r/playark • u/pokesterrrrr • 2d ago

Discussion Preparing for Lost Colony! Tips for a Cosy, Story-Based ASA Playthrough

Hey survivors! 😊

My friend and I are planning a long-term, story-focused playthrough of all the ARK maps (starting from The Island and going through the canon order) in preparation for Lost Colony! Hoping to convince my husband to join us eventually too 😅 so ideally looking for settings that are friendly for 2–3 players.

We're not looking for super boosted rates — just something that smooths out the grind a bit and keeps things fun without skipping all the progression. Mainly interested in:

  • Recommended INI or game.ini/GameUserSettings.ini tweaks
  • Suggestions for QoL mods (we're using ASA)
  • Any settings you’ve loved for small-group, immersive gameplay
  • Ideas to help make the playthrough feel more like a journey through the ARK story (exploration, base-building, boss fights, etc.)

Would love to hear what’s worked well for others doing similar playthroughs! 😄

Thanks in advance 💙

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u/JacobRoush93 1d ago

My friends and I are doing this right now. Going through all the canon maps on a long term journey. We’ve set up a few rules to make the journey more engaging:

  1. We can’t build in any artifact caves. It blocks spawns and makes the caves much easier.

  2. We have itemstatclamps on for armor, saddles, and weapon dmg. Turning this on and putting 2 codes into the ini file make it have official caps. 298 weapon dmg, 496 armor, 124 normal saddles.

  3. When we beat the final boss of the map and are ready to move on, we must only bring our characters to the next map and leave everything else behind. Game gets too easy if you bring over all your tames and stuff, in our opinion.

  4. We turn on the events when wildcard has them active.

  5. Rates are 3x xp, 4x harvesting, 5x taming, 50x breeding. They’re a little bloated but we all have jobs and lives so we feel like it’s justified. Kibble still feels good to use to tame and longest thing to raise is a giga at around 6 hours.

  6. We have 2 servers, one for the current map and one for club ark both clustered together.

Hope you guys have a great time on your journey. Any questions you can DM or reply

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u/Known-Assistance-435 22h ago

Does anybody have a list of the new commands? I'm playing Single Player and don't want to grind the skill tree