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  • What Changes With Difficulty In Ark: Survival Ascended?
  • How To Change Your Difficulty Mid-Run

While making a new single-player or coop world in Ark: Survival Ascended, you'll be asked about the difficulty you'd want to go with. There are three choices in the game, and the difference between them can be quite staggering. However, the difficulty system here can also be complicated.

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Even if you're a casual player who just wants to have some fun with dinosaurs, it's not so easy as to just pick the lowest difficulty since it might actually become a detriment. It's important to know a few things before you go about selecting a difficulty for yourself.

What Changes With Difficulty In Ark: Survival Ascended?

There are quite a few important changes when you switch between the easy, medium, and high difficulty in Ark: Survival Ascended. All these changes are quite small, but their combined effect is significant. Here are the most important things you need to know about:

Difficulty

Changes

Easy

The level of dinosaurs you'll find will be quite low on this difficulty. However, your level-ups will be much easier and more effective. For example, you can easily get over 400 Melee damage just by leveling up the stat a few times.

Other than that, your food and water go down much slower and taming a dinosaur is much easier and faster. You can defeat most dinosaurs using your melee damage on this difficulty.

Medium

This is where things start heating up a little since the level of dinosaurs gets a bit higher while the effectiveness of your level-ups decreases. It leads to various scenarios where it can be quite hard to defeat dinos by yourself.

Hard

The Hard difficulty is where your reliance on tamed dinosaurs increases monumentally since you can easily get defeated by most of the wild dinos even if you're at a higher level.

If you're playing on this difficulty, you might have a rough time getting started. However, the level of encountered dinosaurs is much higher, which makes it easier to tame a dinosaur over level 100.

As you can see, you can't simply choose the difficulty you'd pick in other games when it comes to Ark. If you pick the Easy difficulty, it might get boring when you can defeat everything without the help of another dinosaur. However, playing on the Hard difficulty can be frustrating because of how easy it is to lose your tamed dinosaurs.

If you want to learn the game and defeat the various bosses in it, it's highly recommended to play on the highest difficulty. However, you can pick the lower difficulties if you want to have an easier run for your first save and learn the game's mechanics.

How To Change Your Difficulty Mid-Run

Thankfully, Ark: Survival Ascended is quite chill about the rules of a server, especially if you're on single-player. If you want to change the difficulty in the middle of your run, you can simply head over to the "Create Or Resume Game" section of the main menu and open any one of the following tabs:

  • Game Rules
  • Advanced
  • Engrams

In these sections, you'll see the option to choose difficulty at the bottom. As soon as you select a new difficulty, you'll see the changes when you start up your save. However, you might have to wait for a bit to see higher-level dinosaurs if you go to a higher difficulty since the old ones have to get defeated or despawn.

One way of doing this much faster is by using the console command "DestroyWildDinos". This will despawn all the untamed dinosaurs in your world and start respawning them according to the current settings.

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