ARK Survival Evolved UPDATE: PS4 and Xbox One patch notes reveal new changes

Studio Wildcard has confirmed that a new ARK Survival Evolved update is launching today on PS4, Xbox One and PC.

Having moved on from the massive patches released in the game’s early access development, the dev team are now focused on fine-tuning the game.

Today’s big update includes some new changes for fans on all platforms and also brings a new event.

Valentine’s Day celebrations are now activating across servers and include some new rewards and bonuses.

Players will see new Red, Pink, and White coloured wild creatures wandering the ARKs, meaning most official versions of the game.

Studio Wildcard has also confirmed that when mating, creatures will have a 25% chance to drop an item.

This item could be one of a number of things, including a Valentines Chocolate which restores full HP or knocks 40% off a creatures taming bar, or a Valentines Candy, which gives tames random dino colours when eaten.

There will also be a range of bonuses activate during the ARK Valentine’s Day event, including:

  • Mate Boosted range increased by 2x
  • Mating Speed and Mating Recovery increased by 3x
  • Creature Maturing and Egg Incubation speed has been increased by 3x
  • Baby Food Consumption has been decreased by 1/3

A new limited time feature will see survivors being able to send out custom Valentine’s Day card, which can be done by heading over to playark.com/valentines.

When it comes to the release of today’s update, ARK Survival fans on PC and Xbox One should have already received it.

Those on PS4 may have to wait a little longer, with the official ARK Survival support team confirming:

“Our Valentine’s Day Event patch for PC, Mac/Linux, and Xbox are now available! PS4 coming soon.”

Tomorrow will also see some server disruption as Studio Wildcard perform maintenance.

“On February 13th beginning at 7am EST we will be conducting a small maintenance on a portion of our NA Official Servers,” the ARK support message reads.

“During this time the servers will go offline in succession, therefore, all will not be going down promptly at 7am.

“The servers will not be running during this maintenance period once they are down. We anticipate the full maintenance duration to take a few hours however the servers will be booted back up shortly after they are taken down, which should minimize individual downtime.

“Also worth noting: In our next patch we will be renaming all legacy servers to include “LEGACY” in their names.

“This change will not affect your favourites but the name will be changed there to reflect the new name. Legacy servers will be using the following format: LEGACY-servername. Ex: LEGACY-OfficialServer2.

“This change applies to all platforms that have Legacy servers. Legacy servers will still be located in the Official Legacy Servers tab in the server browser.”

Patch notes have also been released for the new update and confirm all the changes being made to the game. They can be found below for PS4 and Xbox One, revealing a number of exploits have been removed.

PATCH NOTES

Valentine’s Day Event!

  • Auto Activates from 2/12 – 2/18 for non-TCs
  • Run with ActiveEvent=vday to toggle manually
  • Event Rates:
    • 2x Mating/Mate boost Range
    • 3x Mating Speed/Mating Recovery
    • 3x Baby/Egg Maturation Speed
    • 1/3rd Baby Food Consumption
  • Event Details:
    • Dino colour spawns: Creatures have a 20% chance to spawn with holiday-themed colours
    • When mating, creatures have a 25% chance to drop an item.  That item has a 50/50 chance to be one of the following:
      • Valentines Chocolate: Restore full HP, or knock 40% off a Dino’s Tame Bar
      • Valentines Candy: Random dino colours

Managarmr

  • Ice Breath damage is now scaled by distance to the target
  • Improvements to situations where Managarmrs float away
  • Whistle Follow, or Whistle Stop will order the Managarmr to stop their active ability and return to ground
  • Reduced Ice Breath freeze amount
  • Increased time between Freeze Debuffs 

Exploits

  • Fix for exploit related to Rafts
  • Fix for exploit related to Tek Gloves
  • Fix for exploit related to Owl and babies
  • Fix for exploit related to Owl
  • Fix for exploit related to Desert Titan lightning
  • Fix for exploit related to Ladders
  • Fix for exploit related to Chairs

Extinction    

  • Environment memory improvements

Ice Titan

  • Have Ice Titan consider more targets as a leapable-enemy

Desert Titan

  • Fix for Desert Titan sometimes freezing/refusing to move during boss fight
  • Fix for Desert Titan occasionally flying out of world bounds
  • Untamed Desert Titan ground targeted lightning attack will now have a variable delay
  • Removed Burning debuff that the lightning field puts on enemies

Titans

  • Reduced damage to structures from melee attacks

Mating

  • Added “Enable Mating” under Behavior dial on Dinos, wandering is no longer required to mate
  • Change dino hover UI to read “Enable Wander or Mating to Mate” instead of “Enable Wander to Mate.”

UI

  • Moved chatbox down to the lower left corner

Inventory    

  • Increased Bullet/Arrow stack size to 100 (from 50).

Turrets

  • Reduced Auto/Heavy turret inventory size roughly 40%, to accommodate ammo stack change (results in a slight increase of max # of bullets they can store)

Tribes

  • Finish increasing tribe group rank limit from 5 to 10
  • A player can not accept alliance invites unless they are tribe admin
  • Alliance invites and new tribes added or removed from alliances is now logged in the Tribe Log.    

Cryopod

  • Tooltips now contain the stats of the dino
  • Mating timer now advances while in a Cryopod unless the Cryopod is transferred, then it is reset to respect the new server’s MatingIntervalMultiplier
  • Baby ageing is paused while in a Cryopod
  • Baby imprinting is paused while in a Cryopod
  • Baby gestation is aborted when entering a Cryopod

Air Conditioner

  • Reduced Air Conditioning SFX radius

Plant Y

  • No longer affects Quetz and Karkinos

Plant Z

  • Stun cooldown increased vs dinos, 5 seconds -> 7.5 seconds

Megalania

  • Halved torpidity decrease rate

Bola

  • You can now struggle to get out of bola faster

 Experimental

  • Added [ServerSettings] ItemStackSizeMultiplier to allow increasing or decreasing item stack size
  • Added [/Script/ShooterGame.ShooterGameMode] ConfigOverrideItemMaxQuantity to allow manually overriding item stack size on a per-item basis

Mesh Memory Optimizations

  • Doedicurus
  • Parasaur Saddle
  • Rex Saddle
  • Sauropod Saddle
  • Various Particle Meshes    

Particle Memory Optimizations

Skins

  • Fixed missing Bionic skins
source: express.co.uk