I keep seeing folks post in the BUG thread that their dragons won't lay fertile eggs. I also see lots of questions about rearing young hatchlings. I've answered most of those concerns in that thread but decided to add a thread specific to the topic in case others have questions as well.

First thing to know is that with breeding of any kind, in Ark, there appears to be a sort of "Critical Mass". By that, I mean that once you have too many tamed animals of ANY kind within a close proximity of each other (such as a massive pen at the center of your base), egg layers stop laying Fertile Eggs when they mate. Instead, you get nothing, not even a blip.

To get around this issue, you have to move your mating pairs away from the mass of tamed creatures. On our server (a co-op server), we built a breeding pen just out of rendering range of our main base. We take our breeding pairs to the pen, and we get fertile eggs nearly 100% of the time now. There's always a small chance you won't get a fertilized egg, no matter what you do. But if you do something similar to what we did, you should see really good results.

Second thing to know is that Dragons can be a bit of a chore to breed. Luckily, their breeding timers aren't exceptionally long (once they are breeding, it goes pretty quick), but since they have to be on "Wander" to breed properly, they tend to move far enough, and with enough frequency that it can be hard to get them to stop long enough to disable "Wander" when you are done breeding them and have collected your fertilized egg. To get around this, we do our breeding with a trio of people, and our breeding pen is only slightly larger than the space needed for a pair of drogons to be near each other.

Person #1 stands on the ground, they play catcher, their job is to collect the egg when it drops. Persons #2 & #3 each ride a dragon. To do this correctly, you stand up in the dragon's saddle, enable Wandering, and stay right in that spot until they've matted. From the Dragon's back, it's easy to then disable wandering and get them back on "Follow". Makes this process super simple. If you sitin the saddle while they are mating, it disables the matting process and you have to start over... so just stand there, and enjoy the ride, it won't take long.

So now you have a fertilized egg. There are a few mods that offer incubators, I highly recommend those as they will keep your egg at the exact temperature needed, for the entire hatching process. We keep ours back at the main base, so we race back, and set the egg up to incubate in the safety of our base. If something happens and you need to pause the incubation, just pick up the egg. It will remain viable for at least 10-12 hours. Just don't wait too long or you're going to lose the viability of the egg.

OK, so this leads to the part many have issues with... hatchlings. When they hatch, they are on Wander, and have to be tamed quickly because elsewise they will race off, and de-spawn. We've had more than a few run away immediately after hatching, it sucks. So one excellent way to avoid disaster is to place your incubator inside of a closed pen... something with a large enough door that you can then lead your tamed, "Following" hatching out of on foot.

Make SURE you have AT LEAST 60 or 80 Raw Meat (Prime is not necessary) on you before that egg hatches. As soon as the egg hatches, make contact with the hatchling to tame it, get it on "Follow" and feed it at least two or three stacks of Raw Meat. I tend to hit it with about 100 Raw Meat, but I'm overly cautious. BE SURE you do all of this quickly, as the newborn will starve quickly. Your hatchling will go through the Raw Meat that you feed it quickly, but with 100 Raw Meat you should have enough time to at least lead it out of the pen, and out into your "yard".

As an aside, the incubator pen is deal for ANY kind of Egg hatching, because everything that hatches needs to go through this same taming, following, and feeding process. ALso, it is BEST to make sure your hatching pen is at ground level (on solid earth) because we've had issues with hatchlings falling through floors. They never seem to have this issue on solid ground.

The Dragon will grow fairly fast, so what we do is we have a food trough FULL of Raw Meat out in the "Yard", we lead the hatchling to the trough and we make it stay there. The hatchling will eat the meat that you gave it until it hits adolecence, and at that point it will automatically start eating from the trough instead. Until it starts eating from the trough, you should stay nearby and check on how much Raw Meat it has in inventory, feed as needed. Once it starts eating from the trough, you can go about your business until it matures into an adult, and is ready to be saddled and ridden.

If you have any questions, please drop them into the thread. I'll do my best to answer.