ARK server: How to create your own dedicated “ARK: Survival Evolved” server

After a two-year Early Access phase, ARK: Survival Evolved was officially released on August 29, 2017. Since then, the in open-world dinosaur survival game has had numerous adaptations and extensive updates, which is why it is still one of the most popular games in the genre. Collecting resources, cultivating plants, and taming a land or water dinosaur or fleeing from a fearsome Tyrannosaurus —all this is quotidian in ARK.

We’ll show you how to set up your own ARK server to gain maximum freedom in exploring the game world — whether alone or in a team with friends and acquaintances.

Your own “ARK: Survival Evolved” server offers you the possibility to freely design the game world and modes according to your wishes. Unlike playing on a publicly available multiplayer server, you are not bound to the operator’s configurations and rules. You decide for yourself how much PvE and PvP elements should be weighted, who you play with, and when the server is online.

In principle, you can create and host an ARK dedicated server directly on your home computer. With a high-end PC, you theoretically cover the basic hardware requirements. However, the ongoing resource consumption risks regular crashes and lags for you and all other players — even with an excellent Internet connection. In addition, the server does not run when you shut down your device.

If you rent the hardware for your ARK server from a provider, it can run without interruption if necessary, so that the game world is always available online. You can also rely on excellent download and upload capacities that come with the hosting providers’ state-of-the-art data centers.

Getting ARK: Survival Evolved to run on your own server gives you maximum fun and freedom when exploring the game world. The question of system requirements depends on several factors. For example, how many players should be able to be on the ARK server at the same time? What size is the game world? Should mods and plugins be used and if so, how many?

We have summarized the most important performance data for smoothly running an ARK dedicated server for you.

The right CPU setup forms the basis for a well-running ARC server. Even for smaller private servers, two physical cores with over 3 GHz are recommended, for example. The larger and busier the world becomes, the more power is advisable. The ARK dedicated server software is basically designed as follows: One core handles the main calculations and one core is responsible for handling the network activities. For this reason, a host system with two physical cores with high CPU performance is recommended to ensure optimal performance, as distributing it over several virtual cores is suboptimal and automatically reduces the performance potential.

What applies to processor performance is equally recommended for the memory of your server setup: the larger and busier the game world is, the more RAM you should plan for. If you plan to use plugins and mods, you will need to add more RAM capacity. As a minimum recommendation for a small “ARK: Survival Evolved” server without extensions, a value of 6 to 8 gigabytes of RAM can be established.

The basic installation of ARK server software takes up 10 to 15 gigabytes of hard disk space. You will subsequently need additional storage space for the user files and possible extensions. For long-term hosting of the gaming server, we therefore recommend a storage contingent of 30 gigabytes or more.

The Internet connection of your ARK server is as elementary for the later game fun as the hardware of the server itself. A low ping (also known as “latency”) on the server and player side will increase the fun of exploring the huge dinosaur world. From a server perspective, the upload value (“uplink” or “upstream”) is crucial. The more upload speed your server has available per player, the faster the server data will reach the participants.

For the operating system, you can choose between Microsoft (Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016) and Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, OpenSUSE). The server software “SteamCMD”, which you can also use to create other dedicated game servers such as a Rust server, is also available for macOS — but there are always problems when installing it on the Apple system.

The system of your choice also takes up server resources, which you should consider from the start. For example, Windows Server 2016 has the following minimum requirements:

• 1.4 GHz processor (64-bit)
• 512 MB or 2 GB of memory (without or with graphical user interface, respectively)
• 32 GB of hard disk space

If you use the Linux distribution Ubuntu instead, you can orient yourself on the following minimum values (version 20.04):

• 2 GHz processor (64-bit)
• 4 GB of RAM
• 25 GB hard drive space

The demonstrated requirements for hosting a dedicated ARK server make it clear why it is a better idea to rent resources from a provider. Firstly, only absolute high-end PCs offer the necessary computing power for stable gameplay - especially if you want to take part in the adventure in ARK: Survival Evolved yourself on the same device. Additionally, you can be sure that a server in an external data center has a consistently good Internet connection.

Typically, the common providers have several different server options to choose from at once, which differ in points such as administration options, billing model, and hardware setup. With IONOS, for example, you can choose between the following three types:

• Cloud Server
• vServer (Virtual Private Server)
• Dedicated server (either self-administered or administered by IONOS)

When you rent a cloud server from IONOS you enjoy maximum flexibility. You get access to virtualized resources that you can scale up or down at any time. Server performance is billed by the minute, so you only pay for the hardware resources you actually use.

Billing method and scalability are the decisive differences to a IONOS vServer. Resource virtualization is also on the daily schedule when it comes to this model. However, you get a fixed hardware setup that you are billed for monthly.

Best suited for single-core applications like ARK server software is the third server option - a dedicated server. A powerful hardware package including CPU performance with up to 3.8 GHz (4.2 GHz or 4.4 GHz Turbo Boost) is explicitly provided for you at a fixed monthly price in this case.

Three typical ARK server scenarios including matching IONOS plans

The three server models from IONOS are available in different price and performance classes. To make it easier for you to choose a suitable package for your own ARK dedicated server, we have compared three typical scenarios for an “ARK: Survival Evolved” server in the following table and assigned suitable rates of all three server types.

Once you have access to your ARK server hardware, you can start setting up and configuring the server. The steps for IONOS customers (vServer, Cloud Server, Dedicated Server) are described in the following instructions. In this case, the operating system is Windows Server 2016.

On the server, you will now install SteamCMD, the command line version of the Steam client that you will later use to obtain the software for your ARK dedicated server. For Windows, you can download the setup files from the following download link.

The first step is to create a directory for your ARK server. In this tutorial we use the directory “C:\ark-server” as an example. The appropriate command is:

After creating the directory, log in to the Steam servers (Steam Public) as an anonymous user:

The last step is to install the ARK dedicated server software. For this you need the Steam app ID (376030) and the following SteamCMD command:

You have now completed all the necessary steps to be able to start your ARK server. The easiest way to do this is to create a batch file in the subfolder “ShooterGame\Binaries\Win64” with the following content:

Under “SessionName” you enter the desired name for your ARK server instance, your individual server or administrator password you assign after the equal sign of the entries “ServerPassword” or “ServerAdminPassword”.