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Video Game / ARK: Survival Evolved

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This could be you, riding a dino.

ARK: Survival Evolved is a Survival Sandbox game developed by Studio Wildcard using Unreal Engine 4.

You wake up naked, cold, and hungry on the shores of a strange island called ARK. There's some kind of diamond-shaped implant embedded into your left arm; you have no idea how it got there or why it's there at all. Surrounded by dinosaurs and other long-extinct creatures — some of which would like very much to have a delicious human for lunch — you must find a way to gather food and water, create items, develop new technology, and build shelters to survive while not ending up within one of their stomachs. However, if you're crafty enough, you may just be able to make weapons that can kill these beasts— or even manage to tame them so that they can protect you from danger and/or allow you to ride on their backs for quicker transportation. You're not the only one stuck here, though— there are several other people here in the same situation as you. You can either team up with them for easier survival... or just knock them out and take their stuff. And if you look hard enough, you could potentially find the secrets behind this mysterious island...

In other words, basically DayZ, but with dinosaurs. As a survivor, you must, well, survive. Eventually, you need to take that survival to the next level, and dominate. The vast majority animals that inhabit the different maps are fictional versions of actual, extinct animals with full scientific names and dossiers describing their traits and potential uses if tamed. Obviously, taming the animals is one of the main features behind the game, and it often involves knocking them out with arrows laced in tranquilizing narcotics and feeding them as they lie helpless on the ground. After which, they become your ever loyal companion.

The game was released for Steam Early Access on June 2nd 2015, and the full version was released on August 29th 2017 on Steam, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and November 30th 2018 on the Nintendo Switch. Following release, the game has received a number of DLC in the form of paid Expansion Packs and other smaller, free downloadable content.

    Expansion Packs 

  • Scorched Earth, released on September 1st 2016note , added a desert-themed map, new creatures and engrams.
  • Aberration, released on December 12th 2017, added a new map set primarily in a subterranean cave, new beasts and new mechanics.
  • Extinction, released on November 6th, 2018, is set on Earth itself after it was ravaged, now inhabited by new and dangerous monsters.
  • Genesis: Part 1, released on February 25th 2020, is the first part of the game's Grand Finale, taking place in a virtual simulation where new monsters, items and powers can be found.
  • Genesis: Part 2, released on June 3rd 2021, follows the end of the above and concludes the story of Survival Evolved, set in a new location with new content and the final confrontation with Rockwell.

    Expansion Maps 

Unlike the Expansion Packs, the free Expansion Maps are considered non-canon.

  • The Center, released on May 17, 2016, features a new community-made map almost twice the size of the base game's Island.
  • Ragnarok, released on June 12, 2017, features a new map with multiple creatures, biomes and landmarks to accompany it.
  • Valguero, released on June 18, 2019, features a new map and the introduction of the Deinonychus.
  • Crystal Isles, released on June 11, 2020, features a new community-made map and the introduction of the Tropeognathus.
  • Lost Island, released on December 14, 2021, features a new community-made map and three new creatures in the Amargasaurus, Sinomacrops and Dinopithecus.
  • Fjordur, released on June 12, 2022, features a new community-made, Norse-inspired map inhabited by new creatures like the Andrewsarchus.

A Spin-Off called ARK: Survival of the Fittest was released on August 30th 2017, and a Minecraft-inspired voxel-based spin-off called Pix ARK by Snail Games USA was released on May 31st 2019.

A sequel and Animated Adaptation, ARK 2 and ARK: The Animated Series, were announced at the 2020 Game Awards. The animated series was released on Paramount+ on March 21, 2024.

An Updated Re-release named ARK: Survival Ascended was announced on April 2023 and released on Early Access on October 26th 2023. It features a move to Unreal Engine 5, updated graphics and all DLC included (slated to be included as free, post-launch updates). This remaster is planned to incorporate Survival of the Fittest as a game mode within the game rather than a separate product.

Unrelated to the animated movie.

    Animals Inhabiting the ARK. 
NOTE: These scientific names are not factual. While most of Ark's creatures are based on real-life animals, they have fictional species names and unique appearances to make them better suited to video games. Some are relatively similar to the real-life versions, some differ drastically, some are Mix-and-Match Critters, and some of these animals are purely fictional. Ark is a great way to introduce yourself to the scientific side of prehistoric animals, so if you see one you're interested in, hop on the internet and do some research!

This game provides examples of:

  • Ten-Second Flashlight: Anything that burns will eventually run out. Played straight with flares as they only light up for a few minutes.
  • One-Gender Race: The Dung Beetle, Araneomorphus, and Onychonycteris, as well as all untamable animals, all have their gender listed as "N/A," though this could be due to devs having not implemented gender for them yet.
    • With the release of Genesis II, the Maewing appear to be hermaphroditic, as they have no gender markers and any two can breed with each other.
  • Adaptation Expansion: The Explorer Notes in the original game were set from the perspective of four characters, these being Helena Walker, Edmund Rockwell, Mei-Yin Li, and Gaius Marcellus Nerva, and only those four, without showing much of their lives prior to coming to the Island. ARK: The Animated Series expands on this by adding several more characters also surviving on the Island, Santiago da Costa (originally introduced much later on) among them, and showing Helena's past (with her wife and mother appearing in scenes set before her arrival on the Island) and Mei-Yin's past (with her brother appearing in flashbacks).
  • Adventure-Friendly World: Higher-quality items and item blueprints can only be found by actively pursuing supply beacons in the overworld, item drop containers in cave systems, or predator drops, thus forcing the player to explore dangerous areas. Many materials also require players to search mountains (crystal, obsidian, metal), oceans (oil, pearls), caves, or the frozen regions (most of the above). Above all, the mysterious Element is initially only acquired from boss drops, forcing players to seek out, summon, and battle the bosses if they want advanced Tek gear.
    • Scorched Earth's lore indicates that the obelisks monitor human communities for complacency and deploy large-scale creature attacks against them, actively forcing humans to scatter and explore instead of settling long-term.
  • After the End: The final boss of the base game reveals that ARK takes place after an apocalypse has devastated Earth.
  • Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The animals found on the island come in a variety of colors. While the colors of animals in the wild are usually pretty ordinary, breeding can cause mutations and give them a number of bizarre colors. It's possible to end up with things like a blue Woolly Mammoth or a pink Megalodon. These have become very popular with some players, especially on PVE, where breeding dinos for specific colorations and trading them is a common endgame hobby.
    • Holiday events also usually give wild dinos the option to spawn with thematic colors, such as bright red, green, and gold for Winter Wonderland.
  • Androcles' Lion: In Genesis II, the mission "Code Red" is to stop Rockwell from tampering with the creature cloning chambers in the Genesis spaceship, culminating in a battle against a horrible mutant Giganotosaurus where he succeeded. The creatures you successfully defended in the cloning chambers show up as allied NPCs to help battle the Giga, so it pays to defend as many as possible during that stage of the mission.
  • Animal Gender-Bender:
  • Animal Jingoism: As per Dinosaur Media, Triceratops is described as having a hostile animosity with Tyrannosaurus. When near them (or a few other large carnivores) they receive a buff that increases their damage and health.
  • Animals Not to Scale:
    • A lot of animals have been made bigger than in real life so they can be used as mounts. The Dilophosaurus is notably unusually small because it's based on the Jurassic Park version.
    • Some of the larger carnivores have a more exaggerated size for both dramatic effect and the fact that video game camera views make things appear smaller than they really are. The Tyrannosaurus is about twice the size of the real animal. The Giganotosaurus, however, is stupidly huge — it's twice as big as the Tyrannosaurus and the player barely stands as tall as its foot, making it roughly sauropod-sized. (To compare, the real animal was about 13 feet tall at the hips.)
    • There is no consistent scale to how much dinosaurs increase in size, leading to dinosaurs which are very similar in size in real life (such as the Baryonyx and Spinosaur) being drastically different in-game. Some creatures are also made smaller than their real life counterparts, so despite the fact that the in-game Megalodon being larger than a T-rex (which itself is already twice as large as a normal T-rex), it is actually smaller than the real life creature.
  • Apocalypse How: Total extinction all over the planet, as revealed by Extinction: a world war waged with element-based technology contaminated the Earth with element, which began to spread and corrupt living creatures. By the time you reach the surface of the Earth, the only remaining living species are those engineered by the Arks, and the Titans created by the element.
  • Apocalyptic Log: The Dodorex dossier simply contains a picture of the beast among several regular Dodos. However, it being shredded with claw marks and covered in blood suggest that that the one who originally made the entry wasn't able to survive to provide further info.
    • In Aberration, you can collect explorer notes from a group of college students who got stranded there, showing them get slowly picked off by the dangers of the Ark.
  • The Ark: As expected from the title, it turns out that the island you're on is actually an artificial environment aboard a massive orbital space station, one of thousands orbiting a derelict Earth. The Arks were intended to preserve life following an apocalypse and return to Earth once the planet stabilised; however this never happened, leading to the AI overseers going nuts and transforming the Arks into deathtraps.
  • Art Evolution: Post-release, the devs have begun redesigning the models of most of the creatures, leading to this.
    • Most mammals, such as the Dire Wolf, Dire Bear, and Procoptodon, are being modified to look more like their extant relatives.
    • The Dinosaurs are receiving sleeker models that make them look less monstrous.
    • Model and texture quality in general went up throughout development, to the point that you can easily tell which creatures haven't been updated since early access.
  • Artificial Stupidity: This applies to AI controlled animals. For example:
    • They can easily be lured to fall from a cliff using a flying mount.
    • When you are shooting them from a higher place unreachable to them, they still try their best to reach you, resulting in them just standing below you, allowing you to shoot them as a sitting duck.
    • Their attacking pattern is very predictable. It basically amounts to running towards you from the same direction. If you possess a mount with a knockback effect in its attack, you can simply kill most creatures by attacking them, which knocks them away, wait for them to return and repeat the process. AI controlled creatures never attempt to flank and surround other creatures and simply always go forward.
    • It is also a common occurrence for creatures to get themselves stuck in trees or rocks. You can easily exploit this by killing them for their meat and hide.
  • Artistic License – Paleontology: Although the developers actually spent time researching the animals before designing them, they then stylized them for aesthetic's sake. While many animals display the usual inaccuracies — for instance, no real-life raptors would have had largely scaly skin with large feathers on their forearms, heads and tails like the ones in the game, regardless of genus — it's also worth pointing out that all of the animals on the island are fictional separate species of their genus, according to the dossiers, and all of them were created artificially by the Ark's systems.
    • Some Dino Dossier errors, like Therizinosaurus's dossier describing it as a carnivore, or the possibility that Brontosaurus is misidentified, are hinted to be mistakes by Helena in-universe.
  • Ascended to Carnivorism:
    • Moschops and Megatherium are depicted as omnivores, despite being herbivores in reality.
    • Arthropleura, Purlovia, and Tapejara are depicted as carnivores. The dossier for Purlovia even lampshades this.
  • Attack Animal: Technically any creature can be this, but players tend to tame small, fast predators specifically to safe guard bases.
    • Special mention goes to Troodons who are designed specifically to kill humans making them great at killing unsuspecting raiders, and Arthropleura which are designed specifically to destroy armor.
  • Attack Its Weak Point: Many creatures take increased damage if struck on the head, and reduced damage if struck on an armored body part. Some, like the ceratopsians and Pachycephalosaurus, take reduced damage for head shots because that is their armored body part. Some simply don't have a weak point.
  • Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Some of the larger species are many times bigger than their real world counterparts. In particular the Giganotosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Titanosaurus are near Kaiju size. The boss monsters like the Dragon and Megapithecus are similarly enormous.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Metal structures are this in PVE servers as they look cool and have high defense but they are made of metal which requires a workbench to build with and makes it something of a hassel and could be used for other stuff. Not to mention the fact that there are only a select few creatures that can break stone structures which are much easier and cheaper to build. However, this is completely averted for PvP servers since late game players will frequently have weapons and mounts capable of bringing down stone buildings.
    • Without easy access to element, this applies to Tek structures and items. These include things like jetpacks, pulse rifles and teleporters, so a tribe with the ability to build them can effectively rule a server. However, tek is expensive and relies on element, which is only obtained from winning boss fights on most maps. Alleviated somewhat with the Aberration and Extinction DLC, which provide easier (but still time consuming) ways to obtain element.
  • Base on Wheels: The Brontosaurus and to a lesser extent, Paraceratherium, can function as a walking base via platform saddles if not used as an assault platform, able to house all the essentials like generators, walls, beds, and crafting stations. The Mosasaurus and Elasmosaurus can function as a marine version of this with their platform saddles. The Titanosaurus is an even greater example, basically a base built atop a Kaiju, but is a temporary tame unless on mods or edited server rules.
    • The three Titans in Extinction come with platform saddles, though like the Titanosaurus they are temporary tames.
  • Bat Out of Hell: Giant bats infest the caverns of the island. Very dangerous, but can be tamed if one uses bug spray. They're noted for their ability to shred through armor quickly.
    • The Seekers in Aberration are bat-squid hybrids that infest the deeper caverns on the map. They're attracted to sources of charge light, which any sensible survivor will have on to prevent the Nameless from constantly attacking. Turning off the lights makes Seekers easier to kill...but it also enables Nameless attack.
  • Bear Trap: These can be crafted once you hit level 28 and have created a Smithy, with large versions following shortly at level 31.
  • Bears Are Bad News: The Direbear. Their seemingly docile behavior can mean certain death for humans who haven't seen them, as they are actually territorially aggressive when touched.
  • The Beastmaster: Just by feeding an unconscious creature its food of choice (whether or not you were the one that knocked it out), you can get it to fight by your side when it awakens.
    • In the Survivor Notes, Mei Yin quickly gains a reputation for creature taming, earning her the moniker "Beast Queen".
  • Bee Afraid: The giant bees.
  • Beneath the Earth: In the vein of Jules Verne, The Center gives us a massive underground biome complete with its own ocean. The entrances are well-hidden, but one you get in, it's much harder to get out.
    • Most of the Aberration expansion is underground — the sun has turned into a deadly radiation source that will kill you in seconds, as a result pretty much all the life forms that remained had to crawl underground.
  • Berserk Button: As is to be expected, literally every single aggressive predator or territorial herbivore in the game. Depending on the animal, they will ignore you from a distance and appear calm and casual but burst into killer mode when prey is nearby. Animals particularly in caves do not wander(same with Giganotosaurus on Mobile) and rage when there's an intruder in their domain.
    • Any reptile, bird, or other such animal whose egg is stolen; Ichthyornis and Pegomastax when there is something to steal, and Casteroides when you rob their dam.
    • A prime ability of the mighty Giganotosaurus is that they will deal more damage the angrier they get, which happens if they take more damage in a short amount of time.
    • If you're not careful it's very easy to get into crossfire fights with wild herbivores that you can deal damage too, and they'll go from minding their own business to fighting you to the death.
    • Triceratops has a rage aura that activates around apex predators like T-Rex, Spino, and Giga, allowing it to deal increased damage to these creatures.
  • Beware My Stinger Tail: Giant scorpions, Ankylosaurus, Stegosaurus, Kentrosaurus, and the armadillo-like Doedicurus. The Ankylosaurus and Doedicurus can actually break rocks with theirs, and the Scorpion's pack a venom that doubles as a tranquilizer!
  • Big Bad Ensemble: The overarching narrative has the King Titan, the most powerful of the Titans who destroyed Earth, and Sir Edmund Rockwell, a survivor-turned-Humanoid Abomination who wants to assert himself as a god and believes only he has the means to defeat the Titans.
  • Big Creepy-Crawlies: The island is also home to many giant bugs, some of which are actually bigger than the actual prehistoric animals they are based on. The Meganeura dossier actually points this out as the way these creatures diffuse oxygen should've limited their size yet they seem to have been able to advance beyond this restraint. Further notes in the dossier go on to speculate if there might be more oxygen in the air which may explain the bugs' growth.
  • Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: The Gigantopithecus (A large ape which is believed by some to be the inspiration for bigfoot). Speaking of Yeti, the Yeti variant in the Snow Cave, a beefed up Gigantopithecus.
  • Blood-Stained Letter: The nearly shredded dossier entry for the Dodorex is ominously covered in blood.
  • Bloody Murder: The Arthropleura has acidic blood.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • Players with patience and good aim can tame a relatively large amount of Dimorphodon relatively quickly as they are small and found in most areas. Use of a few simple commands can employ them as a Zerg Rush mob of flying piranha that both enemy players and dinosaurs have extreme difficulty fighting due to their high speed and tiny hitbox. A flock of seven or so decently leveled Dimorphodon can easily shred through even super predators with few to no casualties.
    • Surprisingly, Pulmonoscorpius become this for high-level tribes. Most large tribes have several of them for their eggs, which are made into Rex kibble, but they also make excellent warriors. A swarm can take down most targets in seconds and anything that survives extended combat runs the risk of being rendered helpless by their venom.
  • Boss in Mook Clothing: The Giganotosaurus is a Brontosaurus-sized theropod that can destroy stone structures and goes berserk if it takes too much damage.
  • Bragging Rights Reward: A few types.
    • Getting the Bionic Rex skin on Xbox requires getting the dossiers on every released animal. Its only effect is turning your Rex into an awesome animal mecha.
    • The Giga can be seen as this in single player or on PvE servers. It really does nothing that a Rex can't already do, but is admittedly a much more impressive mount.
    • The Titano is similarly mostly useless outside of PvP, but it is cool just to point at it and say "that's my pet." More so since unlike the Giga most servers only allow so many to exist at one time, tamed or not.
    • The Unicorn. It's literally just an Equus with a horn, but only one can exist wild on the map at a time (taming and cryopoding it will allow another to spawn).
  • Breakable Weapons: Spears are highly breakable. Sometimes it takes only one poke to a dino to break it. Aside from that, every weapon and piece of armor has a durability meter. If they break you need to take it to the Smithy Table or the Fabricator to repair them.
  • Brutal Bonus Level: The Swamp and Snow Caves. The former have poisonous air, so players actually take damage constantly inside them (not to mention large populations of insanely high-level scorpions and spiders). The latter is so cold that players will take damage upon entering any bodies of water inside and it's got yetis (really they're just albino Gigantopithecus).
  • Bubblegloop Swamp: A large, waterlogged swamp snakes through the Island's river system populated by crocodiles, Big Creepy-Crawlies, piranhas, Titanoboa (giant snakes), Beelzebufo (giant frogs), and leeches. Unique plants (some poisonous) also abound in the biome, encouraging players to enter and collect necessary ingredients for various recipes. Aberration also has several of these, with bonus bioluminescence!
  • Bury Your Gays: Diana is introduced in Aberration, revealed to be attracted to Mei-Yin, and killed off a few explorer notes later. She gets better in Extinction thanks to Helena creating the respawn mechanic.
  • Butt-Monkey: When a dossier depicts an animal getting brutally attacked, that animal is usually a Raptor.
  • Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The games "advanced crops" are "savoroot", "rockarrot", "longrass", and "citronal". These are just potatoes, carrots, corn, and lemons respectively.
  • Character Customization: A rather impressive one that allows for manipulation of almost all bodily proportions. Naturally, most people decide to use this to make their characters look like freaks of nature. Unfortunately, it does not allow much control over facial features, such as the shape of the eyes, nose or haircut.
    • This has changed a bit since recent updates with the addition of scissors into the game. Players may now cut their hair along with other survivors as well as dyeing. Interestingly as well player character models will have their hair constantly grow while they're alive, meaning that it's now very normal for low-level characters or those without access to a tribe to look like the sterotypical hobo with large scraggly beards and unwashed hair down to their shoulders.
    • Many skins are also available to customise the appearence of weapons and armor.
  • Character Level: Every living being has one. It determines the stats of the organism.
  • Combining Mecha: With the right module and against the King Alpha Titan, you can combine 4 Meks into the MegaMek.
  • Competitive Balance: Because you are free to distribute your stats and those of your tamed dinosaurs after leveling up, you can easily create the standard videogame character builds. Also, most of the dinos themselves fit the standard character builds.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: A mild example. AI controlled creatures don't take any fall damage. This is probably done to compensate for their Artificial Stupidity, as they tend to throw themselves from cliffs when chasing players on flying mounts. If it weren't for their immunity to fall damage, players would easily exploit this, allowing them to easily harvest lots of hide and meat. However, this is also a rare example in which players benefit from the computer being a cheating bastard, as this also applies to AI controlled tamed creatures belonging to the player.
  • Continuing is Painful: When you die, you lose everything in your inventory, unless you can return to the dead body of your past life and recover it all before it decomposes.
  • Cool, Clear Water: To an extreme degree; all water in the game is drinkable without any negative side-effects. This includes not just clear, still water, but also bog water from swamps where diseased leeches are found. Not to mention the oceans...
  • Creepy Centipedes: Arthropleura (well, actually it's a millipede, but close enough). The island's species has evolved into a savage carrion-eating monster with acidic blood capable of dissolving metal! Worse still, they can spit it at opponents.
  • Death Mountain: The best places to mine for metal are the mountains. Expect to see sabertooth cats, Argentavis (a giant relative of the Andean Condor) and, if you are unlucky, the dreaded Giganotosaurus while you're up there.
  • Death World:
    • In the northeast corner of the original map is the infamous "Death Island", an island which spawns exclusively high-level carnivores including many T-Rexes. As the name suggests, it's a very poor location to establish a base unless you're extremely well-equipped.
    • The ARKs in general, especially the Scorched Earth and Center, are not nice places to live, with (as the explorer notes often point out) an absurd and unnaturally high predator-to-prey ratio.
    • Aberration ramps this up to 11. All the Arks are artificially created Death Worlds, but Aberration is what happens when one breaks. The results are horrifying. The air is chocked with toxic spores of various types, the surface is a burning hellscape during the day and a freezing death trap at night, the lower levels are full of radiation, and the local wild life has mutated into unnatural monsters much more deadly then anything native to the other Arks.
    • The Extinction expansion features an Earth that has been contaminated with Element that turned its wildlife even more vicious than the one in Aberration, with several large dinosaur species having been possessed by an Element-powered hive mind that renders them untamable and makes them attack in coordinated groups. There are electromagnetic storms that block GPS signals, mechanical creatures that want your carcass, and mountain-sized Titans roaming the maps at leisure.
    • Genesis Part 1 openly invokes this, as a simulated Training from Hell for colonizing an unpredictable new planet that uses three of the harshest environments from the Island (swamp, Arctic, and deep ocean) and adds "actively erupting volcano" and "orbital debris field (oxygen not included)" biomes.
  • Dem Bones: The Fear Evolved event features skeletal dinos.
  • Developer's Foresight: Wild Yutyrannus and Carnotaurus form symbiotic packs together, where the Yuty will use its courage roars to strengthen the Carnos and the Carnos will share prey with the Yuty. If you use a tame Yutyrannus's courage roars on a wild Carnotaurus, it will follow and share kills the same way until the roar boost wears off. May not work with Alpha, map-variant, or modded versions of these creatures.
  • Diabolus ex Machina: No explanation is given for how Rockwell managed to get onto the colony ship that comprises the Genesis maps, assuming they are meant to share a single continuity with the prior official maps. The last we knew of him, he was still on Earth when the Aberration Ark landed.
  • Domesticated Dinosaurs: One of the main features of the game, if not the main feature, is taming dinos as well as other prehistoric animals. Nearly every animal can be tamed and each has its own usage to a player or a tribe. They can be kept as pets and the bigger ones can be outfitted with saddles so that they can be used as mounts.
  • Doofy Dodo: Dodos are found all over the island. As you may have guessed, they're very easy to kill.
  • Dung Fu: The Mesopithecus monkey is the only animal that produces human faeces, which it will throw at enemies. This applies a very, very small amount of damage, but if the monkey has climbed to a place the enemy cannot reach, it is able to cherry tap anything to death.
  • Early Game Hell: Starting off in Ark is extremely painful. Surviving long enough to get even a basic thatch shelter up is actually quite difficult alone and you have almost no way of defending yourself from the more dangerous creatures. However, the difficulty drops sharply once a player gets their first combat-capable pet (generally a Raptor or a Trike) which can fend off threats much easier than a player can until ranged weapons become available. This trope is averted if you encounter a helpful high level player, who is willing to provide you with the helpful necessities to give you a stable start, such as metal tools, materials to build a basic shelter or even some low level dinos. If you are really lucky, you might even get invited into a well established tribe, essentially allowing you to skip the entire Early Game Hell.
    • The Early Game Hell is particularly prominent in Aberration, owing to the fact that the "Easiest" spawn point next to the entrance portal is a bit of a hike away from a water source, and that spawn point is also a spawn point for basilisks and raptors.
    • Genesis Part 1 just plain has it out for new players, as it advertises the bog ecosystem as being the easiest to survive. The bog with the crocodilians, Utahraptor, and Carnotaurus attacking you every few steps, water full of piranha, air full of stinging insects, not to mention the Bloodstalker, a new spider-like tame that hangs out in trees and may shoot webs at you out of nowhere and reel you in like Spider-Man.
  • Electric Jellyfish: The Cnidaria in-game have electric attacks on close range and will shock the player during combat. Basilosaurus is protected by its blubber; everything else will be paralyzed along with the player.
  • Elemental Dragon: The Scorched Earth DLC introduces three breeds of wyverns, each with a different breath attack; fire, lightning, and poison. The Ragnarok DLC adds the ice wyvern with corresponding freeze breath.
  • Experience Points: You gain these when you do anything. Picking up berries? Gain experience points! You also gain a very small trickle of experience points simply for being alive.
  • Extreme Omnivore:
    • The dossier for Moschops indicates this. Its desired foods for taming range from common berries to organic polymer (which is fatally poisonous to anything else, including tamed Moschops).
    • The Gacha will happily eat rocks, equipment blueprints, and Snow Owl waste pellets in addition to the usual meat and berries. Putting basically anything in it (including cryopodded dinos) will usually lead to it eating it, no matter what it is.
    • The Pachyrhinosaurus, like most other herbivores, likes berries. Unlike other herbivores however - or any dino, really - its favorite food isn't kibble, it's bug repellant (which is otherwise not even possible to consume as a food item).
  • Eye of Horus Means Egypt: Raia's Explorers Notes are separated from the other notes with this.
  • Fantastic Flora: "Plant Species X", a strange plant that can be grown in one's garden with the bonus function of being a biological defense turret.
    • Scorched Earth adds Plant Species Y, whose fruits can be used as bear traps.
    • Aberration adds Plant Species Z, whose fruits function as flashbang grenades. Wild Plant Z also have a healing aura.
    • Genesis Part 2 adds Plant Species R, a rooted mass of fleshy tentacles that can be chopped into edible (or rotten) cuts of meat and fish.
  • Fantastic Nature Reserve: Helena's notes on the Island gradually point to the Island being a contained and actively maintained system rather than a Lost World, which is confirmed when she reaches the Tek Cave and discovers the other ARKs. Extinction reveals that the ARKs' purpose is to reclaim Earth from Element corruption and repopulate.
  • Feathered Fiend:
    • Argentavis, a massive flying bird that thinks you'll make a yummy snack, and Utahraptor, who'll sneak out of the darkness when you're unaware to take you on. Both are tamable and ridable, allowing you to pull this on others. And there's also Troodon, Microraptor (inaccurately portrayed as vicious pack hunters), terror birds, and Yutyrannus. Therizinosaurus is a herbivore, but also very aggressive.
    • On the opposite spectrum, we have dodos and Hesperornis. Gallimimus and Oviraptor, both described as skittish, also have some feathers.
    • Icthyornis is also one, as when it spots you it will continually steal things from you. If you tame one, it'll catch fish and bring them to you instead.
    • Dodos by themselves are pretty much the furthest from being feathered fiends. The Dodorex on the other hand is a complete monster that breathes fire and can destroy metal structures.
  • Final Girl: In Extinction Mei-Yin is the last of the named characters to survive, until Helena awakens and resurrects Diana.
  • Fling a Light into the Future: The ultimate purpose of the Arks and the Genesis ship, to preserve Earth life from the apocalypse. Both have Gone Horribly Wrong.
  • Floating Continent: The DLC map "the Center" has the namesake one floating over a Megalodon-filled lake and ringed by a vast swamp. It is accessible, but you'll need a Pteranodon, Argentavis, or Quetzalcoatlus to get there.
  • Fluffy Tamer: You can name your animals, bonus points for taming a Giganotosaurus and naming it Fluffy.
  • Fragile Speedster:
    • Gallimimus, Procoptodon and female Megaloceros all fall under this.
    • Ichthyosaurus and Manta are the aquatic version of this.
  • Friendly, Playful Dolphin: Though technically dolphin-like reptiles, Ichthyosaurus are these as they have a curious friendly attitude towards humans akin to the trope. In fact, taming one is quite easy as they don't need to be knocked out first. They can be tamed by simply feeding them directly by hand enough times. They have also been reported to bump drowning survivors towards safety, even if they are untamed and the drowning survivor is a stranger to them. According to the devs, this is intended behavior.
  • Full-Boar Action: While technically an entelodont, Daeodon qualifies as this due to being ill-tempered and armed with ferocious teeth akin to tusks.
  • Game-Breaking Bug: Sometimes, in a multiplayer environment, terminals that are about to initiate a boss battle may fail to teleport some tamed dinos or players to the boss arena, even if they are well within the teleport radius. While simple-sounding, having this bug occur can be absolutely devastating - it can stop key teammates and creatures from joining the boss battle, jeopardizing the endeavor and even potentially rendering the battle unbeatable if victory would have depended on having the one guy that the terminal failed to teleport.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • The Mosasaur dossier states that the animal has an oxygen stat unlike most other aquatic reptiles in the game (in other words, it needs to come to the surface every so often or take damage). In-game, however, it doesn't like the Ichthyosaur and Plesiosaur.
    • The dossier for Giganotosaurus states that is slow. In-game, however, it is one of the fastest animals on the island.
    • The dossier describes Carnotaurus as being faster than T. rex, but in-game it's the opposite.
    • Titanoboa's dossier states that it is untamable when it is in fact tamable, via feeding it fertilized eggs. Justified in this case; the dossier also mentions it being immune to torpor-inducing methods which are a "crucial step" in taming, implying that Helena simply hadn't discovered this was how a Titanoboa was supposed to be tamed and leaving it to the players to find out.
  • Gang Up on the Human: It's an extremely risky proposition to try and distract a pursuing carnivore by luring it near another carnivore, as 9 times out of 10 the two will usually aggro against you instead of fighting each other. In fact, with a few notable exceptions such as the T-Rex, most carnivores will never attack each other at all. This is also true of neutral herbivores that turn hostile when approached, such as the Therizinosaurus.
  • Gentle Giant:
    • Diplodocus is definitely this due to its stupidity and over-trusting nature. It's so friendly that it will nuzzle you unexpectedly and send you flying through the air, and its tendency to follow you can be mistaken for aggression.
    • The dossier for Basilosaurus states that it is this way towards humans.
  • Giant Flyer: What else but the Quetzalcoatlus? Very hard to tame as wild specimens never land on the ground, but when finally tamed, they make great flying bases.
    • Later giant flyers include three flavours of wyvern and the massive Desert Titan, a stingray-like beast that somehow propels itself through the air. You can build a base on it too!
  • Giant Spider: Large cave-dwelling ones of the fictional genus Araneomorphus. They spit webs, but can be tamed. There is also the Broodmother.
  • Giant Squid: Tusoteuthis are of the malevolent variety thanks to their life-and-stamina-leeching attacks and getaway ink clouds.
  • Golem: Besides dealing with dinosaurs and mutated spiders, you also have to contend with Rock Elementals, legendary creatures that are described as reminiscent of the mythical golems of folklore.
  • Grappling-Hook Pistol: The Grappling Hook ammo can turn a Crossbow into one.
  • Guide Dang It!: Practically everything! Aside from a brief guide outlining the basic controls, the game offers you no information whatsoever. While this isn't a great obstacle early on, advanced crafting will particularly require you to look up some sort of online guide.
  • Hair-Trigger Temper:
    • Any animal with "territorial" or "short-tempered" listed as their temperament.
    • Giganotosaurus, which has "angry" listed as its temperament.
  • Headbutting Pachy: For the most part seems to avert this trope; with any combat excused to this for easily being justified due to the limited gaming mechanics, and then you discover that pachycephalosaurus can knock trees over by ramming them.
  • Herbivores Are Friendly: Averted. Most of the herbivores in the game will fight back when attacked. Therizinosaurus and Titanomyrma, which are described as herbivores, are also aggressive.
  • Hit Points: Every living thing has one. It can increase if you choose to increase the stat during level up.
  • Honorable Elephant: The mammoths, whose tusks split into two points, giving it a four-tusked look. Phiomia also belongs to this trope, as it is a distant ancestor of the modern elephant. However, it is anything but honorable as it flees at the first sign of danger.
  • Horse of a Different Color: You can ride nearly every dinosaur you can tame.
  • Hot Bar: It also acts as your item storage.
  • I'm a Humanitarian: You can eat human meat, including your own. If you die and go back to your corpse before it decomposes, you can harvest meat from it.
  • In-Universe Game Clock: The game has an in-game day and night cycle that will affect vision and sometimes what comes out to roam.
  • Infinity -1 Sword:
    • The crossbow. It not only works as a powerful ranged weapon but is one of the best weapons to use for knocking out animals for taming and it can be used underwater.
    • Creatures that fill this role are the Megalodon, Argentavis, Sarcosuchus, and Carnotaurus.
  • Infinity +1 Sword:
    • The Tek Rifle is capable of doing absurd amounts of damage to any and everything in the game, even metal structures, and requires beating the Ultimate Life Forms to make. Similarly, the Tek Saddles feature head mounted versions of this gun.
    • Some creatures that count for this are Tyrannosaurus, Spinosaurus, Brontosaurus, Plesiosaur, and Mosasaurus.
  • Internet Jerk: Lack of player conduct enforcement has caused this to rear its ugly head on many of official servers. Even on unofficial servers, whether PvP is turned on or off, if the moderators are not very active, or worse, are complicit, people tend to go in this direction.
    • A notable instance in PvP is "offline raiding", where an assailant waits until the dead of the night when nobody is online to wreak havoc. ORP (Offline Raiding Prevention/Protection) servers have since been released, but only a handful.
    • PvE is not spared either — mysterious walls spring up around spawn points, trapping newcomers as player-built structures can't be damaged by other players.
    • On some unofficial servers, mods will use their admin rights to give themselves high-level equipment and tames when the average research level is still low. This effectively allows them to lord over 'civilian' players.
    • Another aggravating occurrence in PvE servers is when players who've established themselves in an area place pillars or foundations around an area without actually building anything off them. Because other players not in their tribe cannot build within a certain radius of each pillar/foundation, entire areas end up being blocked for player development. Especially unfair when coastal areas in the south, areas that are known to be the best places for newbies to spawn, are the exact places that are blocked off.
    • On some official PvP servers, the Alpha Tribe (the most powerful tribe on the server) will use the above tactics to aggressively monopolize and dominate the server, crushing anyone not allied with them and pushing all other tribes off the server. The typical end goal is to turn the server into the tribe's home base, from which they can safely launch raids on other servers for supplies or low-risk PvP.
  • Invulnerable Knuckles: Averted. Punching things will injure you.
  • Island Base: Several large islands are popular base building spots due to resources or being easily defendable. Cragg's Island in the southwest offers several highland locations for fortress building. Dead Island in the northeast is full of carnivores but has a cave built into it. In contrast, the South Haven has only herbivores and a large crevice that ideal for base building.
  • Island of Mystery:
    • The main setting which is a mysterious island with a number of different environmental biomes that are seamlessly connected to one another and inhabited by various prehistoric creatures.
    • Notable also on the island are the huge prominent light emitting floating obelisks found throughout various regions. These along with various other things such as the devices embedded in the players' hand, the mysterious artifacts, and the dossiers for boss creatures which are written in an unknown language suggest that the island maybe a Fantastic Nature Reserve created by aliens.
    • Adding further to the island's mystery are explorer notes which suggest previous human inhabitants of the island all came from not only different places but also different time periods as well. Later stated to be artificial memories, implanted in clone bodies.
  • Joke Character: Some of the animals are completely useless in terms of fighting abilities, but are fully tameable. These include:
    • The Dodo. It has virtually no offensive abilities, walks very slowly and basically exists to provide players with an easy source of meat and hide. You can tame it, but if you look for a combat related pet, you need to look elsewhere, as sending a tamed dodo into battle will always result in a dead dodo. However, female dodos can potentially be very useful as their eggs can be used to produce kibble (dodo egg), an item used to effectively and quickly tame Pteranodon, Ichthyosaurus and Mesopithecus.
    • Phiomia. Looking like a combination between a warthog and an elephant, its saddle is the first one players can unlock, but it does not offer anything useful as a mount. Especially compared to other rideable creatures. The only use this creature has in long term gameplay is its excrement, which can be used to fertilize your garden.
    • Moschops are slow-moving, slow-witted reptiles that always run away when combat occurs, even if ordered to attack by a player. DLC added a saddle that allows them to be used in battle, but even then they're at best low-tier Glass Cannons. Pretty much the only reason to tame one is the high-quality eggs the females lay, which can be used to create kibble and tame other creatures.
  • Kaiju: Given how drastically the size was increased for them compared to the real life animals, both the Giganotosaurus and Titanosaurus can easily count, alongside the similarly enormous Dodorex and Dragon bosses.
    • The Titans introduced in the Extinction are legit Kaiju monsters over twice the size of the already insanely large Titanosaurus. The Final Boss of the DLC, the King Titan, is over three times the size of the regular Titans.
  • Kangaroo Pouch Ride: The player can do this with the giant short-faced kangaroo Procoptodon, which is described as having a dry pouch unlike those of other marsupials.
  • Killer Gorilla: The Megapithecus boss monster is pretty much a giant, pale furred, scarred, very angry King Kong. Gigantopithecus mainly subverts this, unless you invade its territory.
  • Killer Rabbit: Many of the game's smaller animals can be surprisingly dangerous. Most notably the Compsognathus, whose behaviors is inspired by The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
    • The Ferox in Genesis is normally a small furry lemur-like animal, but upon eating element it transforms into a giant rampaging wolfman-like monster.
  • King Mook: The Alphas are bigger, faster, and stronger than the regular dinos, and it will take considerably more effort to kill them (an Alpha Raptor is considerably stronger than a regular T-Rex; shudder at what an Alpha T-Rex is like). They can also buff nearby members of the same species.
  • Know When to Fold 'Em: Although many animals that attack players (whether provoked or unprovoked) tend to attack relentlessly, if they take enough damage, they will usually turn tail and run away to escape.
  • Later-Installment Weirdness: The "Scorched Earth" DLC is more fantasy-based than the rest of the game, with only one dinosaur species (that's also completely made up) and the rest either inspired by animals that are still alive or a mythical creature that doesn't exist (ex. sandworms, manticores, and wyverns).
    • The Aberration DLC leans hard into science fiction, featuring bizarre, alien creatures along with bioluminescent versions of previously encountered creatures. This is because the DLC takes place on a broken Ark, where radiation and corrupted systems have combined to create new life forms.
  • Leaked Experience: One advantage of being in a tribe. Only applies if you're within a certain range of your tribesmen.
  • LEGO Genetics: Everything in the game is genetically engineered, ranging from modified existing species to outright new creatures.
  • Lethal Lava Land
    • The DLC map, The Center has one to the north. It's got tons of charcoal, but carnivores are everywhere on the lookout for their next meal.
    • The Ragnarok DLC map has a small volcanic area which erupts from time to time.
    • The Genesis DLC also has one with what appears to be a constantly erupting volcano. One of it's inhabitants is the Magmasaur, a large Magma Man reptile that (according to the developers) acts as both a living siege weapon and a mobile smelter.
  • Lightning Bruiser:
    • The Carnotaurus; a trait based on scientific evidence that it may have been the fastest large carnivorous dinosaur.
    • Spinosaurus is the late game version being physically massive, extremely tough, surprisingly nimble both on land and in water, and very deadly fighters. They are also one of the toughest things in the game to tame, much harder then a Rex, as they're incredibly resistant to torpor effects.
    • Tyrannosaurus certainly has the speed and strength to be this trope, but its large turning rate prevents it from being an effective Lightning Bruiser.
    • Giganotosaurus, contrary to what the dossier states.
    • The Megalodon is this for aquatic creatures. While not as fast as Ichthyosaurus it can still reach a respectable swimming speed during sprint, has lots of health and has a powerful bite. Elasmosaurus takes this trope a step further, by being almost as fast as the Ichthyosaurus and easily capable of shredding through enemy megalodons.
  • Loads and Loads of Loading: There is a very long loading screen when you first try to enter a game; even if you're playing the PC version and have a top-of-the-line CPU, an SSD and tons of RAM, the game will still take quite a while to load. Other than that, it has an almost seamless gameplay.
  • The Lost Woods: The Redwood Forests, located in the center region of the island, are a vast forest of tall trees, where the player must be on the lookout for various animals.
  • Love Is in the Air:
    • Wandering Oviraptor can emit pheromones to stimulate nearby creatures, reducing the cooldown between mating sessions or unfertilized egg-laying.
    • In Genesis II the "Bulbdog Fetch" missions are to track a pack of bulbdogs in mating season and collect their pheromones for the same purpose.
  • Low-Tech Spears: The stone spear is the first weapon the player can make and is used to reflect how the survivors start at a stone age level of development. As the player progresses, they are able to create more advanced weapons and are typically expected to abandon spears in favor of more powerful, technologically advanced late-game weapons.
  • Made of Explodium: Mined boulders and rocks explode spectacularly albeit harmlessly.
  • Magic Genetics: Genetic engineering is invoked to explain everything from fire-breathing to clear violations of the square-cube law.
  • Mama Bear: Dinos do not like their eggs being stolen. Even the normally peaceable Dodos will turn on you. This can be useful to prevent the more skittish species from fleeing so you can kill or tame them.
  • The Marvelous Deer: Megaloceros.
  • Mighty Glacier: Most of the game's big herbivores like Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Brontosaurus. Useful as harvesters and pack animals due to their powerful gathering attacks, but very slow too.
  • Min-Maxing: One can literally max out the melee damage stat which will allow you to hit dinos hard, the speed stat to escape from literally anything, or the crafting stat to create more powerful tools and weapons. Also, there are more Engrams than a single person can buy with the maximum Engram points.
  • Mini-Mecha: The Meks are robotic battlesuits that a human can enter to pilot. It carries a strong base arsenal of Tek Sword and Tek Rifle, but it can be further augmented to generate a force field, use rocket pods and have a siege cannon to bombard with.
  • Misplaced Wildlife: For some unknown reason, Tyrannosaurus and Ankylosaurus are quite common in the frigid Arctic biome. This is commented upon by Helena in her journal and serves as another of many clues to her that things aren't as they appear to be.
  • Mix-and-Match Critters:
    • The Triceratops in the game are stated in the dossier to be a hybrid of Triceratops and the less famous Styracosaurus.
    • The Manta dossier suggests that the creature may be a mix breed of two different types of ray as it's capable of swimming into the island's rivers and shallows, as well as through the open ocean.
    • The jellyfish are described in the dossier to have features found in numerous jellyfish species.
    • The Dodorex is a dodo crossed with a T. rex. That breathes fire.
    • Scorched Earth has the Morellatops, a cross between ceratopsians and the iguanodontid Morelladon, with added water-storing humps like a camel, and the "Jerboa", which has the body of the namesake rodent but the head of a fennec fox.
    • Aberration has the Seekers, essentially bats with squid tentacles for heads, and the Bulbdog, half anglerfish and half dog.
  • Mons: In a way, the various prehistoric and mythical animals count, since they can be tamed and used for battle against other creatures.
  • Morton's Fork: On Aberration walk around with a light source to keep away swarms of Nameless and you are likely to be attacked by a swarm of Seekers, that are attracted to and receive a buff being near the light source, turn the light source off and be attacked by a never ending swarm of Nameless and possibly Reapers.
  • Mundane Utility: In the Genisis DLC, HLN-A has the ability to teleport the player to the various different biomes but also to specific regions of those biomes. If you keep track of what is where, it can be used as a makeshift fast-travel system without leaving the biome.
  • My Friends... and Zoidberg: Mentioned in the Ovis dossier.
    Since arriving on the island, I have encountered dozens of fascinating creatures whose behavior has never been studied or documented... and also sheep.
  • Never Smile at a Crocodile: Sarcosuchus are never a pleasant encounter if one goes to a lake or the coasts. There's also the Kaprosuchus which drains stamina with its attacks and can snatch you off your mount.
  • Nobody Poops: Averted. All creatures — including the player character — eliminate regularly; if you don't press Numpad + (PC) or select "Defecate" from the wheel menu (console) when your food meter turns light blue, you will defecate automatically. Feces can be used as fertilizer to help grow crops, or fermented by a compost bin or a dung beetle into a superior fertilizer. If you build a toilet (available at Level 32), you can poop in and immediately produce fertilizer, as well as a brief experience buff for being hygienic.
    • The Aberration expansion also features mushroom spores that up the ante with explosive diarrhea on the spot, which is implemented as emptying your entire food meter while pooping multiple times consecutively.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: The Dodorex dossier contains no info at all of the creature. Instead, it provides an entry that has claw marks and blood covered all over it.
  • Official Couple: The Survivor Notes indicate that John Dahkeya and Raia became a couple in Scorched Earth prior to John's death, and that Mei-Yin Li and Diana Atlarus became one in Extinction after Diana's respawn.
  • Olympus Mons: The Titanosaurus and Giganotosaurus arguably qualify, as they're much rarer and stronger than the other creatures in the game, although they're still just really big, powerful animals. The Titans from the Extinction DLC are a much straighter example, being colossal Kaiju that they player can still tame and control.
  • One-Winged Angel: Rockwell in Aberration injects himself with element and transforms into a massive tentacle monster, which serves as the final boss of the DLC.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: Several types of dragon are present in the game:
    • The actual dragon in the game is an insanely massive (dwarfing even the Brontosaurus) western-style monster that breathes fire and can be tamed for a short period of time.
    • Several additional creatures, classified under the genus Draconis, are disguised by having four limbs arranged wyvern-style instead of the original dragon's six.
      • Wyverns — Draconis vipera — appear in the Scorched Earth, Ragnarok and Extinction DLCs. They resemble smaller versions of the dragons without front legs and come in lightning, acid, fire, ice and forest variations. They can only be tamed by stealing an egg from their nests and raising the chick (assuming the angry parent doesn't kill you first).
      • Rock drakes — Draconis obscurum — are from the Aberration DLC, and live primarily Beneath the Earth. They do not have wings but glide short distances using patagia.
      • The managarmr — Draconis auragelus — is a dragon from the Apocalypse map, has a vaguely mammalian head and breathes ice. Their wings alone are too small for flight, but are supplemented with jet propulsion.
      • The voidwyrm from Genesis Part 2 is a robotic wyvern that patrols the void in the middle of the map, with an electric beam attack that dismounts the player and inflicts topor.
  • Our Gryphons Are Different: Griffins — Gryphon magnificum — appear in the Ragnarok map. They are difficult to tame, but if this is done they can be ridden as flying mounts.
  • Our Manticores Are Spinier: A giant manticore is the boss of Scorched Earth. This one has no humanoid face, but it has horns, dragon wings, a scorpion tail, and the ability to hurl spines from its body.
  • Palm Tree Panic: All players spawn at the beach with some choosing to stay there as dangerous carnivores are not as common, making it relatively safer than the island's interior.
  • Panthera Awesome: Sabertooth cats are found in the northern parts of the island.
  • Peninsula of Power Leveling: On the west coast of the Island, just south of the snowy biome, is a short peninsula nicknamed "the Mosh Pit", where predators continuously spawn and attack each other. A player with a flying mount can safely rest on the tall rock outcrop and either join the fray outright, pick off stragglers, or lure/carry one out for taming. Death Island/Carnivore Island/Carnotaur Island in the northeast works much the same way.
  • Picky Eater:
    • Seabirds Ichthyornis and Pelagornis and semi-aquatic Baryonyx are exclusively piscivorous (despite wild Ichthyornis eating everything else they can take from you).
    • Compies can only be tamed by being fed Raw Prime Meat (or mutton). Ordinary raw meat, or anything cooked, won't work.
    • The kangaroo Procoptodon can only eat rare mushrooms and Plant X seeds in order to be tamed.
    • Archaeopteryx only eats chitin, and the dossier says it's picky about what bugs the chitin comes from!
    • Achatina will only eat Sweet Vegetable Cake. Thankfully their hunger depletes very slowly after being tamed.
    • Most wild carnivores prefer raw meat to cooked meat, and are tamed more efficiently. Thylacoleo GREATLY prefers cooked meat, to the point that cooked common meat is equal taming food to raw prime meat.
    • A wild Ferox will only ever take and eat Element, a rare commodity, as part of the taming process. Once it is tamed however, it will stop being picky and gladly take meat and berries for nourishment.
  • Piñata Enemy: The Phiomia. This might possibly be the only creature more worth dead than tamed, as it's harmless, easy to bring down, but drops loads of meat or hide, depending on what tool is used for harvesting it.
  • Piranha Problem: Schools of giant piranhas lurk in the rivers. One is easy enough to overcome, but the whole group can be a major threat. The dossier states that they can be tameable, but the way how to do it was ultimately not introduced until Aberration, using a fishing basket, which is also how the various other previously untamable fish such as coelacanths and sabertooth salmon can now be tamed.
  • Plasma Cannon: Roast dinosaurs with plasma bolts from your trusty Tek Rifle. The rather misnamed Tek Railgun is also a big gun that fires plasma bolts.
  • Poisonous Person: The Dilophosaurus spits venom, the Pulmonoscorpius has a toxic sting, the Troodon has a neurotoxic bite, and the Megalania has a hemotoxic bite.
  • Power Armor: The Tek Armor set gets you armor that augments its user's punches, a helmet with a sensor suite, increased running speed and also has a Jet Pack
  • Predators Are Mean: The overwhelming majority of the island's carnivores are vicious killers, indiscriminately attacking any animal they meet until they or their prey are slain. If the latter occurs, they switch to the nearest target in their sight — players included.
  • Psycho Electric Eel: Electric eels (referred as Electrophorus note ) are found in the waters of the island. Their shocks can be used to stun large marine animals into submission for taming purposes.
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender:
    • You can choose to design your avatar, but the stats remains the same.
    • Averted for the animals as getting a male and a female can allow you to breed them as well as give the "mate boosted" stat which improves their damage and resistances.
  • Raptor Attack:
    • The Utahraptor has pronated handsnote  and is mostly scaled, save for its arms, head, neck, and tail. It also looks more like an oversized Deinonychus when the real Utahraptor was rather bulky and had fairly short legs. Hand Waved as it's a fictional species of Utahraptor.
    • Microraptor is somewhat better designed, but is portrayed as a pack-hunting Killer Rabbit and has brownish plumagenote .
    • The Troodon's feather arrangement is inaccurate and they give it a powerful neurotoxic bite. Its intelligence is played up; here it is said to be only second to humans in brains on the island. The skull in the dossier also seems to be that of Dromaeosaurus◊, not Troodon.
    • The Deinonychus mostly averts this, being nicely feathered (albeit the face and underside being bare and the wings ending at the wrist) and properly using its claws as hooks. However, it is larger than in real life.
  • Reference Overdosed: The Genesis 2 mission "Star Dolphin" is more than just based on Star Fox; it's saturated with references to it. Besides the identical gameplay, it includes such little details as having a "hit" counter, the saddled Astrodelphis resembling an Arwing and having "Peppy" as its name, the maximum amount of players specifically being 4 (and being the only mission with that maximum, in the entirety of Genesis), the results screen having "Mission Accomplished!", the boss being called "Androck", and HLN-A randomly making a noise resembling the Lylat language at one point (complete with static preceding it) and dropping multiple quotes that reference those from Star Fox 64 during the boss fight (one of said quotes being almost verbatim).
  • Respawn Point: If you managed to set up a nice comfy sleeping area, it can serve as your respawn point. Sleeping bags will respawn you just once while beds will work indefinitely, albeit with a cooldown timer.
  • The Reveal: Extinction indicates the true purpose of the Arks: created by a dying future human race both to preserve Earth life and to evolve through Darwinian selection an army powerful enough to retake post-apocalyptic Earth from Element. Which accounts for the absurd predator-to-prey ratio and general Death World nature of all the Arks.
  • Rhino Rampage: The Woolly Rhino. And to a lesser extent, Paraceratherium.
  • Ridiculously Cute Critter: Jerboas from the Scorched Earth DLC. The Dossier author acknowledges this.
    Scientifically speaking, Renopila Amplexus is an adorable little fuzzball and I just want to hug it forever.
    • The Dodos also count, being completely docile and doing nothing except wandering around in small groups making chirping noises.
    • All four of the light-emitting shoulder pets in Aberration count as cute in some way, from the boggle-eyed and overly affectionate Bulbdog to the fawn-like Shinehorn.
    • The Maewing pups (kittles?) in Genesis 2 give even your Robot Buddy an attack of Cuteness Proximity.
  • Roaming Enemy: All dinos roam around, and a hostile one might even roam all the way to your house.
  • Rock Monster: The Scorched Earth DLC has Rock Elementals, lumbering brutes that feed on mineral matter. They spend most of their time disguised among the desert boulders until a player has the misfortune of enraging it with their attempts to use a pick or axe on one.
  • Rule of Cool:
    • A lot of the prehistoric animals have been extremely stylized at the expense of accuracy.
    • Almost all of the tameable creatures on the island would be impossible to tame in real life, due to their low intelligence, slow breeding rates, antisocial tendencies and/or ferocious nature. A good example would be the giant scorpion. But no one complains, as it is just awesome to ride a giant scorpion into battle.
    • Building a small house on the back of a Quetzalcoatlus and it still being able to fly certainly falls under the Rule of Cool.
    • The Scorched Earth DLC. Why else would a game that sold itself as a dinosaur survival have Rock Monsters, dragons, and several non-prehistoric animals as ordinary encounters in the desert?
  • Rule of Fun: The stylization is sometimes done for gameplay purposes as well such as the Pachyrhinosaurus' nasal ridge releasing pacifying chemicals and the pheromones emitted by Oviraptor that give mated dinosaurs the ability to produce more eggs.
  • Sand Worm: Untamable Death Worms (Khorkoi arrakis) are among the most dangerous creatures a player can encounter in the Scorched Earth DLC, striking from underground. Worse still, they come in two sizes — big and very big.
  • Savage Setpiece: The big herbivores are as docile as can be as long as you leave them alone. But when attacked, they can fight back ferociously.
  • Savage Wolves: Dire wolves; aggressive pack-hunting predators that roam the game's freezing arctic biome.
  • Scary Scorpions: Giant scorpions with torpor-raising attacks are among the many Big Creepy-Crawlies. Unlike most of the bugs, they can be tamed and ridden. Eurypterids (aka sea scorpions) also appear in the ocean.
  • Scenery Porn: The game looks absolutely stunning, especially at night (in-game). Of course, the insanely good graphic means that any old computer will have trouble running the game.
  • Schizo Tech: Some of the guns that are accessible later on are a blend of modern weapons and the sort one would expect in the Wild West.
  • Screen Shake: Any of the really big dinos will cause the ground (and you) to shake.
  • Sea Monster: Many of the popular prehistoric ones like Megalodon, Elasmosaurus, Liopleurodonnote , Mosasaurus, and Dunkleosteus. There's also the giant squid Tusoteuthis.
  • Set the World on Fire: In Aberration, the Surface above the (relatively) safe caverns is a nearly lifeless wasteland that regularly gets set on fire by the sun.
  • Shifting Sand Land: The setting of Scorched Earth.
  • Shotguns Are Just Better: The shotgun is the most damaging basic weapon class, both in terms of per-shot damage and damage-to-resource cost per bullet. It only takes a handful of shots to bring down even a T-Rex. The drawback is that it only works at close range, and the high resource cost of manufacturing bullets in general.
  • Shout-Out:
    • Various notes in the dossier of the Liopleurodon reference Charlie the Unicorn. Even its species name Liopleurodon magicus is a reference to the YouTube video.
    • The game's Dilophosaurus are obviously based on the (in)famous Jurassic Park incarnation. As are the Compsognathus and Troodon.
    • The Leedsichthys dossier describes an albino specimen so rare that men and women have been driven mad with obsession in hunting them, "as if all evil were visibly personified and made practically assailable in this one creature".
    • The dossier for Moschops lists its temperament as "cowardly".
    • Scorched Earth's Death Worms hit two birds with one stone in their scientific name, Khorkoi arrakis.
    • When you reach the Tek tier, you can equip special saddles onto megalodons. It turns them into frickin' sharks with frickin' lasers attached to their frickin' heads. The reveal trailer for this even has a guy who looks like Dr. Evil appear, complete with the "One million dollars!" pose.
    • Ark Park made references to the Jurassic Park franchise.
      • The train scene from Jurassic World along with the iconic gateway to the park.
      • A Dino Ride Pen referencing to the Gentle Giants Petting Zoo.
      • The Raptors are the first to rampage mirroring their roles in the first film.
      • The Giganotosaurus scene mirrors the exact scene with the Indominus Rex who had Giganotosaurus genes, among others.
    • To tame a Hyenodon, you have to pet it without letting it see you.
    • The Jerboa is a blend of rabbit and rodent traits with long black-tipped ears, prominent cheeks, lateral back stripes, and a long squiggly tail. Color it yellow, and it's Pikachu.
    • The reaper is an obvious shout out to Alien, down to reproducing in the exact same way.
    • Genesis 1 has the Ichthyosaurus ("dolphin") escort mission, "Echo of a Classic", which is a reference to Ecco the Dolphin. The mission ends with "Icco" getting carried by a Pteranodon to his next level.
    • Genesis 2 has a mission with gameplay that was clearly inspired by the likes of Star Fox, featuring a player-piloted Astrodelphis with a saddle resembling the Arwing (appropriately named "Astrodelphis Starwing Saddle") and even including the somersault and barrel roll moves. Drilling the tribute even further is that the mission in question is called "Star Dolphin", holding H during said mission reveals the mount is named "Peppy", as well as the part where during the boss fight against Rockwell, HLNA exclaims "So Rockwell, your virus shows its TRUE form" — a line that directly references Star Fox 64, where Fox McCloud has a very similar line. HLNA will even glitch up at one point and make the same kind of noise that the characters from the original Star Fox make when talking!
  • Shown Their Work: While the dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals are obviously not anatomically-correct, the creators have shown they actually did research on them. For example:
    • All of the deinonychosaurs are depicted with feathers, albeit not quite accurately so.
    • Liopleurodon is portrayed as a more realistic 25 feet long rather than 25 meters as inspired by Walking with Dinosaurs.
    • Spinosaurus is portrayed as semi-aquatic, and it has short legs according to 2014 discoveries.
    • Tyrannosaurus slow turning rate is pretty accurate how such a creature would move in real life, as T. rex's weight and physique would not allow it to take very sharp turns, as it would fall in doing so.
    • The full name of a Raptor in this game is Utahraptor as opposed to the more popular Velociraptor, which is correct, as the former is indeed man-sized, while the latter is closer to the size of a large chicken. Other dinosaur-related media, like Jurassic Park, tend to call the man-sized ones Velociraptor.
    • Stegosaurus is portrayed with a fairly long neck, according to "Sophie" which is the most-complete Stegosaurus known to date.
    • The Elasmosaurus are refreshingly portrayed with rigid necks, as opposed to overly-flexible necks like in most depictions.
    • Andrewsarchus is portrayed as an omnivorous whippomorph like Daeodon, which is one of its closest relatives, instead of the outdated mesonychid restoration from Walking with Beasts.
  • Slaying Mantis: Giant mantises are among the Big Creepy-Crawlies unique to Scorched Earth. Asides from being dangerous predators, they are intelligent (especially by insect standards) and have hands on their forearms, which allows players who domesticate them have their mount use weapons and tools. They also jump like grasshoppers.
  • Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The snow biome, which has mammoths, dire wolves, Megaloceros (giant deer), sabertooth cats, and penguins. Expect to see a dinosaur though now and then. Players can brave the freezing temperatures to retrieve resources that are usually found underwater.
  • Somewhere A Mammologist Is Crying: Jerboas in real life actually don't look the way they do in this game -
  • Space Whale: The Astrocetus is a massive flying whale-like creature found in the Genesis Lunar Biome that has the power of Flashy Teleportation, turning into a much smaller pocket of distorted space, that shoots away.
  • Spell My Name With An S:
    • Pulmonoscorpius is misspelled in-game as "Pulminoscorpius".
    • Titanoboa is referred to in-game as "Titanboa".
    • Arthropleura is misspelled in its dossier as Arthropluera.
    • When it was first implemented in the game, the eggs of Giganotosaurus were labelled "Gigantasaur Egg".
  • Stomach of Holding: Tamed dinos can hold a surprising amount of things without it being visible.
  • Summon Bigger Fish: Triceratops are relatively common, entirely passive towards players as long as you don't attack them, and are particularly easy to aggro against hostile carnivores. Low level players being harassed by major carnivores can lure them near wild Triceratops and hide behind the trike, which usually results in the two fighting and giving you a chance to help kill the predator or escape. This can also be done with Stegosaurus, but they're somewhat less common. Brontosaurus are somewhat less useful in this regard, as they're so huge that anything much smaller than a T. rex will just ignore them, and vice versa.
    • Also a common tactic for newer, less established players on PvE servers is to launch a flare skyward when getting overwhelmed by wildlife. This tends to draw nearby players and their mounts to the battle who are often more then willing to butcher the offending creatures.
  • Tech Tree: Certain engrams can only be unlocked when you have its prerequisite.
  • Thanksgiving Turkey: The holiday event Turkey Trial sees Super Turkeys spawn as a creature to encounter, these are surprisingly dangerous should they be provoked into a fight (to the point they are also often called "Murder Turkeys"), but if one is killed, their wishbones can be used to craft several Thanksgiving-themed items.
  • Thirsty Desert: The Scorched Earth DLC. Asides from having several unique creatures and biomes of its own, water goes from being a convenience to the most precious resource in the game and storms (of the sand and lightning type) are the only weather you'll get asides the blistering sun.
  • Threatening Shark: The aforementioned Megalodon. Which you can domesticate and ride.
  • Too Dumb to Live: The dossier for Diplodocus indicates that the animal never fights back, and will even try to make friends with its attackers, often getting itself killed.
  • Took a Level in Badass: Any creature that has had an upgrade through the new TLC updates.
  • Toothy Bird:
    • The Hesperornis and Icthyornis, as per the real animals. Pelagornis, too.
    • The Pteranodon, Gallimimus, and electric eels are portrayed with teeth, unlike their real-life counterparts.
  • Translator Microbes: According to Mei-Yin's journal, the implants allow people to hear any other language spoken as their own (although it doesn't change their lipsl sync to mach it). This is how so many people from different locations and time periods are able to communicate well enough to form larger tribes.
  • Tropical Island Adventure: The game takes place on the titular ARK, a tropical island full of dinosaurs and other giant beasts. Or so you think.
  • Under the Sea: Head to the bottom of the oceans to search for underwater caverns, oil, or silica pearls! Just watch for Megalodons (and your oxygen levels) though.
  • Underground Level: The island's caverns are the place to find crystals and powerful boss-summoning artifacts. Populated by giant spiders, big bats, Titanoboa (a giant snake), cave-dwelling scorpions, and Megalania (a giant lizard related to the Komodo dragon).
    • Aberration is entirely underground, starting with caverns lit by sunlight filtering in from above, going down into dark caves lit by eerie crystals. You can go to the surface if you want, but during the day it turns into a burning hellscape that kills anything on it, hence why everything lives underground (or comes out at night).
  • Undying Loyalty: Tamed animals. Once you tame an animal, there is nothing you can do to make them abandon you. You can even beat them to death, without them even trying to prevent it.
    • The Giganotosaurus subverts this trope, as when it gets angry enough, it could turn on its owner, albeit only for a brief time.
    • The Dragon also subverts this trope, as it's only loyal to the player for a few seconds.
    • The Lystrosaurus embodies this trope as stated and depicted in its dossier.
    • The Titanosaur subverts it by having a countdown timer like the dragon.
    • The Liopleurodon subverts it by only lasting 30 minutes.
    • The Bloodstalker, a hematophagous spider creature, will turn on its rider and drink their blood if its health gets low.
  • Unintentionally Unwinnable: Most of the color-code puzzles in Genesis 2 have HLN-A calling out the colors for you, so color-blind players can still solve them. This is absent in the mission "Choose Your Own Adventure", at the boss stage where you have to disable its shield by stepping on randomized colored panels. Picking the wrong one not only fully restores the shield but also summons a horde of enemy dinos, and color-blind players have reported particular difficulty telling the green and yellow panels apart.
  • Unobtanium: Element, which is used to both build and power a wide variety of futuristic devices. It has the nasty side effect of creating monsters and also causing the apocalypse.
  • Unstoppable Rage: The Giganotosaurus takes this tropes and runs with it. As they take damage they get angrier, stronger, and harder to kill culminating with their eyes lighting up as they enter a berserk frenzy.
  • Vague Age: The player character always appears middle-aged, regardless of customizations.
  • Video Game Caring Potential:
    • Working with other humans accelerates growth in the form of shared EXP.
    • Tamed dinos help a lot - for transportation, hauling, gathering, combat, and more. Players often name and bond with their favorites.
    • Small dinosaurs can be carried on your shoulder. Aww!
    • Baby dinosaurs need to be manually fed and, for the best stats, cuddled and walked. They will imprint on whoever cared for them and, when all grown up, get a huge bonus to stats when ridden by that player.
    • Some advanced players chose to help new players - giving them metal tools or starter dinosaurs. It's the best outcome when a fearsome beast appears outside your thatch hut!
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential:
    • Most dinosaur breeders will cull baby dinosaurs without the desired stats or colors. Welcome to the world, now eat a sword!
    • One of the most efficient ways to get polymer is to club defenseless penguins - especially the babies!
    • Some players will blow up every base they find, even the wood and thatch huts of new players too poor to have any loot.
    • Some raiders will go on a "meat run" against their rivals - eating every single tamed dinosaur with some huge carnivore, wiping out hours of work in minutes!
    • Logged out players are basically unconscious, and their bodies sometimes float in midair. Naturally, many will make them float high off of the ground. When they victim logs back in, they will fall to their death.
    • Unconscious players can also be drowned. As they are technically killed by the environment, they don't get a message saying who killed them. It's the perfect crime.
    • Players can be held prisoner - in a cage, in handcuffs, in a cell. Used to prevent them from defending their base, as punishment for perceived wrongdoing, or - for the especially cruel - arbitrarily against random new players. It's not uncommon to see pleas for rescue in global chat.
      • You can force feed unconscious living beings. Slow suicide by starvation/punching the walls is an escape, but attentive jailers can knock out prisoners, feed, and heal them. The most dedicated tribes can keep prisoners for days, even weeks, by doing this in shifts!
      • Some evil geniuses will put an unconscious/logged off player in a Bond-villain Death Trap, to be e.g. dropped naked into a pit of attack Dodos when they wake up.
  • Voice Grunting: No legitimate language can be heard, it's either grunts from dinos or grunts and whistles from humans. Averted when a player uses the ingame push-to-talk function, in which case the mouth of the character moves, to make it look like the character is talking.
  • Waterfall into the Abyss: On the DLC map, The Center, the western side of the map has bottomless waterfalls that falling off results in instant death.
  • Wizard Needs Food Badly:
    • Well, not wizards but you do. You need water too.
    • All tamed animals require food as well.
  • Wolverine Claws: Therizinosaurus, and to a lesser extent Megatherium and Chalicotherium.
  • Yet Another Stupid Death: What usually happens when players are new to the game. Bonus points for dying of hunger or thirst.
  • You Have Researched Breathing: Many simple things have to be learned in order to be crafted.
  • Zerg Rush:
    • A very effective PVE tactic against apex predators. Often a pack of several Raptors will be more effective than a single T-Rex (not to mention a whole lot easier to tame), due to being able to land multiple hits at once and being several targets rather than a single target.
    • Dimorphodon, Megapiranha, Titanomyrma, Compsognathus, Onychonycteris, Microraptor, and giant bees prefer this attack style.
    • Killing anything in the swamp will likely cause Meganuera to employ this attack style as well, as they are carrion feeders, who do not like to be disturbed during their meals.
    • Most boss fights spawn swarms of high level creatures to attack the players.

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