How to get high-level dinos in Ark: Survival Ascended

If you’re planning to defeat the bosses in Ark: Survival Ascended, you’ll need high-level dinos by your side—but getting hold of them isn’t an easy task.

High-level dinos are harder to find and take longer to tame, so are only viable for players who have built up a good source of materials and are ready to undertake the challenge. When you know what you’re doing, it’s not too difficult—and the hardest task is actually locating the dinos themselves.

While you will be relying on luck a lot of the time, there are some things you can do to help you on your search, which we have detailed below.

How to find high-level dinos in Ark: Survival Ascended

Finding a high-level dino in the wild in Ark: Survival Ascended mostly just comes down to luck but there are a few things you can do to increase your chances—though you’ll still be relying heavily on RNG.

It’s good practice to kill any low-level dinos you find in Ark: Survival Ascended, as they’re taking up a spawn point. If a particular area has one spawn for a Baryonyx, for example, and the one there is level 15, there will not be another Baryonyx until the one occupying the space is tamed or killed.

Early on in the game, you may not have the required weapons to take down a big threat like a Spinosaurus or a T-Rex but you can use the environment to your advantage by luring them into fights with other creatures or into things like lava.

Alternatively, if you have access to admin commands on the server, you can do a dino wipe to erase all of the wild creatures currently on the map. This method will not work on official servers, however, or if you do not have admin access.

How to increase max dino level in Ark: Survival Ascended

By default, the maximum level for wild dinos and creatures on The Island in Ark: Survival Ascended is 150, whereas other DLC maps have a higher threshold. However, there are ways that you can increase the max level on your server.

If you’re on PC and playing through Steam, follow these steps:

1. Open Steam and click on the Ark: Survival Ascended game page
2. Click on “Manage” in the top-right corner.
3. Select “Browse Local Files” to open up a new window
4. Open the “ShooterGame” folder and click on the “Saves” folder
5. Now click on “Config” and “Windows”, which opens up another pop-up with a bunch of text
6. Navigate until you find the “Game User Settings” and look for “DifficultyOffset=1” under the [ServerSettings]
7. If you replace the 1 with 2, so it reads “DifficultyOffset=2”, the max level of wild dinos will now be 300.
8. Open Ark: Survival Ascended and, in the World tab of the Game Rules, make sure “Maximum Difficulty” is set to off.

If you are using a Nitrado server on any platform, including console, follow these steps.

1. Head to your Ark: Survival Ascended game server webinterfact
2. Under “Settings” click on “General”
3. Find and tick the “Expert Mode” option and press “Save Changes”
4. An “Expert Settings” option will now appear. Open this and edit the “Game.ini” file
5. Inside the Game.ini, scroll down to the bottom and then paste the code, for example, “DifficultyOffset=2”, to increase the max level of wild dinos to 300.
6. After adding the code, press “Save Changes”

If you don’t want to mess around with the code, which is completely understandable, you can use Mods to quickly change these settings for you. The Custom Dino levels Mod is the best option for this—though it is not currently available on consoles at the time of writing.