How to upgrade fast in ARK: Survival Evolved Mobile

The survival experience offered by ARK: Survival Evolved Mobile is so deep that it can sometimes be overwhelming. Materials, skills, objects, engrams, dinosaur taming… Studio Wildcard’s popular game is huge and full of content, so in this short guide, we offer some basic tips for beginners to make the start of your mobile adventure much easier.

Better alone than in bad company

You will often find ARK: Survival Evolved Mobile guides that recommend playing alone, while others will tell you that it is better to start in company to share tasks. What is the best way to start? It depends on your experience with the game. If it is your first time, we recommend that you start a single-player game to get to know the controls and the basic game cycles, and once you have assimilated these concepts, make the leap to multiplayer games and look for tribes, servers, and friends to share the experience with.

Collect as much as possible but carefully

You will quickly realize how many materials there are in the game world, so you will also have doubts about which ones to take and which not to take. In principle, we recommend that you take everything you see, but always carefully— fiber and berries from the bushes will be the main materials you will have to have in your inventory at the beginning of the game. However, getting metal soon after you start is also very useful. As for hunting, hunt for Dodos to obtain meat and skin easily, although do it with caution to not wipe out the entire species.

Use tools, not hands

Although they are similar experiences, ARK: Survival Evolved Mobile is not Minecraft. What does this mean? You can’t try to cut down trees with your hands. You can actually do this, but it is not recommended— ideally, you should get an ax and pickax as soon as possible to get more materials effectively. Remember to use each tool to collect the right materials. Otherwise, they will end up breaking before their time.

If you do not know the recipe for these tools, we leave them below:

• Ax recipe: 1 wood, 10 straw, 1 flint
• Pickax recipe: 1 wood, 10 straw, 1 stone

Always have something (cooked) on hand to eat

While the game allows you to eat almost any food you see, we do not recommend consuming raw food in ARK: Survival Evolved Mobile. This can lead to your character getting sick, and you don’t want that because there are already enough dangers in the game. Remember to cook everything you are going to put in your mouth and, above all, remember to always carry something on you that you can eat.

Pay attention to your attributes

There are a total of 11 attributes in ARK: Survival Evolved Mobile— all of them upgradable as you level up and important in the proper way. When you gain experience, you will have to decide in which attribute you are going to invest it to improve your character, so here is the complete list so that you have in mind what each one of them is and what they are for:

1. Health: It represents your life. If it reaches zero, you die.
2. Energy: It is the energy your character has. It is used up by running, jumping, swimming…
3. Oxygen: It marks the amount of time you can stay underwater.
4. Food: It reflects the character’s hunger. If it reaches zero, your life starts to go down.
5. Water: It indicates your character’s thirst. If it is spent, it lowers health and increases fatigue.
6. Weight: It marks the number of items you can carry in your inventory.
7. Melee damage: It marks the force you strike with your hands and blunt objects.
8. Speed of movement: It affects the speed you move and the energy you expend running.
9. Strength: It marks the resistance to weather, diseases, and fatigue.
10. Construction speed: It indicates the speed at which your character can craft.
11. Unconsciousness or fatigue: If you are too tired, you will fall unconscious.

Get to know Thelsand Island— the in-game map

Before starting, you will have to decide where you want to start your game— a very important decision as it will mark your progress in the game. Many people make the mistake of wanting to appear in the center, but our experience tells us that it is ideal to start in the south of Thelsand— it is an area more suitable for the initial levels, with plenty of materials to collect and without too many dangers. When you venture out to explore the map, use the obelisks as a guide— the red one marks the south, the blue one the north, and the green one the east.

Get engrams to make better objects

Although many objects can be built using plans, the best tools and parts are obtained using engrams. Understanding what they are, how they work, and how to get them will make you progress quickly in ARK: Survival Evolved Mobile, so we recommend you stop to learn how to get hold of them as soon as possible. Here are a couple of hints: Engram Points are used to unlock them, and you can’t get all of them in a single game, so choose carefully.

Create a refuge as soon as possible

Building a house in ARK: Survival Evolved Mobile is one of the main tips we can give you to start a game well. This place will not only serve you as a refuge but also as a respawning point and storage for your items, materials, and so on. In addition, you can be creative when creating your home— find a sheltered place, set up your refuge on a raised platform, or build your house on a raft so you can sail the seas.

Learn to tame and start with the smallest creatures

Taming dinosaurs in ARK: Survival Evolved Mobile is one of the most useful gameplays at your disposal for survival, although it will take some time to learn how to carry it out. First, you will have to knock the animal unconscious, something for which you will find it really useful to make Bolas. Then you will have to feed it —narcotic berries are ideal— and try to ride on its back once the taming bar is at maximum. At first try with small dinosaurs, because it will be impossible to go for the bigger ones.

Be careful not to go without thinking

In a game as demanding as ARK: Survival Evolved Mobile, it is key to make the right decisions. Even if you’re surrounded by dinosaurs and futuristic technology, think like in real life— would you go out exploring at night alone and without a torch? Would you waste resources knowing how scarce they are? Would you return to where you were killed just to retrieve a few materials? Would you start a fight with enemies of a level clearly superior to yours? Think twice before you act, and you will progress more optimally than if you were driven by impulses.