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While making a new single-player or coop world inArk: 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.
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 thesechanges are quite small, but their combined effect is significant. Here are the most important things you need to know about:
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 over400 Melee damage just by leveling up the stat a few times.
Other than that, your food and water go down much slower andtaming a dinosaur is much easier and faster. you may defeat most dinosaurs using your melee damage on this difficulty.
Medium
This is where things start heating up a little since thelevel 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 caneasily 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 getboring 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’shighly recommended to play on the highest difficulty. However, you may 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 cansimply head over to the “Create Or Resume Game” section of the main menuand open any one of the following tabs:
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 andstart respawning them according to the current settings.
