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How to Change Spawn Rates in ARK: Survival Evolved

Last modified on Dec 21, 2022 in ark

mc head By Noah

Overview

After countless hours of playing on your Ark: Survival Evolved server, many grow frustrated with inadequate spawn rates for dinosaurs, causing there to be either too many or too few exploring the world. Many Ark:SE server owners who run into this issue struggle changing these values as the process can be difficult. While changing the dino spawn rates may come off as a bit intimidating, our Apex Hosting panel simplifies the procedure. Taking the time to review this guide will give you the tools needed to modify the dinosaur spawn rates to your desired values.

Changing the Spawn Rates

Changing the Spawn Rates

 

How to change overall spawn rates

If you aren’t feeling too picky or just want to change all of the spawn rates at once, the gameusersettings.ini will allow you to do that. By adding or altering a code in this file you can easily increase or decrease the spawn rate of all dinos at once. You can accomplish this by following the steps below:

  1. Navigate to the Apex Panel and stop your server.
  2. In the menu on the left-hand side, click on the “Config Files” tab.
  3. Click on the “GameUserSettings.ini” to edit the file.
  4. Locate the “[ServerSettings]” section at the top of the page.
  5. Search for the “DinoCountMultiplier” setting. If the setting is missing, follow the gif below to add it.
  6. change overall spawn rates
  7. Change the value to what you would prefer. 1.0 is the default, 2.0 doubles the spawn rate and so on.

 

How to change individual spawn rates

Let’s say you are really struggling to find a specific dino, or maybe you want more control over the spawn rates of every dino available. This can be done too, but the process is a little more difficult and requires adding some code to the game.ini settings. In the example below, we will be increasing the spawn rates of Megalodons:

  1. Navigate to your control panel and stop the server.
  2. Click on the “Config Files” option in the menu on the left side of the screen
  3. Find and click on the “game.ini” option to open it in the webeditor
  4. On the top line, add
    [/script/shootergame.shootergamemode]
  5. change individual spawn rates
  6. On the next line, add the following code to change the dino spawn rates:
    DinoSpawnWeightMultipliers=(DinoNameTag=”Megalodon_Character_BP_C",SpawnWeightMultiplier=1.5,OverrideSpawnLimitPercentage=true,SpawnLimitPercentage=2.0)
  7. Press the green “save” button, then restart the server for the changes to take effect.

 

Code breakdown

The example code above can seem pretty intimidating at first, but once you break it down to the individual parts it is fairly easy to grasp:

DinoSpawnWeightMultipliers=(DinoNameTag=”Megalodon_Character_BP_C",SpawnWeightMultiplier=1.5,OverrideSpawnLimitPercentage=true,SpawnLimitPercentage=2.0)

The first part

 DinoSpawnWeightMultipliers=()

refers to the type of function the game is to carry out with this script. In this case, it is to change the spawn weight. The rest of the code tells the game what dino to target, and how it needs to be changed.

DinoNameTag=”NAME”

refers to the name of the creature you are targeting. In our case it is a Megalodon, so we put

”Megalodon_Character_BP_C"

You can change “NAME” in the code to anything you like, so long as you use the exact ID of the dino used by the game files. You can find a list of those IDs on the Ark wiki under the “Entity ID” section

SpawnWeightMultiplier=1.5

This controls how often a creature will spawn relative to every other creature in the world. In this case we want our Megalodons to spawn 1.5 times more often than every other dino, so we set it to 1.5.

OverrideSpawnLimitPercentage=true

This section is if you want to change the hard limit of how many of the creatures can be spawned. If you change the Spawn Weight above, it will increase or decrease how often the creature spawns, but this and the following variable will let you decide how many can be spawned at once. In our example, we wanted to change the hard limit, so we set this to “true”, if you don’t, you can set it to “false”.

SpawnLimitPercentage=2.0

This controls the upper limit for how many of a creature can be spawned. Once our Megalodons hit their maximum number in the world, no more can be created. Increasing this will allow more total creatures to be spawned into the world. In our example we changed it to 2.0 so twice as many Megalodons can be in the world at once.

Common Issues

My settings are not working in the game
In most cases, this happens because there is an error or typo in the code. Go back to your game.ini or gameusersettings.ini and make sure there are no errors. If there are none, refer back to our examples to make sure the codes have been entered correctly.

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