Rideable Dodos
Now you can tame Dodos, saddle up, and ride them in battle! You can craft a saddle for your rideable dodos, giving them an armor boost, too, which will be useful in battle because the creatures are neutral and fight back when provoked.
Final Fantasy VII Swords
With the Final Fantasy VII Swords mod, you can slice up any Raptors that look at you the wrong way with either the Buster or Masamune sword. Both swords are craftable via engrams and inventory.
Ultra Stacks
Ultra Stacks is a stacking mod for ARK Evolved that makes inventory management much easier. Not only does the mod change the quantity and weight of items, changes have also been made to some of the spoiling times as well. Most spoiling times have been doubled, and other items have their spoiling time increased even more.
Zipline System
If you have built your home base near a cliff face, the Zipline mod is excellent for cutting down traversal time. You can connect multiple ziplines to the same post to quickly access different areas in mountainous areas of ARK’s map.
Play as a Dino
If you’re tired of running from dinos and want to give them a taste of their own medicine, try the Play as a Dino mod. Not only can you play as a variety of different dinos, you can also breed and hatch little babies to make your own dino family!
Jetpack Mod
Need a faster way to traverse ARK’s map? Look no further than the Jetpack mod. This awesome upgrade gives you a bird’s eye view of the action and evens the playing fields versus pesky Quetzals.
Health and Torpor Bars
The Health and Torpor Bars mod adds bars into the game, which makes it feel a little more like a traditional RPG. It’s super helpful, allowing you to gauge enemy life and level before taking it on. Trust us when we say that once you’ve played ARK with these bars for a while, you won’t want to go back.
Pimp My Home
Pimp My Home lets you build your own pad in the wilderness, complete with modern walls, windows, doors, and stairs. There are multiplayer servers that run this mod listed on the Steam page.
STARK WARS: Survival Evolved
A long, long time ago, in an ARK far, far away… STARK WARS: Survival Evolved was born. The mod adds a massive amount of Star Wars content, including vehicles, weapons, and tamable droids. There’s even a TIE Fighter!
ARK Futurism
The ARK Futurism mod is a total overhaul that swaps out vanilla dinos for futuristic robotic dinos, automated gun turrets, and fusion powered bases. The mod has a substantial community and is constantly being updated.
NPC Bush Peoples
The world of ARK can be a bit of a lonely place for humans. The NPC Bush People mod adds wild tameable humanoid mobs that are capable of building symmetrical NPC structures and raiding player bases. Not the friendliest looking bunch, but at least you won’t feel quite so lonely.
Improved Dinos
The Improved Dinos mod adds improved elite dino variants with with cosmetic and gameplay differences over vanilla dino types. These tougher dinos offer a chance to harvest better gear blueprints. They are much more difficult to take down but if you can manage it, you’ll get some excellent loot without having to farm the equivalent of several standard types.
The World Turtle
Fans of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books will appreciate this super mod.
The World Turtle spawns an enormous tamable turtle that can carry a giant castle on its back. It is similar in size and power to a Titan.
Dino Tracker
Unlockable at level 25, the Dino Tracker is essentially a GPS system that locates dinos you have tamed from anywhere on the map. When active, yellow crosses will hover over your dinos, which makes finding them super easy.
Eco in Wonderland
Eco in Wonderland adds some beautiful new flora to ARK that you can craft into your own garden paradise. There are 100 new species of plants, including trees, flowers, scrub, and even mushrooms. The team over at Eco do some other superb mods if you’re interested in other botanical improvements.
ReHUD
ReHUD is a simple HUD mod that adds color and a circular theme to the status icons in the right of the screen. Essentially, it makes them easier to see in the heat of combat or a chase.
FreeTheRaft
#FreeTheRaft adds rideable rafts to the game, which can be built upon. The rafts actually mimic dinos in that they have the same characteristics as living creatures. As the mod description notes, there is no plan to make this work on Scorched Earth it would be inhumane for rafts to suffer the arid landscape of Scorched Earth they need the open ocean to live out their lives to their fullest potential.”
Noob Starter Kit
One of ARK’s more brutal survival mechanics sees the loss of your entire inventory when you die. Players are forced you to start over again by finding pieces of their chewed up body, but recovering all of them each time is both exhausting and never guaranteed. When you first start ARK, you’re going to be dieing a lot, so the Noob Starter Kit kit mod here is to make things a bit easier. It spawns a Metal Axe, Metal Pick, 10 Spears, Crossbow, 50 Tranq arrows and a set of Flak Armour every time you respawn.
The Shopping Mod
Obviously, ARK doesn’t have an ingame economy, but the Shopping Mod adds one. You can now buy and sell resources and items, and admins can set prices to make sure everything is balanced according to preference. It adds a nice new layer to the game, as well as giving you an easy way to make use of unwanted items in your inventory.
Structures Plus
Structures Plus completely revamps the building and crafting mechanics in ARK. Gone are the annoying snap points, and there’s much more freedom to add various customizations to buildings and vehicles. Everything just fits together much better, minus all the clipping issues that plague the vanilla game. Notably, the mod lets you pick up things and move them instead of having to destroy and replace them. Additionally, there’s also master crafting stations that can craft every technology and pull materials from nearby containers, which means no more having to juggle three different stations to craft something.
Inventory Cleaner
Inventory Cleaner is seriously handy. Ever find that your inventory is littered with resources that you really don’t need and aren’t even worth storing (or selling with the shopping mod)? This mod allows you to purge your inventory of all of those useless items, dropping or destroying anything that you deem unnecessary. You can set it to auto-destroy or drop items as you scavenge, too, meaning that you can keep grinding resources without having to go in and drop the stuff you don’t want.
Carts and Wagons
For those that are all about the immersion, carts and wagons might make the 500 pounds of flint your carrying in your backpack feel a little more believable. The mod attaches carts to dinos, which can actually carry way more than your own personal weight anyway. It makes farming resources not only more realistic but actually more efficient.
Valhalla
If you’re after a total change of scene from ARK’s vanilla island setting and scenery, look no further than Valhalla. This is an enormous new location with nearly three times the amount of explorable area to keep grinding and hunting dinos. All mods should work with Valhalla.
Ark Steampunk Mod
ARK Steampunk Mod revamps the aesthetic of ARK’s vanilla world with steampunk-style buildings, lights, gates, statues, and hot air balloons. Another one for those who have spent hours on the base game’s island and fancy a change of pace.
Pokemon Allstars
Any Pokemon fan that’s played ARK has surely fantasized a crossover, and now you have it. In Pokemon Allstars, Bulbasor, Pikachu, Charmander et all now replace regular Dinos. And yes, there are Pokeballs to catch them with.
Armored Storage Stands
When you’ve spent ages crafting pretty armor, you’re going to want somewhere to put it on display. Well, Armored Storage Stands adds special shelves, gun racks, and armor stands so you can admire all of your hard work. You can showcase saddles, armor, swords, rifles, and clothes while also keeping everything nicely organized.
Thieves Island
If you’re looking for a new location to explore but you don’t want something as big as Valhalla, Theives Island is an excellent choice. This densely packed island is full of coves, underground caves, and the wrecks of old pirate ships.
Pimp My Dino
Add some bling to your dinos with Pimp My Dino. This mod allows you to customize your dino with armor of all different shapes, styles, and sizes.
Star Gates
ARK’s islands are obvious enormous, so here’s a way to add a cool fast travel system. The Star Gate mod rips the interplanetary travel system straight out of the iconic science fiction TV show, allowing you to warp between areas instantly.
Call of the Wild
In Vanilla ARK singleplayer, there’s really not much point in building up a fortified base beyond the principle of actually creating something cool. After all, nobody is actually going to attack you. Call of the Wild, though, adds a neat tower defense element to the game, adding dinos that constantly attack your base. You can set the frequency and ferocity of the attacks to your preference.
Shattered
Shattered completely changes the ARK map. It “was hit by an Asteroid, leaving broken land and destroying the ARK’s Barrier, causing strange vibrations, abnormal gravity, unstable temperatures, and earthquakes.” It’s a great concept, looks stunning, and adds loads of helpful new features into the game.
Solar Panel
Solar Panel is quite a simple mod. It adds nothing aside from solar panels themselves, and the rechargeable batteries, but it’s helpful for when you’re attempting to go out into ARK’s world at night. It can be learned at level 59, requires the generator engram, and “Each battery will give you an extra hour of in-game power after the sun sets.”
Gyrosphere
You can now ride the famous circular vehicles from the Jurassic World series in ARK. The Gyrosphere mod’s vehicle includes a built-in computer that identifies the prehistoric wildlife you come across, the glass can protect riders from almost any kind of attack, and some special technology keeps the animals from confusing the passengers as prey.
Tree Homes
Ever wanted to build you dream Tree House as a kid? Well, you can now, in ARK that is. Tree Homes allows you to build a house on a platform in a tree on any map. You can even add in elevators to get you to your new home.
All Dinos Allow Guns
The clue is in the name. All Dinos Allow Guns let you wield weapons while riding any dinosaur in ARK. They’re better vehicles that actual cars, after all.
Modern Weapons
Boost your arsenal with the Modern Weapons mod, which adds more than 20 new weapons to the game. The weapons include new snipers and assault rifles that will change up how you hunt in ARK.
Get Off My Lawn!
The cliched ‘Get Off My Lawn!” signs don’t tend to work. Meddling kids tend to just ignore them, or they get knocked over. That’s not true with this ARK mod, however. Putting this outside your base will keep all wild dinos away.
The ZeroG Speed Glider
The ZeroG Speed Glider is a dramatic improvement over the base glider. It has a better aerodynamic design and it uses the thermal air flow up on your map to reduce the dropdown.
Ammo Switcher
Quality of life mods after often some of the best. In ARK, to cycle through ammo types, you’d need to open your inventory. However, with this Ammo Switcher mod installed, you can change with ammo you’re using with just the double tap of a button.
Awesome Spyglass
Checking which type of dino you’re faced with is vital in ARK, and the Awesome Spyglass mod makes that a lot easier. Not only is it hands free, meaning you can use a weapon at the same time, but it tells you everything you could want to know about what creature is in front of you.
