Ark Survival Evolved really throws you into the deep end as you try to survive on an island with dinosaurs, caves, and so many other dangers. If you’re going to survive, you’ll need to make use of the various resources around you to transform them into useful items and tools to aid you.
In other words, you’re going to need to know about Ark Survival Evolved crafting skills and how to craft in general.
- Ark Survival Evolved is a survival game that allows the player to perform a plethora of different things. Be it taming and fighting different animals or any other thing. To survive in this game you need to be able to use resources for crafting useful items.
- Any item that is not a raw material has to be crafted in order for it to become useful. It might look hard but the game has made it simple and you only need to look out for these three things.
- Engrams: You can acquire Engrams by Engram Points after you level up in the game but sometimes Engrams have a different set of requirements.
- Blueprints: Blueprints are similar to Engram but they are not necessary to learn. You can find them at Beacons and use them as much as you like.
- Raw Materials: You will need to acquire all the raw materials that are required for crafting a specific thing. Make sure to gather these.
- A Device For Crafting: For crafting different things players are going to head to specific locations depending on the item they want to craft.
How To Craft in Ark Survival Evolved
If you’re new to the game, then perhaps you might not even be aware of the various mechanics that go behind crafting in the game. If that’s the case, then worry not, as this section will guide you through everything that you need to know about Ark Survival Evolved crafting.
Why Do You Need To Craft?
The concept of crafting may seem new to you if you’ve never played a survival sandbox game. As in many other games, you’re often granted the various tools and resources that you might need.
However, in Ark Survival Evolved, almost any item that is not a raw material will need to be crafted before it can be used. For example, if you’re looking for a Water Jar or perhaps a wooden foundation for your base, or even a campfire for cooking, you’ll need to craft it.
The thought of having to craft everything might seem tedious at first. But the game has simplified it such that you only need to worry about 3 things whenever you want to craft something:
- Engram / blueprint
- Raw materials
- A device for crafting
And with a giant map in Ark Survival Evolved, you’ll never have trouble running into all the resources that you might need. Let’s break down each of these in detail.
Engrams
The very first thing that you’re going to need while crafting any item is its Engram. You can think of Engrams as the instructions or recipe for any item. These Engrams can be learned through Engram points that you get after you level up in the game. Once you do, you can invest those points to acquire the Engram.
However, sometimes it’s not that simple. Certain Engrams can have requirements that you need to fulfill before you can unlock/learn them.
They might need you to have a certain number of Engram points but also a specific level. For example, the basic Campfire requires 3 Engram Points and level 2. If somehow you already have 3 Engram Points but are not level 2, you will not be able to unlock the recipe.
Similarly, there are other requirements, such as having unlocked Engrams of other items first. For example, if you want to unlock the Cooking Pot or the Industrial Grill Engram, you must already have learned the Campfire Engram. Therefore, you need to keep these in mind and hover over the Engram that you want to learn to check for its prerequisites.
Blueprints
You might know about Engrams, but there is another way of acquiring recipes for certain items. They are known as the Blueprints.
They’re similar to the Engrams, but you don’t need to learn them before their use, nor do you need to invest any points. Instead, you can find Blueprints at Beacons that are scattered across the island.
Once you acquire one in your inventory, you can use it as much as you like without any other restrictions (as long as you have the materials and crafting station, that is).
Beacons also have certain requirements, and unfortunately, you cannot approach every beacon that you see. These long beams of light come in various colors, marking incoming cargo crates.
These crates can have useful supplies but, more importantly, blueprints. But you need to be at a specific level to access certain colored beacons. Here are the colors and the levels associated with them:
- White/Prismatic – Level 3
- Green – Level 15
- Blue – Level 25
- Purple – Level 35
- Yellow – Level 45
- Red – Level 60
- Deep-Sea – Level 80
It goes without saying that the higher-level crates will have better loot. In fact, the blueprints that you can find in them can have advanced versions of standard Engrams.
Resources
Coming onto the next part of Crafting skills in Ark Survival Evolved, you will need the relevant resources for whatever it is that you’re trying to craft.
You can check up on what you need by hovering over the Engram; it will tell you the amount and the name of the raw material required. If, for some reason, you cannot see anything by hovering on top, then go to the top-right menu of the crafting section and click “Toggle Tooltips” to enable them.
Most of the time, you won’t have issues with trying to gather raw materials as the island is filled with them. Moreover, they spawn in the same place where you found them before as long as a foundation has not been laid nearby. So, if you find a good spot for a material that you use often, you can keep coming back for more.
Early on, you won’t even need many major raw materials. You’ll mainly be relying on:
- Wood
- Thatch
- Stone
- Flint
- Fiber
- Metal
- Oil
- Crystal
- Silica Pearls
- Hide
- Pelt
- Chitin
- Keratin
- Feces
But as you progress, you will need more exotic resources like pearls or compound materials. The compound materials are a mixture of various resources. The mixture could be of two or more raw materials or perhaps even a combination of other compound materials. For example, Sparkpowder requires you to combine Flint and Stone in a Mortar and Pestle.
If you’re looking for more information on resources, make sure to check out: Ark Lost Island Resource Map.
Workstations
The last prerequisite for learning Crafting skills in Ark Survival Evolved is a crafting station. There are various stations in the game, and they all get used to creating various items. For example, if you want to create Metal Ingot or a Metal Irrigation Pipe, you will need the Metal Foundry. Or a Loading Bench for ammunition like bullets or arrows.
But these stations can get further nested. Some stations might require you to have another station through which it can get crafted. For example, if you want to create a firearm/assault rifle, you will need the Fabricator. But to create a Fabricator, you will need the smithy.
Therefore, you should keep in mind the relevant workstations. You wouldn’t want to spend all the time gathering resources only to find out you can’t even craft the item because of no station.
Resource Gathering
Now that you have a basic understanding of how Crafting works in Ark Survival Evolved, it’s time to discuss a few tips on resource gathering. Knowing which resources to get is one thing, but resource gathering can be considered a skill of its own.
As we mentioned earlier, resources can spawn back in where you first found them. Therefore, being familiar with the island will prove to be quite useful in resource gathering.
But besides just the locations of various resources, you will also need to have tools that can help you harvest all those raw materials. The essential items for this purpose are a pick and a hatchet.
You can craft a basic Stone Pick using 1 stone, 1 wood, and ten thatch. Whereas the Stone Hatchet will require you to have 1 Flint, 1 Wood, and 10 Thatch. With just these materials, you’ll be able to do a lot of resource gathering at the start.
But as you progress, you’ll need to upgrade your materials and get specific tools to make resource gathering more efficient. For example, you might want to upgrade your stone pick to a metal pick instead.
Therefore, keep upgrading your materials as you progress through the game so that resource gathering should feel like a breeze for you.
Another great way for resource gathering is through the aid of various dinosaurs. If you want to learn how to tame one, consider reading: ARK Crystal Wyvern.
Ark Survival Crafting Skill
We’ve looked at the basics of Evolved crafting. However, there are actually ways of improving your crafting, and that is through the crafting skill.
What is the Crafting Skill?
In Ark Survival Evolved, your character will have various skills that you can invest in. These range from Health and Stamina all the way to Movement Speed and, of course, crafting skills.
Just like any other regular skill, you can invest points in the skill to improve your Ark Survival Evolved Crafting skill abilities.
Benefits of the Crafting Skill
To understand the effects of the crafting skill, let’s consider cases where your crafting skill is at the base and then when it has a lot of points invested.
If you craft anything with base crafting skills, you will get exactly what the blueprint specifies. So, if you crafted a weapon with 240% damage, you will get 240% damage on the crafted weapon.
However, if you have a high crafting skill, you get a chance of getting a weapon that does greater damage than the specified 240%. The damage can go as high as 300% if you have all of your points invested into crafting skills.
But that’s not quite realistic, so you should expect a +10-15% increase in damage on average, depending on how many points you’ve invested.
Additionally, your crafting speed will also increase as you invest more points into the skill.
The best way of utilizing the crafting skill, if you can, is to respec your points. Then, invest all of them into crafting, craft all the items that you might need for a while and then respec back into your normal skill distribution. It’s not ideal and is definitely time-consuming, but if you want to get the really high damage rates or just better loot in general, it is a technique that you can use.
With that, you know everything about crafting skills and overall crafting in Ark Survival Evolved. The island can be quite tricky to survive on at the start, but perhaps with the information we’ve given you on crafting, your survival chances will have increased.
Next: BEST Ark Single Player Settings
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