ARK 2 Metal, Complete Farming and Processing Guide

mountain tops are basically where the good stuff lives and I mean the volcano at 60,50 is pretty much the holy grail with 50+ rich metal nodes sitting up there. But here's the thing, that place is a nightmare of predators and you'll probably die a few times before you get your route dialed in. Anyway the central mountain at 40,55 has like 30+ nodes and way less things trying to eat you which is honestly a better deal for most players. And if you're feeling brave the northern snow mountains have metal and crystal spawning right next to each other so you can knock out two resources in one trip and stuff like that. So yeah. Pretty great spot honestly.

tame a high-melee Ankylosaurus and this is where it gets fun honestly, you fly it to a mountain using an Argentavis that holds the Anky in its beak which looks kinda ridiculous but trust me it works. Then land on the mountain, hop on the Anky and go to town on every metal node you see, load all that sweet metal onto the Argy and fly home. And here's the part I love, the Argy's 50% weight reduction on metal stacks with the Anky's 75% reduction on raw metal so you're literally hauling way more than you should be able to. It's kind of broken tbh. But I'm not complaining.

so you got all this raw metal ore and now you need to turn it into something useful, the basic refining forge does a 2 to 1 ratio meaning 2 ore makes 1 ingot and honestly it's slow as hell but it gets the job done early on. Then later you upgrade to the industrial forge which does 12 ore into 1 ingot at double the speed and that thing is an absolute beast. 1 stack of raw ore which is 100 pieces turns into 50 ingots in the refining forge. A typical metal run for me pulls somewhere around 300 to 500 ingots every 20 minutes depending on how many predators interrupted me and whether my Argy decided to wander off or whatever. Because honestly. That bird has a mind of its own.

beyond the volcano and central mountain that I already talked about there's honestly some underrated spots that most guide videos don't even mention and I only found them because I kept dying at the volcano and had to find somewhere else to go, the blue obelisk mountain around 25,45 has about 20 rich metal nodes and the predator spawns there are way lighter than the volcano, mostly scorpions and the occasional carno instead of rexes which is such a relief tbh, it's basically a great spot for solo players who don't want to deal with alpha predators breathing down their neck every two seconds, the northern snow mountains between 15,20 and 30,25 have metal and crystal nodes right next to each other and that's super efficient if you need both in one trip, but the real hidden gem imo is the underwater metal nodes, yeah most people don't even know these exist and I didn't either until I randomly dove down one day, there are metal-rich rocks on the ocean floor in the deep trenches around 50,10 and 90,25 and if you harvest them with a Dunkleosteus you get metal plus oil and pearls all in the same run, it's a multi-resource gold mine down there if you have scuba gear and a decent water mount, kind of a pain to set up but so worth it once you get it going

when you first spawn on the beach and need metal for your first smithy and basic tools you're definitely not flying to the volcano, I mean you could try but you'd be dead before you got halfway there. So early game metal basically comes from river rocks and I've spent so many hours whacking those little round rocks along riverbanks with a pick. They give a bit of metal and they're everywhere so you don't need any tames. And the river that runs from 50,50 down to the south coast has tons of these rocks and they're safe to farm without anything scary jumping you. You can get enough metal for your first crossbow and some flak armor pieces in about 20 minutes of river rock farming and honestly it's kind of zen. Mid game is when you finally get your first Argy plus Anky combo and can start hitting the mountain nodes properly. This is where your metal income jumps from like 50 per hour to 500 per hour and it feels so good when that starts rolling in. Late game you're running an industrial forge at your base and you've got multiple ankys stationed at different mountains with teleporters or cryopods. Metal basically becomes a non-issue at this point. The bottleneck shifts from gathering metal to having enough cementing paste and polymer to actually use all that metal in high-end blueprints. I've found that once you hit Tek tier you spend way more time farming paste than you do farming metal and that's kind of annoying honestly but it is what it is. Anyway the whole thing is just a different game at each stage and you get the idea.

the Anky plus Argy combo is the standard for a reason but you can optimize it further and I've learned some tricks the hard way after farming probably thousands of hours. Build a small metal outpost with a refining forge right on top of your favorite mountain, just a 2x2 stone hut with a forge and a bed nothing fancy. Fly your Anky up there harvest everything dump the raw metal into the forge and start it refining while you fly home with the ingots. This way you're not hauling raw ore which is heavier than ingots. 100 raw metal weighs 100 units and refines into 50 ingots that weigh 50 units so you literally double your effective carry weight by refining on site and honestly that's one of those tricks that changed the whole game for me. Another tip if you're in a tribe have one person on Anky duty harvesting and another on Argy duty shuttling loads back to base. The harvester never stops swinging and the shuttle never stops flying. You can pull 2000 plus ingots in an hour with two people working this system and it's kind of insane how fast it adds up. Also don't forget about the industrial forge it processes 12 ore into 1 ingot at double speed compared to the refining forge's 2 to 1 ratio. It's a resource hog to build ngl but it pays for itself within like two farming sessions and then you wonder why you ever used the regular forge. So yeah. Worth it.

hands down the most painful mistake and I've made this more times than I want to admit is losing your Anky because you weren't paying attention to predators. You're happily swinging away at metal nodes camera angled down and a pack of allosauruses walks up behind you. By the time you hear the footsteps your Anky is already in their mouths and it's basically game over for that tame. Always do a quick 360 scan before you start harvesting and keep your Argy on neutral nearby so it can at least buy you time to react. Another thing don't use a low-weight Argy for metal transport I know high-weight Argys take forever to tame but a 300 weight Argy can carry maybe 2 metal nodes worth of ingots before it's capped. You'll spend more time flying back and forth than actually farming and that sucks. Get your Argy to at least 800 weight before you call it a metal hauler. And the most annoying one that nobody talks about, if you leave an industrial forge running with gasoline and then log off the gasoline keeps burning and you come back 8 hours later the forge is empty of fuel and your metal is half-smelted. So put exactly enough gasoline for what you need to smelt or just don't start a batch right before logging off. I've wasted so much gas this way it's honestly embarrassing. Kinda tragic really.