ARK: Survival Ascended – Difficulty Settings Guide in SP & Non-Dedicated

Hey nerds, I played a lot of hours of ARK SE and gave in to intrusive thoughts to try ARK SA.

After looking at difficulty settings and messing up a couple times on some custom settings I put, I tried to search for steam guides or info on exactly what changed and did not find a comprehensive list, so I figured I would write it down myself instead.

• The main changes are that (maybe obviously) your stats get boosted quite a lot in easy, but also that if you play on hard preset, your dinos after taming really does not get a lot of additional stats, so that one is quite harsh.
• “Select Difficulty” are just presets that move most of the sliders to mold the difficulty for you without you having to do much, you can still manually tinker with all the values after if you want.
• If you select difficulty or hit “Reset to Default” after having manually changed stuff, all your tinkering is undone, and there is no way to get it back.
• You can manually go into the games files and make a copy of the .ini files to import them later if you made settings you liked.

Here is a link to all changes between the various difficulty settings, so you can find whatever works for you, or just to find what you accidentally changed, and need to change back:

Google Sheets – ARK Survival Ascended Difficulty Presets[docs.google.com]

I just thought you might want to know.

I tried to make it easy to see where there were changes and not so I just made the entire list like how the settings are ingame, it is a bit long but that way if they change something later I can just edit it.