. A bruiser, then. Out of a fight it's a harvester, and the studio's wording there is oddly specific: trees "have a curious tendency to end up a little more... charred before the Boaratos brings them crashing down." There's also a gag about the spoils being best enjoyed "around the breakfast table with a side of eggs", which I'd read as a food or egg drop, though Wildcard haven't actually said that, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
What they also haven't published, at least not at the time I'm writing this, is a patch note. No taming method, no spawn table, no stat block, and nothing whatsoever about whether the map's terrain shifts. That last gap matters most. It's the one that should shape what you do before you press update, and I'll come back to it.
"Final update" is doing a lot of work in that sentence too. Taken literally it means Astraeos stops getting content, which, if you're choosing a long-term map for a community, is quietly good news: a finished map is a map that stops rearranging itself underneath your players' bases, and if you've ever lost a build to a terrain revision you'll know that isn't a small thing. I'd lean that way. I wouldn't bet a server on it, though: Wildcard said "the final update to Astraeos", not "Astraeos is done forever", and those are not the same promise.
Taking the update on a dedicated box
Nothing about the mechanics changes for this one. The ASA dedicated server is Steam app 2430930, it's free to download, and it does not need a licensed account:
steamcmd +force_install_dir C:\asaserver +login anonymous +app_update 2430930 validate +quit
Worth knowing if you're planning your own box: Wildcard only ship a Windows build of that server tool. The app's own metadata lists Windows and nothing else, so every Linux ASA server you've seen in the wild is running through Proton or Wine, which works fine in practice but isn't something Wildcard support. Your configs land in ShooterGame\Saved\Config\WindowsServer\ either way, even under Proton. That one catches people out constantly, off hunting for a LinuxServer folder that never gets created.
The map string is Astraeos_WP, and ASA's launch syntax has two quirks that generate more forum posts than anything else in the game:
ArkAscendedServer.exe Astraeos_WP?listen?SessionName=MyServer?ServerAdminPassword=changeme -port=7777 -mods=123456,987654
Note the port. ASA wants -port=7777 as a dash argument, not ?Port= in the query chain the way Survival Evolved did, and copying an old ASE line across is exactly how you end up with a server nobody can find. The other quirk: keep ?ServerAdminPassword= as the last of the ? options. Defaults, if you're opening firewall rules:
- UDP 7777, the game port
- UDP 7778 for the peer connection, which people forget and then wonder why joins hang
- UDP 27015 for queries
- TCP 27020 for RCON, optional
And the usual patch-day thing: Steam pushes the client update to your players the moment it goes live, so there's a window where their build is ahead of yours and every join attempt fails with a timeout that says nothing useful. That's not your firewall. Update the server and it clears.
You can't rehearse this one, and that surprised me
My instinct with any map update is to pull the test branch first and see what breaks. I went to check, and the answer for ASA is that you can't, at least not on the server side.
The client app has an active public_test_realm branch that Wildcard were still pushing builds to on 23 August. The dedicated server app has a public_test_realm branch too, and its last build landed on 19 February. Six months stale. So there's no supported way to stand up the Astraeos build ahead of the public release and run your mod stack against it, which means that whatever happens today, you're finding out at the same time as everyone else.
Which makes the boring advice the correct advice. Take a full backup of your save directory before you touch anything, keep it somewhere that isn't the server, and go into the update assuming you'll need it. If your community has a base sat in a region Wildcard decide to redecorate, that backup is the difference between a bad evening and a dead server.
Mods and the CurseForge auto-update trap
ASA loads mods through CurseForge project IDs on the -mods= argument, and the detail that catches people out is sitting right there in the wiki's server configuration reference: those mods update automatically when the server starts. That's convenient right up until it isn't. On a normal Tuesday it saves you a job. On patch day it means your server can pull a freshly rebuilt mod (or one that hasn't been rebuilt yet) at the exact moment the base game has moved underneath it, and now you're debugging two changes at once instead of one.
If you're running anything beyond cosmetics, I'd strip the mod list back to empty for the first boot after the update, confirm the server comes up clean on vanilla Astraeos, then reintroduce mods a few at a time as their authors confirm they've rebuilt. Anything touching spawns, creature stats or map geometry is suspect number one if the server won't start.
Astraeos itself is paid DLC, originally a community map by Nekatus that Wildcard made official back in February 2025, his third after Valguero and Fjordur. Every player joining needs it on their account, and the game now throws a popup at anyone who tries a server running the map without it. None of that changes today.
The date that actually deserves your planning: 30 September
Here's the thing the Boaratos coverage is burying. Wildcard have confirmed that September 30 brings the Unreal Engine 5.8 upgrade, the Therizinosaurus TLC, the Cerberax from ARK Fantastic Tames Season 1, and Gargantar from ARK Dragontopia, all in a single release. Gargantar goes to Expansion Pass owners first, so if you're planning a server night around it, check who in your group actually owns the pass before you promise anyone a dragon. They're calling the engine move "one of the biggest technical milestones yet for ASA", with the team focused on "tangible performance improvements, platform-specific fixes, and stronger technical foundations".
We went through the last one of these when ASA moved to Unreal Engine 5.7, and the honest lesson from that round was that the headline performance numbers are mostly a client-side story while the disruption is very much a server-side one. An engine version bump means the server binary gets rebuilt, which means every native mod in your list needs rebuilding against it, which means a stretch of days where half your CurseForge stack is broken through nobody's particular fault. Wildcard haven't said anything yet about save compatibility across 5.8. On past form I'd expect saves to carry, but expecting isn't knowing, and this time the engine move is arriving on the same day as three separate content drops, which is a lot of variables to untangle if something does go wrong.
So treat today as the dress rehearsal. Whatever your backup and rollback process turns out to be for the Boaratos patch, you want it working properly by the 30th.
Two calendar notes while you've got the month open, both official-network only rather than anything to action on a private server: transfers onto Genesis Ascended Part 1 open on 4 September, and the Genesis Part 1 Expires servers shut down on 18 September.
We don't sell ASA hosting yet, so none of this is me steering you at a plan. It's on the way, and the ARK: Survival Ascended page is where it'll show up when it lands. In the meantime, if you're juggling several ARK maps and it's the transfer side that's biting, our guide to ARK clusters covers how shared storage actually works, and most of that thinking carries over to Ascended cleanly enough.
Good luck with the hog. Whatever it does to your trees, back up first.