‘ARK: Survival Evolved’ Gets Family Trees, 4 New Dinos, And Refreshed Caves With PC Patch 252

ARK: Survival Evolved PC players received a gift to go along with their Thanksgiving meals Thursday. Patch 252.0 has been released to add four new dinosaurs and refreshed caves, plus some oft-delayed features like the third phase of breeding.

The big change comes to The Island in the form of refreshed caves. Studio Wildcard has revamped the graphics of each cave on the map to bring “them up to par visually” and improve the game’s performance while in the caves.

Cave rewards have often been a sore point for ARK: Survival Evolved players, but those have been updated as well. The new rewards come with an increased challenge, however, as Studio Wildcard has upped the challenge in each of the caves on The Island.

It is worth pointing out all player built structures inside and at the entrances of caves have been destroyed with patch 252. This was an unfortunate necessity to update the caves, but it should help those on servers being blocked out of caves by alpha tribes.

The new caves are joined by four new dinosaurs available on The Island, The Center, and Scorched Earth. This includes the giant snail, Achatina, another two-legged carnivore with the Megalosaurus, the Triceratops cousin, Pachyrhinosaurus, and the four-legged lizard, Moschops.

Achatina is an animal cementing paste factory. Its slime trail will occasionally include a loot drop of cementing paste for players to collect.

Megalosaurus is another two-legged carnivore for players to fear, but it does come with a unique characteristic. The animal is nocturnal and prone to sleeping during the day. When it’s not sleeping, it is sluggish while the sun is still out. However, it turns into one of the more ferocious and dangerous creatures players can encounter when the sun goes down.

The Pachyrhinosaurus is another dinosaur with a unique crowd control ability. Its primary attack is to emit a purple mist which pacifies nearby aggressive animals. Meanwhile, an alternate attack emits a red cloud of smoke that makes nearby animals aggressive. This grants Survivors with a tamed Pachyrhinosaurus a lot of options to either protect their own base and tames, or attack enemy bases.

Finally, Moschops is a fearsome looking four-legged lizard, but is actually quite cowardly with a useful utility ability when tamed. The creature can be taught to harvest certain resources over time. In other words, it can be trained to harvest more prime meat from kills, for example, or more rare flowers from plants.

Breeding Phase 3 finally makes its way into ARK: Survival Evolved after many delays. This adds family trees and mutations to breeding dinosaurs. The extent of which remains to be discovered.

New whistle commands are also available with the ability to assign dinosaurs to groups for players to give whistle commands to. Studio Wildcard has also added new visual indicators for players to recognize where commands have been directed.

The new ARK: Turkey Trial 2 will be available on The Island, The Center, and Scorched Earth maps. It sends players on a scavenger hunt to kill Super Turkeys to collect wishbones. These can be used to turn in for a new custom emotes as a reward or a temporarily tamed DodoRex. The good news for PC owners is Xbox One players have already been subjected to killer Super Turkeys, which have been nerfed into non-aggressiveness.

Another Evolution Event is also live on both the PC and Xbox One versions of ARK: Survival Evolved. The event will run until Monday and brings double experience gains, harvesting, and taming rates while active.

Here are the official patch notes for ARK: Survival Evolved PC version 252.0 via the game’s forums.

• ARK: Turkey Trial 2! New challenge and cosmetics! Earnable Emotes! (this system also enables Mods to add more Emotes to the game!)
• New Dinos: Achatina, Megalosaurus, Pachyrhinosaurus, & Moschops!
• New Mechanic: Breeding Phase 3: Random Mutations and Family Trees. At last!!!!
• All-new Caves on The Island, redesigned with proper shipping-quality layouts and graphics & increased challenge (ALL Cave Structures will necessarily be wiped in this version). (Still to come beyond this are the Underwater Caves & Tek Cave.)
• Two new mythos Explorer Notes for each character
• 20% server performance increase due to massive replication & PhysX efficiency improvement
• Whistle Ordering Groups! Create groups by class, or specific-dino! Awwww yeah! (also Whistles to group-set Follow Ranges)
• New Whistle Type: “Move To,” point at an arbritrary location and tell your dinos to move there!
• VFX indicators for whistle commands: Move To, Attack, and Group-Selected Units. ARK RTS?
• Extra Option to “stream” in “Far” map sublevels, for large memory and performance gains (but reduced visual quality & draw distance).
• Fixed Dinos falling thru bases/floors on client
• Fixed server option ConfigOverrideItemCraftingCosts to work properly for inventories that have been loaded from saved game (so it works properly now)
• Tamed Giga HP & Damage reduced by 15 percent

[Featured Image by Studio Wildcard]