Getting Started with Your ARK: Survival Evolved Server

Getting an ARK: Survival Evolved server online is one of the most common things we help new customers with, so here's the full walkthrough we usually talk people through on tickets. It covers ordering, your first login, connecting, admin access, maps, mods and backups — in that order.

Ordering your server

Pick a plan from our ARK server hosting plans page. ARK is a hungry game, so we've sized our plans with that in mind — grab whichever slot count suits your group and checkout. Provisioning is automatic and usually takes a minute or two, after which your server will be ready and waiting in the control panel.

First login

Everything lives in the LOW.MS control panel. Log in with the credentials you were emailed and click into your new ARK service. The panel itself is a customised TCAdmin build, so if you've used a game server host before the layout will feel familiar — a big green/red start button at the top and a list of tools down the left hand side.

The overview page is where you'll grab your IP and port to hand out to players. ARK's default Game Port is 7777 UDP and the default Query Port is 27015 UDP. The query port is the one Steam's server browser talks to, and ARK's in-game browser uses it too, so that's the one you give to friends who ask "what's the server address?".

Connecting to the server

There are three ways we tell people to connect, and honestly the Steam favourites route is the most reliable, especially in the first hour after a patch when the in-game browser gets hammered.

Steam favourites

Open Steam, click View in the top menu bar, then Game Servers.
Switch to the Favourites tab and click Add a Server.
Type your server IP and query port (for example 123.45.67.89:27015) and hit Add this address to favourites.
Double-click the server in the list to launch ARK and join.

ARK in-game browser

Launch ARK and pick Join ARK on the main menu.
Set the session filter to Unofficial and, if you've set a password, tick Show Password Protected.
Type part of your server name into the name filter, select it and hit Join.

Direct connect

If the browser is being slow, open the console on the main menu with Tab and type open YOUR.IP.HERE:7777. That will drop you straight in.

Becoming admin

Before you hand the address out, set yourself an admin password. It's two lines in a config file.

In the panel click Configuration Files on the left.
Open GameUserSettings.ini and, under [ServerSettings], add:
```
ServerAdminPassword=SomethingOnlyYouKnow
```
Save and restart.

Once you're in the game, press Tab to open the console and type enablecheats SomethingOnlyYouKnow. You now have admin for that session and can use any of ARK's cheat commands. If you want several people to have admin without sharing a password, we've got a separate walkthrough for whitelisting admins by Steam ID.

If you also want the whole server locked down to invited players, add a ServerPassword= line in the same [ServerSettings] block and restart again.

Picking a map

ARK has a lot of maps — The Island, Ragnarok, Aberration, Extinction, Valguero, Crystal Isles, The Center, Scorched Earth, Genesis 1 & 2, Fjordur and Lost Island — and you can swap between them whenever you like. We don't make you edit anything to do it: every map and DLC has a one-click entry in Commandline Manager.

Click Commandline Manager on the left hand side.
On the Predefined tab, find the map you want and click Select on the right.
Restart the server and it'll boot into the new map.

There's a full write-up of the gotchas (saved data, cluster IDs, Primitive+, etc.) in Switching map or DLC on your ARK Server if you need more detail.

Tweaking rates and settings

Most of the fun stuff — taming speed, XP, harvest multipliers, day/night cycle, structure limits — lives in GameUserSettings.ini and Game.ini. Open Configuration Files from the sidebar and you'll find both of them in the list. Edit, save, restart. We've collected the settings we get asked about most often in the ARK server configuration guide.

One heads-up: don't edit ini files through File Manager while the server is running. It'll happily overwrite your changes on shutdown. Use Configuration Files, which waits until the next restart to apply anything.

Installing mods

ARK has one of the best modding scenes on Steam, and we've made it as painless as we can.

Open Mod Manager on the left hand side.
Search the Steam Workshop from inside the panel, or paste a Workshop ID in directly.
Click install. The panel downloads and unpacks the mod on the server for you.
Add the mod IDs to the ActiveMods= line in GameUserSettings.ini via Configuration Files, then restart.

A thing that trips people up: mods do not magically sync to your players when they connect. The server runs them, but each player still needs to subscribe to the same Workshop items in Steam themselves. The cleanest way to handle this is to post your mod collection URL somewhere your community can find it.

Console, logs and backups

A few other bits of the sidebar worth knowing about on day one:

Web Console — the live server console in your browser. Great for watching startup, running admin commands, and confirming the server actually loaded.
Log Viewer — ShooterGame logs when something goes sideways. First place to look if the server won't start.
Cloud Backup / Cloud Restore — off-box backups of your save. We'd strongly recommend taking a manual Cloud Backup before you start messing with mods or switching maps, so you've always got a known-good state to roll back to.

That should be enough to get your ARK server running, your friends connected and your first Rex tamed. If something doesn't behave, check the ARK troubleshooting guide or open a ticket from support — we answer them ourselves.