Extinction is the one map where the Obelisks have no terminals under them. Instead, the job is done by City Terminals — scattered across the ruined city and out into the domes — and they're your only real way to craft the map's engrams and move tames and items between servers. Here's exactly what a City Terminal does, what it doesn't, and where to find one.
A City Terminal is Extinction's stand-in for the terminal you'd normally find under an Obelisk. Three jobs, straight from the wiki:
| Use | What it means |
|---|---|
| Cross-server transfer | The primary means of uploading and downloading tames and items across servers on Extinction — this is the big one, and the reason the terminals exist at all. |
| Engram crafting | Crafts several of the map's engrams, including the Enforcer and the Scout — the Extinction robots you build rather than tame. |
| Charge Battery charging | Charges Charge Batteries with seemingly no cap on total charge — but only 10 batteries can charge at once. More below. |
This is the quirk that sends people searching in the first place. You fly up to an Obelisk expecting the usual transfer/craft terminal — and there isn't one.
On Extinction, the Obelisks have no terminal underneath them. That's intentional: the map is set in the ruins of the "Great City," and its lore-appropriate infrastructure is the City Terminal network, not the pristine Obelisk terminals you get on The Island. So Wildcard put the crafting-and-transfer function into City Terminals spread across the map instead. Practically, that means you never fly to an Obelisk to transfer on Extinction — you walk to the nearest terminal.
| Structure | Transfer? | Craft? | Boss access? |
|---|---|---|---|
| City Terminal (Extinction) | ✅ Yes — primary method | ✅ Map engrams (Enforcer, Scout) | ❌ No |
| Obelisk (most maps) | ✅ Yes, at its terminal | ✅ Cryopods, Tek Replicator | ✅ Boss arenas |
| Titan Terminal (Extinction) | ❌ No | ❌ No | ✅ Summons the Titans |
| Supply / Loot Crate | ❌ Not a terminal | ❌ No | ❌ No — it's a lootable drop |
They're not confined to the safe green zone — City Terminals are spread across four regions of the map:
Sanctuary — the domed "green zone" city and the safest place to build near one, home to Obelisk Park and several terminals · Wasteland — the exposed, corrupted midlands · Snow Dome and Desert Dome — the two biome domes. In total the wiki documents roughly 27 exact City Terminal locations with GPS and map coordinates; for a first base, the Sanctuary terminals are the low-stress option.
Because every City Terminal shares the same upload pool, it doesn't matter which one you use to transfer — the closest working terminal to your base is always the right answer. For the full coordinate list, the community-maintained table on ark.wiki.gg is the canonical source.
A genuinely handy secondary use that most players miss.
Drop Charge Batteries into a City Terminal and it recharges them — with, per the wiki, seemingly no limit on how much charge it hands out. The one constraint: only 10 Charge Batteries can charge at the same time. On Extinction, where Charge Light and charge-powered gear matter for fending off corrupted creatures, a City Terminal near base doubles as free battery infrastructure.
For server owners and single-player admins.
| Action | Command / note |
|---|---|
| Spawn a City Terminal | cheat summon primalstructure_cityterminal_bp_c |
| Destroy one | Only the Admin Blink Rifle can destroy a City Terminal — and it will not respawn afterward, so it's an admin-only, one-way action. |
61.14 specifically fixed "Terminals on Extinction sometimes appearing invisible." If you're on an older server build and a terminal won't render, that's the known bug — update the server.cheat summon primalstructure_cityterminal_bp_c.Server files, spawn commands, and the rest of the ASA coverage.