One of the things that always bothers me about games is all the good and often bad information that circulates when a something new is added. In order to ensure that does not happen, I decided to do a breeding guide for people to have a one stop shot to reference.

I do have experience with breeding, plus I'll diligently scan the forums and other websites for new information.

Please please, if you find something wrong or have an improvement, please let me know.

***Note: Throughout this post I often refer to pets as Dino's. I am aware that not all creatures in ARK are dinosaurs, but this just makes it easier.

Breeding in ARK allows you to mate a Male and Female tamed creature with each other and then receive a fertilized egg. Hatch the egg, or give birth (Mammals only), then raise a baby through 3 stages until it reaches adulthood.


Currently only tamed pets can breed, they do not breed in the wild (yet).

The 20 October patch added Mammals to the list of animals that can be bred. Currently it appears only water animals such a Megaladons or Plesiosaurs can't be bred. (If you have info on this being wrong, please post in comments)

Depending on what you are trying to Breed, this can be a very short and easy process, or a longer time consuming one. So why bother?

- It is a fun dynamic that adds something else to do to the game.

- Some people enjoy collecting dinosaurs of different colors. Breeding allows you to mix and match your dino's colors for unique combinations.

- You kick puppies, toss kittens and take perverse joy getting prime meat from baby dinosaurs.

- Easily add more dino's to your stable or egg farm.

- While the time commitment can be extensive for some of the bigger dino's, by following this guide, you will be able to break this time up into different convenient phases. So instead of spending hours looking for a tame, knocking it out then sitting by it for hours, then getting it back to your base (all things that must be done at once.) You can do breeding in phases as described by this guide.

- You can merge "good" stats from parents into a baby that is actually better then it's parents. There is a lot of bad information out there about this. so let me explain in detail how this works.

When a wild dino levels (level 120 max without mods) it will actually get 119 stat points where it randomly (there may be hidden limits we don't know about) distributes into it's stats, such as health, melee, or oxygen. Then as the last phase of taming completes and you get your bonus taming effectiveness levels, those points are randomly distributed as well.

So you often may find a dino in the wild that has really good health, food, stamina, but it's melee damage may be bad. There are many possible combinations, and end game players knock out many dino's looking for a perfect tame. Breeding allows you to CREATE that perfect tame.

For example, let's say you find a male Raptor with really high melee, but it's health is bad. You also have a female raptor with great health and stamina, but it's melee is poor. Separately, neither are great mounts. When you breed them together, the baby has a 70% chance to get the better stat from each parent. Using our raptors above, an example would look like this:

----------------- Male------- Female
Health----------300------------700
Stamina--------250-----------350
Melee-----------400-----------200
Weight----------160-----------160
Oxygen---------200-----------225
Food------------2000----------1900

The baby get's a 70% chance for each stat to get the better number.

So the baby could look like this:

Health 700 (from mother)
Stamina 250 (failed the 70%, got lower stat from father)
Melee 400 (from father)
Weight 160 (from both)
Oxy 225 (from mother)
Food 1900 (from mother, again failed 70% chance)

So you now have a Raptor with good health and melee. However, the other stat that you wanted was stamina, which ended up low. You can try to rebreed them again if you want to improve, or be happy with your baby raptor.

IMPORTANT: WILD BASE STATS ARE USED FOR PASSING ON TO BABIES. THIS INCLUDES TAMMING EFFECTIVENESS LEVELS. A post that the developers made confused some people on this point. Think of wild base stats as what the stat is before you spend a single point leveling that stat up. These are the stats that are passed on.

Bred babies can never have higher stats, then their parents. (SEE NOTE BELOW) However, their level can be higher then the parents levels right after taming. Let's say the Father was 150 and the mother was 149 right after taming. You could possibly end up with a level 160 (or better) baby. Remember that all level means is a representation of how many stat raises were done. Because the baby got good stats from both parents, it ended up higher level. All higher level gives you is more torpor. Bred level can also be a good indication of if the breed was "good" or "bad." If the level is higher, at least some good stats were merged. If it is lower..... well do with the failed breeding as you will.

NOTE: Currently, it looks like a baby can have the melee that their parent SHOULD have had if taming effectiveness was maxed. For example, if the parent would have had a melee of 400%, but due to dropping taming effectiveness the parent only got 300%. The baby seems to be getting the 400%. It is unknown if this is a bug or intended.


Now people may think that this method will allow you to just keep making your dino better. Not really. Remember that the babies stats can never be higher then their parents, all you can do is merge stats. If you want to RAISE those stats, then you need to find a wild dino with a higher number in the stat that you want. Breeding for perfect lines would involve looking for lopsided dino's that spent a ton of points on a specific stat.

Theoretically you could find wild dino's that spent all 119 stat points on health, then another melee, then the rest of the stats. However "possible" this is really a statistical impossibility.

For an EXTREMELY thorough look at the math behind breeding, check out this excellent thread.

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/app/346110/discussions/0/483367798506048963/?tscn=1445624420

This section can be confusing, please let me know if you have questions.

- The last reason to breed is to "bank" your dino's. Let's say that you perfect your line with the maxed stats from your stable. You can now fertilize eggs, then freeze them. If your dino dies, you have another one in the bank (you would still need to level it though.) This is much better then going and needing to tame another and start from scratch. Eggs can also be traded, sold, or stolen.

You can't just jump into breeding. You need to plan a bit. You will need a lot of berries or meat, depending on what you are taming. I would probably say store maybe 10k, but you may not need that much if done correctly. How much you will need is based upon the dino type for example a Bronto will take more then a Trike.

*NOTE: Recent changes bumped up feeding requirements again. I raised the amount of food probably needed to compenstate.
You will also need to setup the following:

Breeding Area
You male and female will need to be set on wander to mate, but at the same time they need to stay really close to each other. The size of your area will depend on what you are trying to breed.

I use one of my taming pens for my big pets as seen in the picture. (Yes my pen is overkill, but I may need to tame Godzilla some day.)

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=536450224

For smaller creatures you may need a 1x1 enclosure or some other means to contain them. More information will be given in the Mating section.


Hatching area
For hatching you will need to keep your egg properly incubated. On regular servers, if you have the resources, I strongly recommend the use of AC units (remember they do hot and cold.) I use 10, but you can get away with probably 4-6. How many you will need depends on your climate. If you live up North you definitely will want more. I recommend setting them up so that if you stand in middle of them you get AT LEAST +900 - 1000 insulation. This is my temporary setup:

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=535829042

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=537886378

IMPORTANT: Ensure that all turrets are turned off and no creatures are on aggressive near your eggs. Once they hatch, they will get killed!

On primitive servers (or if you can't make AC's,) you will need to use campfires or standing torches. This is much trickier, and hopefully they will add an incubating chamber for primitive soon. Setup an area with a circle of fires or standing torches (use less fuel) where you will have the ability to light and extinguish fires as needed. In the north you may need as many as 12 fires. The majority of eggs prefer hot over cold.


Raising Area
Setup an area to raise the baby. Remember they start out small, and can get lost easy. They also will grow, make sure you have room. You don't want to dismantle your house to get that Bronto out! Babies are not the best followers, they don't swim well and act odd at doors. So don't count on being able to walk your baby dino where you want.

Pretty simple step, pick your male and female, and put them on wander to mate. They need to stay together (really close) for a few minutes to complete the mating. You will show flashing hearts of the Hud screens for each dino when mating. On the females, you will see a tan bar that shows mating progress. This bar will reset to zero if they wander away.

Recently they made changes where overburdened, ridden, or following dino's cannot mate. This does add a little difficulty to the process.

You want to use the pen that you have setup. Some people report that they will wander through walls. In my experience, this only happens when first put on wander. It's like they ignore structures around them initially. So if you keep them a little back from the walls, then put them on wander, they may not glitch. Further testing intended.

I have never had them wander out of my taming pen shown earlier. I normally ride them next to each other and stick them through the pillars. Sometimes they wander away, then I ride them back.

If you do not want to use a pen, then you can keep hitting the "U" button for all stay.

Once mating is done, a fertilized egg will drop. Grab it and incubate it or you can store it for later.

A male can breed again right away. The female has a timer that varies, Patch 220.1 changed the mating interval time to 18-48 Hours. This will significantly change how often animals can breed.

It is possible for a male to mate with more then one female at a time.

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=539278362

A fertilized egg has 2 bars, a hatching bar and a health bar, both go down. The egg needs to stay within a certain temperature range to incubate. If it falls outside that range it will lose health and die. On the egg it will say incubating when everything is ok. If it says to hot, or to cold, the egg is losing health.

Egg health has no effect on the quality of the baby, as long as the egg does not die.

Storage
If you do not wish to incubate an egg right away, you can store it. If an egg is in any sort of inventory, such as yours, a dino's, or fridge it will neither incubate nor lose health. A fridge is the preferred method as the egg can spoil and this preserves it the longest. A preserving bin can be used for primitive as well (no it will not incubate the egg.)

Incubating
First you need to understand how things like fire and AC work in game. They do not create heat or cooling. What they do is provide insulation, allowing you to ignore greater shifts of temperature. Fires help you ignore cold, but AC's let you do both.

When you hit H or in the upper right side of your inventory you can see the current temperature in game. Overall, this does not help you much in breeding (or in anything) unless you want to incubate an egg only using the external temperature (totally not recommended.) When you use fire or AC's, this temperature will never change what will change is your insulation levels. These can be seen on the upper right in your inventory. Check them near a AC or fire, then move away (armor and fort also get added to this).

There is finally a use for AC. This is by far the preferred way to incubate an egg. Place the egg in the middle of your AC units and then just leave it there. My setup of 10 AC units gives +1000 insulation to the egg in the middle, meaning I totally never need to worry about them.

If using fires, standing torches provide the same heat, but cost less in fuel. Generally you want to be in a moderate climate, even a little towards the cool side. It is easier to light fires to add heat insulation then to cool an egg down. Light and extinguish fires as needed. Keep a close eye on the status of the egg. If it gets to hot or cold it will lose health fast. This method basically forces you to constantly watch the egg.

IMPORTANT: IF YOUR EGG IS LOSING HEALTH AND YOU CAN'T QUICKLY ADDRESS THE TEMPERATURE, PICK THE EGG UP! Picking the egg up stops the health loss (but also prevents incubation.)

CAUTION you need to be there when the egg hatches, or the baby will quickly starve and die. The bad thing about AC's is that you can lost track of time as you are not constantly watching the eggs. I got sidetracked with 4 Rex eggs hatching, meant to finish one at a time, but remembered just all 4 hatched. Lost one right away, feeding 4 baby rex's was not fun!

The next phase is initially very time consuming, so unless you have a few hours, DO NOT HATCH THE EGG. Get it close, then put it in a fridge until you are ready. I also recommend this if you are hatching multiple eggs. Pick them up a bit so they are behind each other. The next phase is rough with a lot of mouths to feed.

Time estimates (going to update with exact ones):

-Large Dino's such as Rex's, Spinos, and Brontos will take about 4 - 8 hours to incubate.
-Medium Dino's such as Raptor, Patchy, Trike take about 1-4 hours to incubate.
-Small Dino's such as Dodo or Dilo are fast, about 5-15 minutes.

From Developer V220 Patch Notes "Upon Mating, the female then becomes pregnant and you have to wait a Gestation Period indicated via the HUD before she will give birth. During this period, her belly becomes larger and larger, and the female's Food consumption rate increases all the way up to double food consumption as the gestation progresses. When that timeframe is up, she'll give birth, and then the mating interval cooldown starts before she can mate again.

Also as noted in the v220 patch notes, there's now a random chance of genetic twins (10% chance) or triplets (2% chance). Bear in mind this is again first pass implementation, there will be additional layers of complexity going into this system down the line, including plans for random mutations with increasing chance of inbreeding penalties (representing the concept of "recessive alleles"). Also might add some temperature/care requirements to meet for the female during the pregnancy gestation period."

I need more information, but pregnancy times appear to be about the same times as hatching times.

They are still tweaking the food consumption rate. It was reduced again, but is still pretty fast.


First you need to understand that your new Dino has maxed future stats, such as 5600 Health. Then they also have current baby stats such as 100 health. So this would be displayed as 100/5600 health. But it is constantly going up, changing and jumping around. All stats are like this. So a baby initially can't hold much food and will starve to death quickly.

Look at the right hand side for Dino stat example (sorry about my resolution).
http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=535829069

Phases
The first 10% of the babies life is the actual "Baby" phase. This is followed by Juvenile 10-50%, and Adolescant 50-99%, then 100% is adult. The only real indicator that you get of percentage of completion is the weight stat. So if a dino has 72/720 weight they have just reached the 10% phase.

Babies grow significantly during each phase.

Baby Hatching - 10%
In the Baby phase you need to put the food into it's inventory, a trough will not work. So this is the main time sink phase and grind part.

Once it hatches hit E to imprint on it.

If you get twins or triplets, you have a hard and brutal choice to make. Unless you have tons and tons of food, or the ability to have help getting more, you probably want to pick one then let the others die. I know most people will be happy and try and keep them both. However, what often happens is people run out of food, then all the babies die while they are getting more.SKIP NAMING RIGHT AWAY. It can starve while you name it. Feed it and name it later. Initially in the baby phase, just put as much food on it as it will hold. They can die easily and wasting some food here is not a problem. Just keep adding as much food as it can hold manually.

Initially they have very low weight, so cannot hold much food. You literally just keep dragging them food. This is why multiple babies at once is not recommended. Their weight goes up really quickly, and soon they can hold multiple items of food, then stacks. Once they reach stacks of food, it is much easier. Their health also increases as well, meaning if they do run out of food, they don't die right away. They initially eat about 1 food a second, so have it ready!

You never need to remote feed a dino, they will eat when they get hungry.

**Fria curry is said to help lower it's hunger during this phase. (thx Doywan)

Carnivores will eat in this order. Raw meat, Cooked meat, Raw prime, cooked prime, then jerkies. They will eat Kibble. Herbivores will eat any regular berry. Different foods seem to have no effect on growth rates.

Only during the Baby phase do you need to babysit it's food manually.

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=535403895

Big Dino's take about 2-3 hours, Medium 1-2, Small 10-15 minutes to reach the next phase. Remember though, with that 2-3 hours for big dino's only about the first 30 minutes are super intensive.

Bug: If a baby dies, sometimes the body just disappears. I had this happen to me, so it is confirmed (it may have been under my foundations). Yes I killed a baby! It was for testing, really... not because it didn't meet my breeding criteria... really. (at least I didn't feed the prime meat to the other hatchlings...)

Juvenile Phase 10-50%

Unlike the baby phase, they will now eat from troughs, this makes things much easier. They also eat much slower. Each dino varies, if you are going to leave your dino alone (which is fine at this point.) I recommend that you time how long he takes to eat a trough full of food. Then use that to gauge how much you can safely keep him with. ACCOUNT FOR SPOILAGE!

If you are offline or nobody is around the dino, it will go into stasis. It will still eat, but not nearly as fast. If lots of people are around, ensure they know to check the troughs and don't have other dino's empty them! (This is why I recommend your rearing area be far away from others.)

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=535496939

Adolescent Phase 50-99%

No real difference between this phase and the juvenile phase, except the dino eats a lot less. Dino's vary, but about 1 food per minute is about right.

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=535757427

(If you are paying attention you will notice something odd. My baby initially was all black with a touch of dark green exactly like her father. However, at some point the ridge on her back changed to white like her albino mother. No clue if this is a bug, designed, or what. It also happened right after some server resets for the patches, so it may have been a rendering issue? I have also received reports of the same thing with Raptors, dino's changing color. I DON'T want to put this out as fact without more evidence. So if you have had it happen as well, please let me know.)

Adult Phase 100%
Basically when you hit 100% you have a regular dino. You can now put a saddle on them and level them normally. They are also able to breed now.

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=536450249

Notes
- I had a hard time getting the babies to follow me. The would hit a dino gate in my house and just freeze like they hit a wall. I had to punch, I mean help! them through.
- Not sure about other dino's but Rex babies swim slow. I mean like REALLY slow. As in you can't even tell they are moving slow.

Total times from mating to adult will vary, however the following seems about right.

Big Dinos: 2-3 Days
Medium Dino's: 1-2 Days
Small Dinos 1-8 hours

The last patch seems to have effected growth rates as well, so it may take twice as long as posted.

Out of that time, remember if you use ACs for hatching, of those 2-3 days for big dino's you really only need to be stuck there about 1-2 hours during the baby phase.

If you do not have a lot of time (or want things longer) for breeding and play single player or on a private server. The following are settings you can modify in your game.ini config file.

New Server Game.ini configurable values:
[/script/shootergame.shootergamemode]
MatingIntervalMultiplier=1.0
EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=1.0
BabyMatureSpeedMultiplier=1.0


Notes: If you are running other mods, some of them have been reported to interfere with breeding.