ARK server settings: ini files explained

Your ARK: Survival Evolved server's rates, difficulty and breeding speeds all come from two plain text files: GameUserSettings.ini and Game.ini. This guide explains what each one controls, where they live on your ARK: Survival Evolved server, and the keys people change most.

The easy way: the Server Settings tab

Your server panel has a Server Settings tab that covers the settings below as labelled controls: XP, taming and harvest rates, difficulty, day and night speed, PvE and camera options, and every breeding speed. Presets (2x, 3x, 5x, 10x, Breeding boost and Short nights) fill them in with one click.

The tab handles the stop-first rule further down for you. While the server is offline it just saves. While it's running, Save and restart stops the server, writes your changes into the files ARK has just saved, and starts it again. Players online are disconnected for that minute or so.

Use the File Manager method in the rest of this guide for any setting the tab doesn't list.

The two files

GameUserSettings.ini holds almost everything you'd call a "server setting": experience, taming and harvest rates, difficulty, day and night speed, PvE or PvP, and camera and map options. Most of these sit under one section, [ServerSettings]. Two more sections matter: [SessionSettings] holds SessionName (your server's name in the in-game browser), and [/Script/Engine.GameSession] holds MaxPlayers.

Game.ini is for what ARK's own documentation calls "more advanced modifications". Most owners only ever use it for one thing: breeding. Maturation speed, egg hatching, mating cooldowns and imprinting all live in Game.ini, under a single section header you need to type exactly as shown: [/script/shootergame.shootergamemode].

GameUserSettings.ini is created for you the first time your server boots. Game.ini is not, but the Server Settings tab creates it the first time you save a breeding setting. To make it by hand instead, create a plain text file named Game.ini on your computer, then in the File Manager open ShooterGame/Saved/Config/LinuxServer/ and Upload it.

Both files live in that same folder, opened from the File Manager tab. If you'd rather not hand-type every key, our ARK server settings generator builds both files from a short form. Download the result and upload it the same way.

The golden rule: stop the server first

ARK keeps its settings in memory while it runs, and writes them back out to GameUserSettings.ini when it shuts down. Edit the file while the server is online and your changes are gone the moment it next stops, overwritten by whatever was already running. ARK's own documentation puts it plainly: close the server before changing the ini files, or the changes are removed.

What the Startup tab controls, and why it wins

Several of the same settings also live on the Startup tab, and from there they go straight onto the server's launch command, not into a file. A value on the launch line always beats the same key in GameUserSettings.ini:

How to set the admin password and enable cheats in ARK: Survival Evolved covers the admin password case in detail: edit ServerAdminPassword in the ini and the old password keeps working, because the Startup tab's value is the one actually in use. The same applies to every row above, and to anything typed into Additional Arguments: whatever is on the command line wins.

The Server Settings tab knows this. A setting you've put in Additional Arguments shows there as read-only, with a link to the Startup tab, so you change it in the one place that counts.

The most-changed GameUserSettings.ini settings

All of these sit under [ServerSettings].

Wild dino levels and difficulty

OverrideOfficialDifficulty is what raises the level cap on wild creatures, not DifficultyOffset. Set it to 5.0 and wild dinos spawn up to level 150, the same as official servers. Leave it at the default 0.0 and the override does nothing, no matter what DifficultyOffset is set to.

Game.ini breeding settings

These sit under [/script/shootergame.shootergamemode] in Game.ini, not GameUserSettings.ini.

ARK: Survival Evolved server: connect, mods covers the map choice and RAM sizing that go alongside these settings.

Common mistakes

1. Editing by hand while the server is running - the changes are gone the moment it next stops. Stop first, edit, then Start, or use the Server Settings tab, which restarts it for you.
2. The wrong section header - a key typed under [ServerSettings] that actually belongs in [/script/shootergame.shootergamemode], or the other way round, is silently ignored. Check the header above the line you added, not just the line itself.
3. Copying a setting from an ARK: Survival Ascended guide - Survival Ascended is a separate, newer game on a different engine, and several of its settings are renamed or don't exist in Survival Evolved. If a key does nothing, check the guide it came from is written for the original game.
4. The same setting is also on the Startup tab or in Additional Arguments - the launch command always wins, so the ini edit looks like it changed nothing. Check the Startup tab first if a setting won't stick.