Creature Categories
Tbh when I first started playing ARK I had absolutely no idea there were this many different creature types and I spent my first 50 hours basically just taming whatever looked cool which is the worst possible strategy because a cool looking dino with no utility is just a resource sink that sits in your base doing nothing and eating all your meat while actual useful dinos go untamed because you didn't know they existed and you were too busy trying to knock out a level 20 carno with a slingshot like an absolute madman. Seven major groups and each one serves a completely different role in your survival strategy like fundamentally different purposes that don't overlap much and skip a category and you're missing out big time trust me on that one because I ignored aquatic tames for like my first 200 hours and it was a huge mistake and I didn't realize how much oil and pearls I was leaving on the table until I finally tamed a megalodon and the ocean went from "terrifying death trap I never enter" to "terrifying death trap I sometimes enter for resources" which is progress honestly.
15+ species including T-Rex Giganotosaurus Spinosaurus and a bunch of other things that will absolutely destroy you if you're not prepared and honestly half the fun of ARK is the first time you encounter a new apex predator and it kills you in 2 seconds and you're just sitting there like "okay I need to tame that" which is the entire ARK gameplay loop in a nutshell really see big scary thing get killed by big scary thing spend 3 hours preparing to tame big scary thing finally succeed and feel like a god for about 10 minutes before something even bigger kills your new tame and the cycle starts all over again.
20+ species including Pteranodon Argentavis Quetzal and honestly these are the most important tames in the game imo because once you can fly everything changes the map shrinks resources become accessible and you can scout enemy bases from above like some kind of prehistoric drone operator and it's genuinely the biggest power spike in the game bigger than any weapon upgrade or armor tier and if you're not rushing a ptera by level 38 you're making the game harder for yourself for no reason and I say this as someone who walked everywhere for way too long because I was scared of flyers and thought they were too fragile which they are but the mobility is worth it every single time.
25+ species including Ankylosaurus Doedicurus Mammoth and all the other workhorses that keep your base stocked with metal stone wood berries fiber and all the other stuff you need constantly and never have enough of and honestly a good gatherer is worth more than any combat dino in the early to mid game because you can't fight bosses without gear and you can't get gear without resources and you can't get resources efficiently without gatherers and it's this whole economic pyramid that every new player ignores because they just want a rex and then they spend 4 hours farming metal with a pickaxe while I'm sitting on my anky collecting 300 metal per node and wondering why anyone would do this to themselves.
18+ species including Megalodon Plesiosaur Mosasaurus and the ocean in ARK is terrifying and amazing at the same time and these tames are basically mandatory if you wanna do anything underwater because swimming around without a water tame is like running around the redwood forest naked with a wooden club technically possible but you're gonna die and it's gonna be scary and you're gonna lose all your stuff at the bottom of the ocean where you can't get it back because you don't have a water tame and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy of misery that I've experienced multiple times and every time I tell myself I'll prepare better next time and every time I don't and the ocean claims another set of flak armor that I spent 30 minutes crafting.
12+ species including Otter Dung Beetle Achatina and nobody talks about these but they're lowkey some of the most useful tames in the entire game because the otter keeps you warm the beetle makes fertilizer the snail makes cementing paste and suddenly you have automated passive resource generation happening in your base while you're out doing other things and it feels like cheating except it's not cheating it's just playing the game properly and understanding that efficiency matters and that having a beetle producing fertilizer while you're offline means you never have to spend 20 minutes gathering poop manually which is a sentence I never thought I'd write about a video game but here we are and ARK is a strange game that makes you care deeply about dinosaur poop management.
8+ species including Broodmother Megapithecus Dragon and these are the fights you're building toward whether you realize it or not because they drop tek engrams and element you absolutely need for endgame and you can't just waltz into a boss arena with random tames and expect to win because bosses in ARK don't mess around and they'll wipe your entire army in 30 seconds if you didn't bring the right dinos with the right stats and the right saddles and enough veggie cakes for your therizinos and it's a whole preparation process that takes days or weeks of breeding and imprinting and leveling and then the fight itself is over in 10 minutes and you're either celebrating or staring at a screen full of death notifications wondering where it all went wrong.
10+ species including Tek Rex Voidwyrm Shadowmane and whatever other crazy stuff Studio Wildcard decides to throw in and these are endgame creatures with abilities that break normal ARK rules and they are absolutely worth the grind because riding a voidwyrm feels like you're piloting a mythological creature from another dimension and one-shotting things that used to terrify you and it's the ultimate power fantasy payoff after hundreds of hours of getting bullied by the game and finally you're the one doing the bullying and it feels incredible and you deserve it after everything ARK has put you through and don't let anyone tell you otherwise because you earned that power and you should enjoy it.
Sample Creature Taming Data
Quick reference for the creatures people ask me about most often and all numbers assume max wild level 150 because honestly if you're taming anything lower you're probably wasting your time for the long game at least imo but hey a level 50 ptera is infinitely better than no ptera at all so don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough and sometimes you just gotta grab what's available and move on because waiting for that perfect 150 to spawn can take hours and in that time you could have tamed three lower level ones and still gotten useful utility out of them plus the taming time difference between a 150 and a 50 is massive and sometimes efficiency means taking the lower level tame and moving on to the next task instead of spending your entire evening waiting for a spawn that may or may not happen and honestly most of the game can be completed with mid-level tames if you know what you're doing and you're not trying to solo alpha bosses with a team of level 50 rexes which would be a bad idea for reasons that should be obvious.
| Creature | Tame Method | Preferred Food | Time (Lv150) | Saddle Level |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| T-Rex | Knockout | Exceptional Kibble / Raw Mutton | ~1h 30min | 74 |
| Pteranodon | Knockout (Bola first) | Regular Kibble / Raw Mutton | ~20min | 38 |
| Argentavis | Knockout | Superior Kibble / Raw Mutton | ~1h | 62 |
| Ankylosaurus | Knockout | Regular Kibble / Crops | ~50min | 36 |
| Mammoth | Knockout | Superior Kibble / Crops | ~1h 15min | 31 |
| Therizinosaurus | Knockout | Exceptional Kibble / Crops | ~2h | 69 |
| Castoroides | Knockout | Superior Kibble / Crops | ~45min | 61 |
| Quetzal | Knockout (mid-air) | Exceptional Kibble / Raw Mutton | ~2h 30min | 76 |
ARK 2 New Creatures (Leaked / Confirmed)
What we know so far about how ARK 2 is changing the creature game and honestly some of this stuff sounds genuinely exciting to me not just marketing fluff that sounds cool in a trailer and never materializes but actual mechanical changes to how creatures behave and interact and I want to believe it's real because the idea of dinos that actually hunt in packs and migrate and fight over territory instead of just standing around waiting to be shot in the face sounds like a completely different game and one that I desperately want to play and I'm trying to keep my expectations in check because game dev is hard and things get cut and features get simplified and what ships is never exactly what was promised but the direction they're going is the right one and that's worth being optimistic about even if the execution isn't perfect on day one and honestly ARK 1 was a broken mess at launch and people still loved it because underneath the bugs was something special and that's what I'm hoping for with ARK 2 a game that's broken but brilliant instead of polished but boring.
Multiple new dinosaurs and fantasy creatures exclusive to ARK 2 with Studio Wildcard being cagey about the specifics which probably means there are some surprises they wanna save for launch or maybe they're still designing them and who knows with game dev because sometimes "we're not ready to reveal" actually means "we don't know yet" and other times it means "we know and it's awesome but we're saving it for a big marketing moment" and you never know which one it is until the game comes out and you either get something amazing or something that was clearly rushed in the last 6 months and I've seen both scenarios play out enough times that I've stopped trying to predict it and just accept whatever we get.
This is what I'm most excited about tbh and creatures with actual pack hunting behavior migration patterns dynamic territory systems and no more dinos just standing around waiting for you to shoot them in the face because they'll hunt you down in packs and some will flee when injured and others will fight each other over territory without you even being involved and the world should feel alive and dangerous and unpredictable instead of just being a theme park with teeth and if they actually pull this off it'll be the biggest improvement to ARK since the original game launched and it'll make every previous ARK experience feel primitive by comparison because the difference between static AI that walks in circles and dynamic AI that behaves like an actual ecosystem is the difference between a game that feels like a game and a game that feels like a world you're living in and I want the latter so badly I can taste it.
New mutation system and visual traits for bred creatures so your super-bred rex won't just have better stats it'll actually look different from a wild one and finally right because the breeding grind is getting a much needed refresh and I'm honestly pretty hyped to see what kind of crazy color combinations people come up with and the old system of breeding 500 rexes until you randomly get a blue one with good melee stats was tedious and soul-destroying and anything that makes it more predictable or more visual or just more interesting is welcome and I'll take literally any improvement over the current system which feels like a second job that you don't get paid for.
New smaller faster mount class for scouting and PvP and think of it as a ninja mount quick and agile but probably pretty fragile and this is gonna completely change how early game PvP plays out because suddenly you have a mobility option that isn't a ptera and doesn't require level 38 and you can scout enemy bases and harass supply lines and do all kinds of hit-and-run tactics that weren't possible before and I'm here for it because early game PvP has been stale for years and anything that shakes it up is good for the health of the game and the community and my personal sanity because I've seen enough stone-age beach brawls to last a lifetime.
Taming Effectiveness Guide
How to get perfect tames with maximum bonus levels because lemme tell you nothing hurts more than spending 2 hours carefully tranqing a 150 rex only to get 50% taming effectiveness and a creature that's basically mid compared to what it could have been and I've done exactly that multiple times actually and it sucks so bad that feeling when you check the stats and realize you messed up somewhere and all that time and kibble and effort produced a tame that's barely better than a wild 120 and you could have done it right if you'd just known one simple thing about taming effectiveness but nobody told you and the game certainly doesn't explain it and you're just supposed to absorb this knowledge through osmosis or by reading a wiki like this one which is why I'm writing it in the first place because someone should have written it for me years ago and saved me from taming 3 mediocre rexes before I finally figured out what I was doing wrong and by then I'd wasted enough kibble to feed an entire boss army and I'm still bitter about it.
Use preferred kibble don't let the creature take any damage after knockout and no extra food in its inventory because it'll eat the wrong thing and tank your effectiveness and sounds simple but you'd be amazed how many people mess this up by accidentally punching their unconscious tame or dumping random berries in there or letting a passing dilo take a bite because they didn't build spike walls around the tame and honestly spike walls are cheap and take 10 seconds to craft so there's really no excuse for losing a tame to random wildlife unless you're just being lazy which I have been many times and paid for it every time and somehow I still don't always build spike walls because apparently I enjoy learning the same lesson repeatedly.
50% of your taming effectiveness converts to bonus levels and at 99.9% effectiveness that's +74 bonus levels on a max wild tame so a perfect 150 tame pops out at 224 before you even start breeding and that's the difference between a creature that can do boss fights and one that's just cannon fodder and honestly the bonus levels are the entire reason you should care about taming effectiveness because a 150 rex at 50% effectiveness is basically a 130 rex that took 3 times as long to tame and that's not just inefficient it's actively self-destructive and you'd have been better off taming a lower level with perfect effectiveness and getting more bonus levels out of it than a high level with terrible effectiveness and the math on this is confusing and counterintuitive and I've explained it wrong to people multiple times and had to correct myself later.
Basic goes to Simple goes to Regular goes to Superior goes to Exceptional goes to Extraordinary and ARK 2 might rework this whole system probably simplifying it but for ARK 1 this is the bible and always use the highest tier kibble the creature accepts because using raw meat on a rex when it takes Exceptional Kibble is just throwing away levels for no reason and the kibble tree is confusing at first but once you memorize which kibble goes to which creature category it's actually pretty logical except for the creatures that take a different kibble than their category suggests which is classic ARK logic and proves that the devs enjoy watching players suffer and consult wikis at 2am trying to figure out why their tame isn't working.
Creature Detail Pages
Full deep dives on every creature with spawn maps so you actually know where to look instead of wandering around for hours like I did my first month of playing and taming calculators that factor in your specific server rates because vanilla rates and 5x rates require completely different prep work and using a calculator calibrated for official rates on a boosted server means you'll overdose your tame on narcotics and waste resources or worse underdose and it wakes up and kills you and all your prep work is wasted and that happened to me twice before I figured out the rate conversion math and I'm still embarrassed about it. Base stats at level 1 and 150 so you can tell at a glance whether that wild dino is worth your time and best use cases for PvE and PvP because sometimes the answer is totally different depending on what mode you're in and breeding tips saddle comparisons ability breakdowns and whatever else is relevant for that specific creature and you get the idea pretty much everything you'd wanna know before committing hours to a tame and potentially wasting all that time on a creature that doesn't fit your playstyle or your server's meta or your personal goals and the worst part is you won't realize you made a mistake until you've already invested the time and resources and by then you're committed and you convince yourself it was worth it because admitting you wasted 3 hours on a suboptimal tame is more painful than just pretending it was a good decision all along and I've done that more times than I care to admit.
T-Rex
Apex predator. Knockout tame using Exceptional Kibble. You'll need the saddle at Lv74.
Giganotosaurus
Largest carnivore in the game. Extreme knockout difficulty, gotta use Extraordinary Kibble for this beast.
Pteranodon
Early-game flyer that changes everything. Bola it first, then tranq. Regular Kibble works fine and the saddle unlocks at Lv38.
Argentavis
Heavy transport flyer, my personal favorite honestly. Superior Kibble for taming and you can craft the saddle at Lv62.
Ankylosaurus
Best metal/flint/crystal gatherer bar none. Regular Kibble does the job and saddle unlocks at Lv36 which is pretty reasonable.
Doedicurus
Stone gathering machine. Regular Kibble, nothing fancy needed. You can ride it at Lv34.
Mammoth
Wood and berry gatherer with great weight. Superior Kibble preferred. Saddle unlocks at a nice early Lv31.
Castoroides
Wood gatherer that doubles as a natural smithy. Superior Kibble for taming and you'll need Lv61 for the saddle.
Therizinosaurus
Multi-resource gatherer that can harvest pretty much anything. Exceptional Kibble though, so prepare accordingly. Saddle at Lv69.
Spinosaurus
Amphibious apex predator with a nasty bite. Exceptional Kibble, saddle at Lv71, worth every bit of effort.
Quetzal
Giant flyer with a platform saddle option. Exceptional Kibble again. Lv76 for the saddle which is pretty late game but absolutely worth it.
Wyvern
Elemental flyer. You steal the egg and raise it with milk, no saddle needed at all which is awesome.
Mosasaurus
Largest aquatic predator. Extraordinary Kibble for this monster. Can equip a platform saddle too.
Plesiosaur
Aquatic platform mount that's great for underwater bases. Superior Kibble, rides at Lv64.
Megalodon
Solid ocean predator for getting started underwater. Regular Kibble works, saddle available at Lv47.
Raptor
Early pack hunter with a mean pounce and bleed. Bola it then tranq. Saddle at Lv18 which is super early and they get a pack buff.
Carnotaurus
Medium carnivore that's great for farming torpor. Superior Kibble recommended and the saddle unlocks at Lv46.
Sarco
Amphibious ambush predator with a unique passive tame using spoiled meat. Can ride it starting at Lv44.
Baryonyx
Fish eater with a spin stun attack that's nasty in caves. Superior Kibble, saddle at Lv55. Great cave crawler.
Parasaur
Best beginner tame, I start with one every single playthrough. Has radar ping ability. Saddle at Lv9 which is basically free, plus it's a decent early gatherer.
Triceratops
Berry gatherer with a charge attack that knocks things back. Regular Kibble, ride it at Lv16.
Stegosaurus
Three plate modes make this dino super versatile. Gatherer, tank, or transport depending on what you need. Superior Kibble, saddle at Lv26.
Allosaurus
Pack-hunting carnivore with alpha bleed buff. Superior Kibble, saddle at Lv67. Pack leader makes the group hit harder.
Basilosaurus
Passive tame ocean whale. Immune to jellyfish and tusoteuthis grabs, produces oil passively. Saddle at Lv60.
Carbonemys
Giant turtle tank with massive HP pool. PvP turret soaker. Regular Kibble, saddle at Lv10.
Daeodon
Healing pig with AoE aura. Essential for boss fights. Superior Kibble, saddle at Lv59.
Direwolf
Pack hunter, no saddle needed. Howl buff boosts pack damage. Superior Kibble. Great cave mount.
Diplodocus
Passive tame, it's a bus not a fighter. 11-seat saddle at Lv32. Zero damage, all transport.
Dodo
Iconic beginner tame. Knockout with berries, breed in masses for eggs and kibble. No saddle.
Griffin
Fast flyer with dive bomb and respect-based taming. No saddle required.
Iguanodon
Fast runner with infinite stamina in quadruped mode. Seeds to berries. Saddle at Lv30.
Equus
Passive tame with carrots. No saddle, acts as mobile mortar and pestle. Lasso ability.
Lystrosaurus
Tiny pet with XP boost aura for nearby tames. Passive tame with berries. Essential early tame.
Megatherium
Giant sloth with bug-killer rage. Essential for Broodmother boss. Superior Kibble, saddle at Lv52.
Otter
Shoulder pet with insulation buff. Passive tame with fish. Can carry artifacts.
Oviraptor
Egg production booster. Set to wander near tames. Passive tame. Must-have for breeding.
Sabertooth
Fast agile cat. Great for caves and hide/chitin. Regular Kibble, saddle at Lv37.
Tapejara
Three-seat flyer that latches onto walls. Perfect for aerial taming. Superior Kibble, saddle at Lv55.
Terror Bird
Fast ground runner with glide ability. Saddle at Lv32. Great exploration mount.
Thylacoleo
Tree-climbing marsupial lion with bleed. Best cave mount in the game. Saddle at Lv51.
Titanosaur
Biggest creature in ARK. Cannon KO, platform base. Limited-time tame. Saddle at Lv100.
Rock Drake
Steal egg and raise. Glide + invisibility + wall climb. Radiation immune. No saddle.
Dunkleosteus
Underwater miner that handles oil, metal, and crystal. It's a passive tame which is nice. Saddle at Lv58.
Tusoteuthis
Giant squid perfect for black pearl farming. Passive deep sea tame so bring your scuba gear. Can equip a platform saddle.
Brontosaurus
Mobile platform base with massive HP and weight capacity. Exceptional Kibble needed. You unlock the saddle at Lv62.
Creature FAQ
The questions I get asked literally every time someone new joins my server and honestly they're good questions so I don't mind answering them over and over because we were all new once and ARK does a terrible job of explaining anything and the ingame tutorial basically teaches you how to punch a tree and then abandons you to figure out the remaining 99% of the game on your own which is why wikis like this exist and why I've spent hundreds of hours writing this instead of actually playing the game and I'm not sure if that's dedication or a cry for help at this point but here we are and the FAQ exists and people use it and that's what matters.