YMMV / ARK: Survival Evolved

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Jerboas are in fact real creatures - though they do not have the rather vulpine appearance in-game (Being rodents).
• Demonic Spiders: Besides the actual giant spiders, the Megalodon which infest the oceans. Sometimes you can be swimming along, look behind you, and suddenly find ten to twenty sharks chasing you down. Really, anything that lives in the caves.
  • Cnidaria, despite their low health and sluggish speed, are absolute hell to deal with. Their immobilising sting can immediately stunlock your aquatic mounts (including powerhouse creatures like Mosasaurus and Megalodon) and slowly shock them to death unless you kill them first. Of course, the jellyfish can also home in and stunlock you too, trapping you in place until you either drown or fry. While they're somewhat manageable in open waters, the jellyfish frequently populate the cramped underwater caves, where you have little room to escape to if one of them is able to dismount you with their sting.
  • Scorpions can be this, particularly for novice players. If one sneaks up on you and you aren't equipped to deal with it, you're probably a goner. Oh, and there is a lot of them in the aforementioned caves.
  • Carnotaurus can arguably be the most dangerous carnivore in the game for newer players. Even after a health nerf, they still have a hefty amount of HP, can easily outrun a player and most dinosaurs, and hit very hard for their size. And if the Carnotaurus is a high level, this results in a monstrosity you can't outrun or outfight without a powerful dinosaur of your own.
  • Titanoboas are able to kill new, and even experienced players with a tactic that can make your blood boil if you aren't prepared. Their attack damage is nothing impressive and they're easily outrun, but they slide along the ground which can be quite hard to hear and if you don't know what it sounds like you might not react in time. Their bites give a massive amount of torpor (Think fatigue), with sufficiently leveled Titanoboas able to knock a player out in one bite if you don't have stimulants, meaning you can do nothing but watch as your character falls asleep and gets killed.
  • Wild Dimorphodon. While lacking HP they do have a surprising amount of damage for their tiny size, often come in swarms and are very fast. What really makes them demonic, however, is the fact they aim for riders rather then mounts. Few things can make a player riding a Rex flee in terror, but an enraged Dimo flock is one of them.
  • Troodons are extremely aggressive if the player gets close enough, it's easy to mistake them for Dilophosaurs or even Compsognathus, their aggro range goes up a LOT at night, they come in packs often of three or more, and worst of all they cause very high torpor damage that makes being surprised or not being able to take them out before they hit a death sentence to any unmounted player.
  • The Nameless on Aberration were actually designed to be this on purpose in order to stop you from easily entering the deeper parts of the map. Once you enter one of the dark zones these things start periodically attacking you in sizable groups and until you enter charge light (or get close to a large base) they will literally never stop. Getting strong enough to reduce them to Goddamned Bats is literally a requirement to advance.
  • Ichthyornis and Pegomastax have a truly annoying item theft mechanic and can be difficult to kill and recover your items because of their high speed and small hitbox. Even more banal is that edible items, like food or medicine, simply can't be taken back from Ichthyornis; it eats them as soon as it grabs them, and somehow doesn't instantly keel over from chugging an entire stack of narcotics at once.
  • The Arthropleura, which is present mainly in caves is all but guaranteed to destroy your armor if you don't kill it before it notices you, even if you're riding a mount. This is especially pronounced in Aberration where they're not only all over the place, but you're reliant on the Hazard Suit armor set to even survive in the last third of the map.
• Fandom Rivalry: With The Isle, due to having a similar premise.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Beach Bob" for new players, as the beach is one of the easiest biomes for beginners.
  • "Tickle chickens" for Therizinosaurus, due to their delicate harvest animation and bird-like appearance.
  • The Chalicotherium has jokingly been compared to Bojack Horseman, or, due to its mix of equine and ape-like features, "Donkey Kong".
  • Fan-operated helper site Dododex replaced the scientific names on most creature profiles with silly nicknames for April Fool's 2019.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Gacha found in Extinction has the ability to generate just about any resource necessary, from the rare Black Pearls to Crystal, Metal and even Element Dust with no drawbacks whatsoever and the only restriction is that you can only have two adults (one of each gender) within 14 foundation lengths of eachother. Fill a greenhouse with Species Y plants to use as "fuel" and you'll soon find you're rolling in resources without ever having to leave your base.
  • The Desmodus, introduced in the free Fjordur map is a moderately decent flyer with good maneuverability and the ability to turn invisible at night, but its true value lies in its saddle, which has the ability to convert blood packs (which the Desmodus can harvest directly from wild creatures) into a Sanguine Potion, which gives an instant 30% boost to taming completion and baby imprinting. Even though it's only one per tame, this will massively speed up taming and imprinting of most any creature.
• Goddamned Bats: The Titanomyrma (giant ants). Although very easy to kill, it's never pleasant to meet them due to their territorial natures and the hornet-like buzzing of the soldiers.
  • The actual bats themselves: the Onyc (Or Onychonycteris if you want to be specific) is a giant bat that inhabits caves and can easily swarm players that attack people that enter their sight radius. Even more annoying is the fact that their attacks have a reputation for shredding armor durability which makes extended fights very detrimental to continued exploring.
    • To add insult to injury, the bats now can carry rabies.
  • The Titanoboa could also count. While they're not exactly small, they are still hard to spot until they're right on you. Making matters worse is that one bite is all it takes to KO a player character, and if you're alone when you're attacked, you will die to it. Having a few dinos on your side will turn the tide however, but you may be sleeping off a bite while your dinos look at you and wonder why master is sleeping suddenly.
  • The Vulture will act in a similar vein to this when in the presence of corpses, and the player can make it act as this towards other players after it's tamed.
  • An almost literal example with Seekers, as they will attack you if you have Charge on you, and very quickly swarm you.
  • While a Dilo can provide an easy snack for an advanced survivor or their mount, they more often become a headache. Their spit will affect any creature, be it a small Parasaurolophus or a gargantuan Giganotosaurus, and can spell certain death in a situation that you would be able to easily escape otherwise. Additionally, them spawning all over the map means they can often appear even within bases undetected and then proceed to attack and kill valuable tames that were left on passive mode (which is what you normally set most your tames on to avoid them running off into the blue or getting stuck and becoming easy targets for raiders). The amount of annoyance these small, weak creatures generate can truly be absurd.
  • Pegomastax is a very common creature, and its annoying stealing mechanic ensures it remains dangerous throughout all stages of the game. Worse, this dinosaur can attack tamed animals of any kind, and, since it cannot rob them, will keep attacking them over and over again, meaning animals left on passive can and will be killed by it.
  • Ichthyornis deal very little damage, but every time they successfully damage you or your mount, they'll steal and eat a whole stack of food. If you have no food they'll knock your weapon right out of your hand instead!
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Creatures can and will get stuck in trees, letting you kill them with ease without being attacked or having to chase them. Unless they are just big enough to knock the tree over.
  • If a player riding a mount suddenly finds themself falling down a high drop, they can negate the fall damage of both almost entirely by dismounting before they hit the ground. If they do so close enough and time it right, the mount will take no damage and the player (especially if they have a parachute) will take little to none as well.
  • Occasionally, an Ichthyosaurus or Manta will attempt to leap out of the water before the area is fully rendered, causing the game to think it's beached and instant-kill it on the spot.
  • Wild Mosasaurus and Tusoteuthis are supposed to be exclusive to deep ocean, so on maps where they can spawn in shallower regions, their AI prioritizes seeking deeper water over combat, causing even the alpha versions to repeatedly de-aggro if they can't get deep enough. This isn't the case on ARK Mobile, a Tuso in shallow water will still come after you.
  • Crossing a desert and worried about a Death Worm attack? In the console versions, at least, a Death Worm spawning and/or entering draw distance in will flash on the screen above-ground for a split second before properly appearing underground where it belongs, allowing you to see it and be aware that there's one ahead. Still need to go ahead instead of going back? Use the orbit camera to clip under the ground and you'll be able to see its tail, allowing you to go around and avoid fighting it entirely.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Spinosaurus model has a fin on the end of it's tail. While there was no evidence for this when it was first put in but in 2020, fossil discoveries shown that not only did the real dinosaur have a tail fin but that it was actually much larger than the one in the game.
• LGBT Fanbase: Although the game's LGBT presence is more subtle, hidden in the Explorer Notes, the hints of a romance between Mei-Yin and Diana are shown, giving the game a presence among these fans. ARK: The Animated Series revealing that Helena Walker was Happily Married to a woman named Victoria (played by trans actor Elliot Page) and had been widowed prior to arriving on the Island expands on this element, with Helena gradually falling in love with Mei-Yin.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The OP Chair. Turning the Wooden Chair, a simple decorative item that's easy to make into a Memetic Badass.
  • The character creator allows for extensive modification of your character, resulting in Player characters with grotesque proportions. Twice as hilarious considering Rockwell's goal to use them as a perfect Master Race.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • Leveling up.
  • Spawning and respawning.
  • According to its dossier, Oviraptor sounds are considered cute.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: To such an alarming extent that many players would probably be surprised the game even has a story. It's told through the survivor notes and mostly revolves around Helena, the writer of the dossiers and the woman on the cover art. The players are following her footsteps from Ark to Ark trying to figure out both what happened to her and those she met as well as figuring out the purpose of Arks themselves.
• Porting Disaster: None of the console ports are anything to write home about, as they all suffer from severe framerate issues. However, the Nintendo Switch port is the worst of the worst, as not only does it suffer from similar framerate issues, it also manages to be quite possibly the ugliest game ever released for an HD console, to the point of getting unfavourable comparisons to Turok on the Nintendo 64. Shadows have been completely destroyed, the textures look hideous, almost all scenery has been completely gone, the little added effects present make things worse rather than better, and worst of all, the resolution can dip as low as 170p. (For reference, not only did the original Doom run at a higher resolution, but the Nintendo Entertainment System pushed more pixels than that!) It says a lot that the loading times, which can reach 2 minutes and 40 seconds to go into a new world, are the least of the port's concerns. The quality of the Switch port has led to Studio Wildcard to commission what is basically a redone port of the game for the Switch version of Ark: Ultimate Survivor Edition.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • On the default settings, taming speeds for larger and higher level animals can be painfully long. Due to this, most unofficial servers have taming times upped.
  • The taming process for Dimetrodon. Its rapid torpor drop and slow eating rate make it a very painful experience.
  • The Manta being a passive tame. Their fast speed, high amounts of attack damage, and aggressive behavior have made many see the process as broken.
    • They are tamed with Angler-Gel. While it is fairly easy to obtain, it doesn't actually replenish their food. If the Manta is above a certain level, then it will starve before it can be tamed. The taming process literally is broken!
  • Troodon taming, as it requires the sacrifice of tamed animals. It can be mitigated by breeding or taming sacrificial creatures, but even this can be ineffective (or at the very least time-consuming) as a Troodon is best tamed with sacrifices such as Giganotosaurus and those kinds are already hard to get and take a while to reproduce.
  • If the Steam Discussions are an indicator, Pegomastax's stealing mechanic. In essence, it basically attacks unprovoked and snatches a random item from the player's inventory, prioritizing the hotbar.
  • The Ichthyornis not only steals from players like the Pegomastax but suddenly decides to attack the player seemingly at random, as a flier is hard to hit, steals something in the player's inventory every single time it attack hits, knocks the player's weapon out of their hand if the player doesn't have anything it can steal, and it even instantly destroys whatever it steals so unlike the Pegomastax the player can't even get what it stole back.
  • Server transfer gets a fair amount of this, as it makes it even more feasible for endgame or cheating players to grief low-level ones.
  • The fact that wild dinos can have their food bar drop to nothing when in the process of passive taming, potentially leading to both starvation and the loss of taming progress should anything interrupt the process. If a creature's food bar is dropping faster than a food item can feed it and it drops below 50%, the taming progress starts to drop and the creature can become untamable as a result and even die before it can be tamed.
  • It's minor, but the fact that the player location being shown on the map is turned off by default.
• Spiritual Successor
  • Science fiction and fantasy elements? Check. Magical crystal and unknown element technology? Check. Animals from different time periods alongside man and fictional races? Check. Central hubs that affect the whole region? Check. The game is like a more violent, mature game adaption of Land of the Lost
  • Dinosaurs and other animals are used for a variety of mundane tasks and are essentially living vehicles and appliances. It's like a violent, action packed reboot of The Flintstones.
• Squick: You can pick up your own poop and use it for fertilizer (or eat it).
• That One Boss:
  • The DodoRex. It's incredibly powerful and is easily capable of wiping an entire tribe of high level dinosaurs.
  • The Dragon also has this kind of reputation. Its percent-damage Breath Weapon is punishing to tanking strategies that work well with the Broodmother or the Megapithecus.
• That One Level:
  • The Cave of the Pack has an extensive underwater section infested with Megapiranha and Sarcosuchus, with a triple threat of getting eaten, drowning, or freezing to death. Made even worse by several areas that just go in circles. Of course, there is now a route that is accessible if you have grappling hooks and a mount to get you to the launch area. You'll still need to fight your way through the first part of the cave, however, and if you miss the grappling hook you can end up in piranha and crocodile infested waters.
  • Some Genesis 2 missions fall under this, particularly alpha missions. One such example is "Downriver Run"; on the highest difficulty, you get barely enough time to make it to the end with the speed boosts and the canoe you are in easily takes damage, so you cannot rush towards the end nor dilly-daily with stopping to dodge the obstacles. Sometimes, the speed boosts can and will push you into obstacles if not approached from the right angle. Getting stuck on a rock is quite possibly the player's worst enemy - it will damage or even destroy the canoe, as well as waste precious time. And that's on top of the fact that steering the canoe is difficult, because it turns and moves slowly (as a canoe does).
• Tear Jerker: Most of the grad student journals from Aberration (aside from Boris), are equally sad and horrifying since they're normal students who've awakened in Aberration and die in horrible ways, but especially Emilia's since she deserves nothing that happens to her.
• Win Back the Crowd: The Ragnarok DLC was much better received than Scorched Earth, no doubt helped by the time gap letting the Broken Base heal. It was also free, compared with the $20 Scorched Earth.
• The Woobie: Emilia, one of the writers of the Grad Student Journals, has a surprisingly heart-wrenching story for a game that's relatively light on plot. She's a Shrinking Violet who's probably the nicest member of the 5 stranded students, who constantly chastises herself for being The Load on the group and asks what she did to deserve this situation, mentioning how she was a good student, sister, and friend. Finally, in an attempt at a Heroic Sacrifice, she lures away a pack of Nameless and is killed by them, only for Boris, the next grad student to take the journal and who constantly abused her prior, to brush off her death entirely. And ultimately, everyone dies, meaning her sacrifice was entirely pointless. For a game most well known for fighting/taming cool beasts, it's a surprisingly dark and realistic look at a Nice Girl with no self-confidence who's forced into a fate she didn't deserve.