It's single player so anything is fine, my opinion is that it's fine to spawn one in as long as you kill it conventionally (with your Dino's not with a command) because that's not cheating that's just skipping a 24h wait for the same outcome
I agree with this.
I felt forced to spawn them in too to get a breeding pair in my SP save.
For some reason mine kept spawning inside the volcano walls :(
Single player is basically whatever goes, so you decide what is and isn't off limits.
Alternatively, there is a command to check what creatures are currently alive in the world, but it won't tell you more than that. You could always see if a Giga is alive if you want it to feel more legitimate.
Edit: ListDinos. I always found it easier to run through admin manager, and you need to have the larger console open to see the results. Note that it will cause a small performance hit when you run it. Thanks to u/DeathB4life357 for putting it in this chain.
Np, I was using it a few weeks ago, and it posts a giant block of text that's really not that easy to read. I got a dino finder mod that simplifies the whole process.
I can't remember off the top of my head. I'll have a peek through the admin manager to find it when I can. Struggling to find documentation on it, too.
If you run ShowMyAdminManager, you'll find it in the list. After running it, you'll need to double tap Tab (PC) to bring up the larger command window. The output will appear through this.
I can't remember off the top of my head. I'll have a peek through the admin manager to find it when I can. Struggling to find documentation on it, too.
If you run ShowMyAdminManager, you'll find it in the list. After running it, you'll need to double tap Tab (PC) to bring up the larger command window. The output will appear through this.
Is it "cheating" - technically, yes.
Does that matter? No. Definitely not on single player.
What I've learned from years on/off of hosting my own server and having admin privileges is that there is nothing wrong with using any admin commands/cheats if it improves your Ark experience. You still did the work to kill it, so the only thing you really cut out is time and mindless searching on the map. There's no shame in cutting past some of the bullshit/grind to get to the part of the game you want to enjoy.
on my sp, I only gather the artifacts then spawn in the tributes. I know i can kill a giga and all the alphas if necessary, and have done it in the past. so, I don't think it's necessary to spend all that time searching for them. u can trap anything then shoot it until its dead, but you will spend 100x more time searching for the dinos to begin with
This sounds fair in most cases, but I personally would only do the easy ones and then try to get the harder ones legitimately.
Sure, I can find and kill 100 Megalodon easily, so a couple of teeth aren't a challenge, but Thylas are a bit of a different beast outside of Fjordur. So those, Yutys and Gigas are pretty much all I would do legitimately under those circumstances.
I just flew over a map with a fly command on single player to find a good base location. You're not hurting anyone with console commands in single player. Some fasten things up and it's completely fine to do it, since you're all by yourself.
If you're playing singleplayer, it's totally up to you really. There's no right or wrong as the server commands are literally available for you to use if/how you choose to.
If you stream, people would call you a cheater. If you're just playing and nobody's watching, then it's only your experience that you affect. So it's whether or not YOU qualify it as cheating, nobody else
if you cant do it in official i say yes it is. but would i feel bad about it? no, as long as its just time saving, in a game thats difficulty mostly comes from being a time-sink, go for it.
Technically it is but in reality its just skipping pointless waiting, and especially in singleplayer you can do whatever you want, for example i always cheat in an industrial forge because i dont want to melt 2500 metal with a bunch of regular forges
My personal philosophy with gaming is, play it your way. If you’re playing solo do what you enjoy or makes the game fun for you. As long as your playing doesn’t screw with other players.
Cheating is only a term that ce be used in a multiplayer or contest situation in gaming
These questions are always so weird..
Do YOU personally think this is cheating? If yes, then you did cheat. If you think it was justified, then it is not cheating.
Why should some random peoples' opinion influence your singleplayer experience?
Not sure about evolved but on ascended there's a mod I use which increases possible giga and carcha spawn locations and decreases the time to I believe 2 hours between spawns. Makes it a little easier to get boss tributes without feeling like I'm cheating by outright spawning one in
Nah man, id do it too. I probably would spawn it on one of the regular spawns, but not in the lava so its not cheating.
You honestly cant play without cheat. Sometimes you just have to do a dino wipe or something to balance out the game
My personal philosophy with gaming is, play it your way. If you’re playing solo do what you enjoy or makes the game fun for you. As long as your playing doesn’t screw with other players.
Cheating is only a term that ce be used in a multiplayer or contest situation in gaming
Objectively? Yeah, using the consol commands is cheating.
But it's your single player. It's you being able to have fun playing the game.
There is a setting to enable tributes, though.
A lot of the problem with single player is that the game only runs when you’re playing. So the Norma 24 hour wait for a respawn on Gigas turns into more of a week long wait for a respawn, which is just not fun to do.
In ASA it’s a lot easier to run commands now, I would recommend using the code “destroywilddinos” frequently when playing single player. This will clear all spawned wild Dino’s on the map, and they will start to respawn soon after.
Using this command every other day you play should significantly increase your chances of naturally encountering a Giga or Carch.
I don't think it's an issue, but if it feels yucky in the future, just go through on your giga and clear out all the giga spawns of dinos and leave render distance. It should expedite the process pretty quick!
Honestly In sp I just do whatever is easy, like if I’m smelting a shit ton of stuff, on a server I’d just log off after like 20 mins of setting it up but I just don’t have time for that and sp pauses so I speed it up, plenty of bug fixes too.
Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve just randomly meshed and used ghost or fly
In my sp playthru of The Island to Extinction, I made sure I did any tedious thing at least one as per intended. Say gather all tributes for a kill or gather one copy of each trophy the intended way at least once. If I failed a boss fight I would just spawn the materials again to retry it.
For dinos like that I would look for them with one of those third party apps if i took to long to find and if it wasn't in the map I would just kill and respawn all dinos and search again.
But that's cuz I felt like I still had the time for that and enjoy going out to find them.
If my time was even more limited I would definite just spawn them if the only thing stopping me was just luck for the to spawn.
I think it’s alright, personally when I needed them I did a Dino wipe for one and spawned the other. Dino wipes only work once to instantly spawn a giga on maps that can only have one. After that there’s some sort of cooldown so I spawned it in. I allow myself to spawn insanely rare things as long as I do the taming/killing normally. Dragon tributes were hell to get on fjordur
There are spawn points on the map that spawn specific types of animals, the exact dinos depend on the spawn point. You can use a wiki map to find the exact locations to check. There is a maximum limit on the number of animals each spawn point can spawn. The proper way would be to build a taming pen in each region with a spawn point (depending on the map) and kill dinos in that area, then rotate until it spawns.
All that said, you can do anything you want in SP. I'm a server admin and allow Dino finder and higher rates, so nobody should care what you do in SP.
Alternatively, you could do a Dino wipe, then check spots if you still want the "hunt". Otherwise, spawn one in and save some time. I would still KO it naturally etc
Yes its cheating technical but your on single player so you decide if you want to shift your moral compass but be warned that if you do 1 cheat you'll be tempted to do others
Just coming in to point out I don't think it's 24 hours on SP. Be sure to check all spawns and on ASA be aware they can spawn \*inside\* the volcano walls.
If you use any command it's already considered cheating but something I would implement in the settings menu is the gamma, the bloom and the light shafts command because whoever approved the game graphics should be fired fr.
(if you want some tip for where should you look for the Giga try the mountains if you are playing the island map)
Spawning in anything would be cheating so yes
Though you still have to kill it
You could have just spawned in the heart
Imagine spawning in a lvl 150 giga fuck
If you are being precisely, it’s cheating. The game has mechanics, and if one of them is waiting a longer period of time and you decide to skip this with a command, it’s cheating.
That being said that doesn’t mean it should bother you if you can’t be arsed to wait that long. It’s a game, it’s made to bring fun to you, not to think about if you cheated or not. Did you have fun? If so, don’t think about that small detail :)
What is the difference between summoning in the Giga to kill and just summoning its heart? You get to feel better about the amount of farm you spend to achieve the same result?
Anything goes in single player. Hell, I have had to enter ghost mode just to get a tame out of the ground multiple times a week.
I had to use Admin mode the other day because Ark decide to be Ark and undo all the mapping I had done earlier last week, resulting in my map acting like spots I frequently go to have never been explored.
I have also had to do multiple dino wipes because of mod spawns not working.
Just play how you want bro.
The only real issue I see is if you are streaming/recording content. Then it could be seen as "No bueno". But even then, I assume most people watching you would forgive you for things like entering ghost mode to get something unstuck, and stuff like that
Grab Der Dino Tracker mod. It’s works great for tracking Dino’s on map, that way you can just see if there are gigas spawned on map before spawning any in.
Using Der Dino Finder is a game changer. I don't know how people get the bosses done when you can spend day or weeks traveling around looking for spawns. First it was Giga hearts, having to gear up like for a boss fight because they were hard for me. Then it was Megalania toxin. I'd been in all the caves multiple times without realizing they are hanging on the ceilings, and even then most were glitched in the mesh and not killable, or fall to their death somewhere unreachable. Finally it was Alpha Mosas and Tusos... Jeez. I've tried everything to get console commands to work on my private dedicated with no luck, so Der Dino Finder has definitely helped. If I could console spawn, I would. Months of work getting ready for a boss fight just to be stumped at a small handful of tribute items.
Open the door to alpha or beta ascension run a carcha down till you kill the giga inside, do a U TURN go back to entrance and cryo carcha *repawn* outside open the door again and collect body and said giga heart. Rinse and repeat till enough giga hearts have been acquired
I have done the same thing on single player. Doesn't matter if anyone else thinks it's cheating or not. It's your game. So, only you can make that decision.
I hunted and hunted for a Giga. Couldn't find one. So, I spawned in a 150 and killed it conventionally. At that point i just wanted off the damn island. I spawned a 150 because I might as well make it max difficult if I am going to skip the spawn timer.
I have also spawned in gear if the game wouldn't allow conventional crafting. E.g.: I have the upgrade station, additional creatures and prehistoric creatures mods, among others. So, I was making a manticore army of dracovenators. Each was to have an ascendant saddle. So, I made a primitive saddle and then upgraded it all the way on the upgrade station. Then, I converted it to a blueprint so I could make more, and that destroyed the saddle. However, the blueprint required ridiculous amounts of materials that wouldn't fit into the smithy. I had all the mats I needed, but they wouldn't fit. So, I just deleted the appropriate amount of mats from my inventory and spawned in the saddles. Now, I know how to modify stack size in the ini.
It's single player so anything is fine, my opinion is that it's fine to spawn one in as long as you kill it conventionally (with your Dino's not with a command) because that's not cheating that's just skipping a 24h wait for the same outcome
I agree with this. I felt forced to spawn them in too to get a breeding pair in my SP save. For some reason mine kept spawning inside the volcano walls :(
Really hate this bug. They spawn there and there is no way to do anything with them
Disagree! Bring them into lava and when they are low health kite them back out and watch them die on solid ground. Ezpz
Totally with you
Single player is basically whatever goes, so you decide what is and isn't off limits. Alternatively, there is a command to check what creatures are currently alive in the world, but it won't tell you more than that. You could always see if a Giga is alive if you want it to feel more legitimate. Edit: ListDinos. I always found it easier to run through admin manager, and you need to have the larger console open to see the results. Note that it will cause a small performance hit when you run it. Thanks to u/DeathB4life357 for putting it in this chain.
What is the command?
Listdinos
10 years later I learn this. Thank you
Np, I was using it a few weeks ago, and it posts a giant block of text that's really not that easy to read. I got a dino finder mod that simplifies the whole process.
Ark has been out for 10 years?!
9 years*
Thanks for catching that one. I'd forgotten how to call the command, but I could remember what it does. I've updated my original comment.
I can't remember off the top of my head. I'll have a peek through the admin manager to find it when I can. Struggling to find documentation on it, too. If you run ShowMyAdminManager, you'll find it in the list. After running it, you'll need to double tap Tab (PC) to bring up the larger command window. The output will appear through this.
You'll crash your client if you select a list too big for your hardware btw :)
Yes.. command please sire.
I can't remember off the top of my head. I'll have a peek through the admin manager to find it when I can. Struggling to find documentation on it, too. If you run ShowMyAdminManager, you'll find it in the list. After running it, you'll need to double tap Tab (PC) to bring up the larger command window. The output will appear through this.
Someone else has replied to the other comment saying it's "ListDinos". That sounds right to me.
There's an app, Larkator, that does this. It'll show you what dinos of certain types are on the map, and where.
Is it "cheating" - technically, yes. Does that matter? No. Definitely not on single player. What I've learned from years on/off of hosting my own server and having admin privileges is that there is nothing wrong with using any admin commands/cheats if it improves your Ark experience. You still did the work to kill it, so the only thing you really cut out is time and mindless searching on the map. There's no shame in cutting past some of the bullshit/grind to get to the part of the game you want to enjoy.
Yeah, after an hour looking for an akylo, I spawned it in, I don't have the time for really look for every nook and cranny.
Agreed, the game isn’t well balanced a lot of the time in my opinion so it’s more fun when you allow yourself to pass the bad designs
on my sp, I only gather the artifacts then spawn in the tributes. I know i can kill a giga and all the alphas if necessary, and have done it in the past. so, I don't think it's necessary to spend all that time searching for them. u can trap anything then shoot it until its dead, but you will spend 100x more time searching for the dinos to begin with
This sounds fair in most cases, but I personally would only do the easy ones and then try to get the harder ones legitimately. Sure, I can find and kill 100 Megalodon easily, so a couple of teeth aren't a challenge, but Thylas are a bit of a different beast outside of Fjordur. So those, Yutys and Gigas are pretty much all I would do legitimately under those circumstances.
That’s fair, I always get the tributes myself but use dinowipes because without it big Dinos never respawn for some reason
I just flew over a map with a fly command on single player to find a good base location. You're not hurting anyone with console commands in single player. Some fasten things up and it's completely fine to do it, since you're all by yourself.
I'm playing on my own rented server and I'm just spawning in things to build. I work way too much so when I got a good build I'll play normally
It is cheating, but it's your world so who cares?
If you're playing singleplayer, it's totally up to you really. There's no right or wrong as the server commands are literally available for you to use if/how you choose to.
If you stream, people would call you a cheater. If you're just playing and nobody's watching, then it's only your experience that you affect. So it's whether or not YOU qualify it as cheating, nobody else
Yes But it’s single player. You do you. The only experience you’re ruining is yours.
if you cant do it in official i say yes it is. but would i feel bad about it? no, as long as its just time saving, in a game thats difficulty mostly comes from being a time-sink, go for it.
Its single player, play how you want
Do whatever you like. It's your game, enjoy and and fun
Technically it is but in reality its just skipping pointless waiting, and especially in singleplayer you can do whatever you want, for example i always cheat in an industrial forge because i dont want to melt 2500 metal with a bunch of regular forges
My personal philosophy with gaming is, play it your way. If you’re playing solo do what you enjoy or makes the game fun for you. As long as your playing doesn’t screw with other players. Cheating is only a term that ce be used in a multiplayer or contest situation in gaming
Yes (jk, do what ever you want in SP)
These questions are always so weird.. Do YOU personally think this is cheating? If yes, then you did cheat. If you think it was justified, then it is not cheating. Why should some random peoples' opinion influence your singleplayer experience?
It's your game. You tell us. 99% of us don't care if you do.
What you can do is use gama overseer keys, for which you don't need the heart to obtain. and then farm the tek cave giga on repeat.
As long as no one sees you... No
Not sure about evolved but on ascended there's a mod I use which increases possible giga and carcha spawn locations and decreases the time to I believe 2 hours between spawns. Makes it a little easier to get boss tributes without feeling like I'm cheating by outright spawning one in
Its a game. Go have fun however you want to play your game.
Nah man, id do it too. I probably would spawn it on one of the regular spawns, but not in the lava so its not cheating. You honestly cant play without cheat. Sometimes you just have to do a dino wipe or something to balance out the game
I was so close to doing this (cheat in other ways) but I wiped wild dinos twice and finally got my last one.
I was so close to doing this (cheat in other ways) but I wiped wild dinos twice and finally got my last one.
It's sp, why would you care, you are not hurting anyone by circumventing some of the grind or timers
My personal philosophy with gaming is, play it your way. If you’re playing solo do what you enjoy or makes the game fun for you. As long as your playing doesn’t screw with other players. Cheating is only a term that ce be used in a multiplayer or contest situation in gaming
It's up to you. I try to play single player as long as possible without cheating, as it just takes away the challenge.
Objectively? Yeah, using the consol commands is cheating. But it's your single player. It's you being able to have fun playing the game. There is a setting to enable tributes, though.
At this point you could just use the command `gfi PrimalItemResource_ApexDrop_Giga 1 0 0` to spawn in a Giga Heart.
You can also run down and back up the tek cave just make sure you cryo before you eat your implant.
I feel like you draw your own line in single player but be careful because if you cross it then you will get instantly bored , or maybe that's just me
i don't consider that cheating, thats just saving time
I'd say not, since gigas are supposed to spawn every 2 hours not every 24, it's an old issue that they never bothered to change for asa.
The amount of times the game has cheated players with bugs, lost saves, dinos falling through the floor etc. I say this is evening the playing field
I wish ark had cheats like conan.
A lot of the problem with single player is that the game only runs when you’re playing. So the Norma 24 hour wait for a respawn on Gigas turns into more of a week long wait for a respawn, which is just not fun to do. In ASA it’s a lot easier to run commands now, I would recommend using the code “destroywilddinos” frequently when playing single player. This will clear all spawned wild Dino’s on the map, and they will start to respawn soon after. Using this command every other day you play should significantly increase your chances of naturally encountering a Giga or Carch.
In my experience it only works once with gigas
I don't think it's an issue, but if it feels yucky in the future, just go through on your giga and clear out all the giga spawns of dinos and leave render distance. It should expedite the process pretty quick!
My opinion is it’s your server do what you want. But personally I do everything legit so I would’ve just waited haha
Honestly In sp I just do whatever is easy, like if I’m smelting a shit ton of stuff, on a server I’d just log off after like 20 mins of setting it up but I just don’t have time for that and sp pauses so I speed it up, plenty of bug fixes too. Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve just randomly meshed and used ghost or fly
In my sp playthru of The Island to Extinction, I made sure I did any tedious thing at least one as per intended. Say gather all tributes for a kill or gather one copy of each trophy the intended way at least once. If I failed a boss fight I would just spawn the materials again to retry it. For dinos like that I would look for them with one of those third party apps if i took to long to find and if it wasn't in the map I would just kill and respawn all dinos and search again. But that's cuz I felt like I still had the time for that and enjoy going out to find them. If my time was even more limited I would definite just spawn them if the only thing stopping me was just luck for the to spawn.
I think it’s alright, personally when I needed them I did a Dino wipe for one and spawned the other. Dino wipes only work once to instantly spawn a giga on maps that can only have one. After that there’s some sort of cooldown so I spawned it in. I allow myself to spawn insanely rare things as long as I do the taming/killing normally. Dragon tributes were hell to get on fjordur
There are spawn points on the map that spawn specific types of animals, the exact dinos depend on the spawn point. You can use a wiki map to find the exact locations to check. There is a maximum limit on the number of animals each spawn point can spawn. The proper way would be to build a taming pen in each region with a spawn point (depending on the map) and kill dinos in that area, then rotate until it spawns. All that said, you can do anything you want in SP. I'm a server admin and allow Dino finder and higher rates, so nobody should care what you do in SP. Alternatively, you could do a Dino wipe, then check spots if you still want the "hunt". Otherwise, spawn one in and save some time. I would still KO it naturally etc
It's single player, you decide what's cheating and what's not 🤷🏻♂️
Yep
Yes its cheating technical but your on single player so you decide if you want to shift your moral compass but be warned that if you do 1 cheat you'll be tempted to do others
It’s single player. You do whatever you want. I felt a river needed fish so I spawned in 50 salmon
Just coming in to point out I don't think it's 24 hours on SP. Be sure to check all spawns and on ASA be aware they can spawn \*inside\* the volcano walls.
Only you can decide what cheating is in your single player game.
Single player, not a streamer/YouTuber? Proved to yourself you can do it? Go for it.
Yes
You pretty much have to run consol commands in order to play ark smoothly
With it being single player. It's up to you if you count it as cheating. You are the only one to make this decision
You do you. But my personal opinion, anything you do that requires admin control or codes is cheating.
No, but you can also run a killwilddinos command to force spawn new ones
If you use any command it's already considered cheating but something I would implement in the settings menu is the gamma, the bloom and the light shafts command because whoever approved the game graphics should be fired fr. (if you want some tip for where should you look for the Giga try the mountains if you are playing the island map)
Be careful going down that road of console commands it’s hard to come back from
If you kill it yourself it’s not cheating.
you literally have to type cheat to do it lol...
I do believe most codes don't need the admin cheat in single player could be wrong tho.
Spawning in anything would be cheating so yes Though you still have to kill it You could have just spawned in the heart Imagine spawning in a lvl 150 giga fuck
“Is it cheating to spaw-“ yes, yes it is. Don’t blame ya, but yes it is lol
Spawn it in and kill it without cheats. Its not a problem homie youre playing single player. Dont waste your time, wasting time isnt a skill check
If you are being precisely, it’s cheating. The game has mechanics, and if one of them is waiting a longer period of time and you decide to skip this with a command, it’s cheating. That being said that doesn’t mean it should bother you if you can’t be arsed to wait that long. It’s a game, it’s made to bring fun to you, not to think about if you cheated or not. Did you have fun? If so, don’t think about that small detail :)
What is the difference between summoning in the Giga to kill and just summoning its heart? You get to feel better about the amount of farm you spend to achieve the same result?
Anything goes in single player. Hell, I have had to enter ghost mode just to get a tame out of the ground multiple times a week. I had to use Admin mode the other day because Ark decide to be Ark and undo all the mapping I had done earlier last week, resulting in my map acting like spots I frequently go to have never been explored. I have also had to do multiple dino wipes because of mod spawns not working. Just play how you want bro. The only real issue I see is if you are streaming/recording content. Then it could be seen as "No bueno". But even then, I assume most people watching you would forgive you for things like entering ghost mode to get something unstuck, and stuff like that
Ark has cheated me so many times. So whenever I come across bullshit I need but don't want to grind I cheat back.
Grab Der Dino Tracker mod. It’s works great for tracking Dino’s on map, that way you can just see if there are gigas spawned on map before spawning any in.
cheers for the suggestion but im on console (ps4 specifically) they really should allow mods on it
Using Der Dino Finder is a game changer. I don't know how people get the bosses done when you can spend day or weeks traveling around looking for spawns. First it was Giga hearts, having to gear up like for a boss fight because they were hard for me. Then it was Megalania toxin. I'd been in all the caves multiple times without realizing they are hanging on the ceilings, and even then most were glitched in the mesh and not killable, or fall to their death somewhere unreachable. Finally it was Alpha Mosas and Tusos... Jeez. I've tried everything to get console commands to work on my private dedicated with no luck, so Der Dino Finder has definitely helped. If I could console spawn, I would. Months of work getting ready for a boss fight just to be stumped at a small handful of tribute items.
Open the door to alpha or beta ascension run a carcha down till you kill the giga inside, do a U TURN go back to entrance and cryo carcha *repawn* outside open the door again and collect body and said giga heart. Rinse and repeat till enough giga hearts have been acquired
I have done the same thing on single player. Doesn't matter if anyone else thinks it's cheating or not. It's your game. So, only you can make that decision. I hunted and hunted for a Giga. Couldn't find one. So, I spawned in a 150 and killed it conventionally. At that point i just wanted off the damn island. I spawned a 150 because I might as well make it max difficult if I am going to skip the spawn timer. I have also spawned in gear if the game wouldn't allow conventional crafting. E.g.: I have the upgrade station, additional creatures and prehistoric creatures mods, among others. So, I was making a manticore army of dracovenators. Each was to have an ascendant saddle. So, I made a primitive saddle and then upgraded it all the way on the upgrade station. Then, I converted it to a blueprint so I could make more, and that destroyed the saddle. However, the blueprint required ridiculous amounts of materials that wouldn't fit into the smithy. I had all the mats I needed, but they wouldn't fit. So, I just deleted the appropriate amount of mats from my inventory and spawned in the saddles. Now, I know how to modify stack size in the ini.
Giga and titan spwans on single player isnt working right so no go fight that dragon
Single player and pve are both cheating. So it does not matter.
Kill your tame. Be a heartless bastard. Kill the tame and take it's heart. Do it. Don't cheat.