ARK GameUserSettings.ini Generator
Build a clean GameUserSettings.ini for your ARK: Survival Ascended server in under a minute. Adjust taming speed, harvest rates, XP multipliers, structure damage, PvP rules — copy the output, paste it in. No login, no half-broken templates from 2019, no "premium settings" paywall.
Core Server
The basics — server name, passwords, player limits, RCON. The first stuff anyone touches. If your server doesn't show up in the browser, something here is wrong.
The name players see in the server browser. Make it searchable and memorable — "John's PvE 5x Cluster" beats "Server1" every time. Keep it under ~50 characters or it gets truncated on the list.
Required to join the server. Leave blank for an open public server. Whatever you put here is what players type to connect — don't reuse your admin password, these are not the same field. Yes, people do that. Don't.
Required to log in as admin and run cheat commands in-game. Use a long random string — if someone guesses this, they can wipe your server with one command. Treat it like a real password, because it is one.
Optional password that lets someone join as a ghost spectator — useful for content creators, tournament referees, or admins who want to watch without affecting gameplay. Leave blank to disable spectator mode entirely.
Maximum simultaneous players on the server. Official servers run 70. Performance depends entirely on your hardware — most casual unofficial servers run 20 to 40 and call it a day. Going above 70 on a budget VPS is asking your CPU to file a complaint.
Enables remote console access — required if you use RCON-based admin panels, Discord bots, or scheduled commands. Leave off if you manage the server manually through the in-game console. Most modern admin tools (CrossArk, Server Manager) need this on.
TCP port for incoming RCON connections. Default is 27020. Only matters if RCON is enabled. If you're running multiple ARK servers on the same machine, each one needs a different RCON port.
Lets players see the on-screen crosshair. Disable for a more immersive or hardcore experience — hardcore players love this off, casual players hate it. Pick your audience.
When enabled, dying wipes your character entirely — you respawn at level 1 with nothing. Tames and structures remain. Brutal, but a niche audience loves it. Most casual servers leave this off.
Disables all player-vs-player damage and structure raiding. Players can still kill wild dinos, but other tribes can't touch them. The single biggest setting on the whole file — pick wrong and your entire community walks away on day one.
Shows the "You are here" dot on the in-game map. Disable for hardcore navigation — players have to figure out where they are from landmarks, like savages. Most PvE servers leave this on so people don't get lost in the swamp forever.
Lets players toggle to third-person view. Some hardcore PvP servers disable this because it lets you see around corners — a real combat advantage. PvE servers and most casual PvP leave it on because watching your character do stuff is half the fun.
Shows damage numbers floating off enemies when hit — RPG-style. Some people love the feedback, others find it cluttered. Pure quality-of-life setting, no gameplay impact.
Player & Dino Multipliers
The XP, taming, harvest, and damage multipliers. This is where casual servers part ways with official rates. Most unofficial servers crank these way up to cut the grind — official's 1× rates assume you're playing 8 hours a day, which most working adults aren't.
How much experience players earn from all sources. 2× to 5× is the sweet spot for most unofficial servers — fast enough that levels feel meaningful, slow enough that players still care about leveling up. Anything above 10× and players hit max level before they've explored half the map.
The single most-changed setting in all of ARK. Multiplies how fast knocked-out dinos go from torpor to tamed. 5× is casual-friendly, 10× is "I have a job", 20×+ is "I want to play, not babysit a Rex for 6 hours". Pairs naturally with a higher torpor drain rate so tames don't wake up mid-feed.
How much resource you get per hit on a tree, rock, or corpse. 3× to 5× is standard for boosted servers. Push it too high (20×+) and players have stockpiles of everything within a day, which makes economy mods and trading pointless.
How much "health" resource nodes have — basically how many hits a tree or rock takes before it's gone. Higher = more total resource per node, but takes longer to fully chop down. Most servers leave this at 1 and just raise HarvestAmountMultiplier instead.
How fast trees, rocks, bushes, and metal nodes respawn after being harvested. Lower means faster — this one is backwards from most multipliers. 0.5 = nodes respawn twice as fast. Crank this down on busy servers where players strip the map bare every morning.
How much damage players deal in melee and ranged combat. Mostly tweaked on PvP servers to balance fights — raising this makes early-game combat lethal and late-game gear less of a hard wall.
How much damage players take. Higher = takes more damage (yes, the name is backwards from what you'd expect — blame Wildcard). Lower this on hardcore servers where you want fights to last; raise it on casual servers where one wild Rex shouldn't oneshot a new player.
How much damage wild dinos deal. Raising this makes the world genuinely dangerous — a wild Carno becomes a real threat instead of free XP. Hardcore servers run 1.5× to 2×. Lower it if you want a more chill exploration vibe.
How much damage wild dinos take. Higher = tougher wild dinos. Pairs naturally with DinoDamageMultiplier for hardcore servers that want every wild encounter to actually matter.
How much damage your tamed dinos deal. PvE servers sometimes bump this up so players feel powerful late-game. On PvP servers, raising this trivializes raids — official runs 1× for a reason. Tweak with intent.
How much damage your tamed dinos take. Higher = tankier tames. Lower this slightly on PvP to make raids more dynamic instead of "whoever brought the most Rexes wins".
How fast players get thirsty. Lower means you sip a waterskin less often — quality-of-life for most servers. Hardcore desert servers crank this up because the heat should hurt.
How fast players get hungry. Lower = less constant snacking. Survival purists keep this at 1×; everyone else drops it to 0.5× and gets on with their day.
How fast players burn through stamina while sprinting, jumping, swimming. Lowering this is a common QoL change so you're not gasping after every 3 seconds of sprinting.
How fast players regenerate health out of combat. Bumping this up means players spend less time eating Cooked Meat in a corner and more time actually playing.
How fast your tamed dinos burn through food. Lower means feeding troughs last longer. Anyone with more than 10 dinos lowers this — otherwise managing food becomes a part-time job.
How fast tamed dinos burn stamina while sprinting or flying. Travel-heavy maps benefit from a small reduction — your Argy shouldn't need to land every 30 seconds.
How fast tamed dinos heal out of combat. Bumping this up means less time sitting around waiting for your Rex to stop bleeding after a fight.
How fast a knocked-out wild dino consumes the food you're using to tame it. Higher means it eats food faster — counterintuitively, that means faster taming on most kibbles. Most boosted servers raise this 2× to 3× alongside taming speed.
How fast knocked-out wild dinos lose torpor (and risk waking up). Lower = stays unconscious longer. Crank this down on boosted servers so your Rex doesn't wake up halfway through a 20× tame and eat you.
How much bonus quality your Crafting Skill stat adds to crafted items. Higher = your level-up points into Crafting Skill matter more. A common tweak for end-game crafting servers where players want masterwork gear to feel masterwork.
XP earned from killing things, on top of the base XPMultiplier. Stacks multiplicatively. Bump this up for PvP-focused servers where you want combat to actually reward players.
XP earned from harvesting nodes — chopping trees, mining rocks, picking berries. Builder-friendly servers usually bump this up so the early-game gathering grind also feeds your level.
XP earned from crafting items. Raise this for crafting-focused communities — when smelting metal or making narcotics also levels you, AFK farming becomes leveling.
Passive XP gained from doing anything while alive — the "just being there" XP. Usually left at 1×; tweak only if you want idle play to count more.
XP from special events — boss kills, explorer notes, mission completions on Genesis maps. Usually scaled with the rest of your XP rates so explorer-note hunters still feel rewarded.
Time & Difficulty
Day/night cycle speed and the difficulty offset that determines wild dino levels. The day/night settings are usually small tweaks; the difficulty offset is the one that matters most — it's what makes the difference between fighting level 30 wild dinos and level 150 wild dinos.
Overall speed of the day/night cycle. Lower = longer days and nights. 0.5 is a popular "give me more time to actually do things between sleeping" setting.
How long daytime lasts relative to nighttime. Lower = longer days. Use this with NightTimeSpeedScale to make day:night ratios feel right for your server.
How long nighttime lasts. Higher = shorter nights. Bump this up to 2.0 if your players hate being stuck in pitch black waiting for sunrise.
Scales how the OverrideOfficialDifficulty setting applies. Almost always set to 1.0 alongside an OverrideOfficialDifficulty of 5.0 — that combo is what gives you the standard "max difficulty" wild dino levels up to 150.
The big one. Sets the maximum wild dino level — 5.0 gives you wild dinos up to level 150 (the post-tame ceiling players actually want). Official PvE runs 5.0; official PvP runs 4.0. Setting this to anything below 5.0 produces sad, low-level wild dinos that nobody wants to tame.
Removes fog weather effects. Some players find fog atmospheric, others find it eye strain. Pure preference setting.
Building & Structure
How structures behave — damage, decay, placement limits, raid rules. PvP servers obsess over this section. PvE servers mostly care about decay and max-structures limits to prevent dead bases choking the map.
How much damage player-built structures take from all sources. Raid-heavy PvP servers bump this to 2× to 3× to make raids end in hours instead of days. PvE keeps it at 1× because nothing should be eating your base anyway.
Damage resistance for structures — the inverse of damage. Pick one or the other, don't change both at once or you'll spend an hour figuring out why nothing feels right.
Lets PvP structures auto-decay when nobody's been around to refresh them. Essential for cleanup on active PvP servers — without this, abandoned mega-bases sit forever. Default decay periods are tribe-tier dependent; pair with the timer multipliers below if you want them changed.
Turns off the auto-decay on PvE structures. Good for small community servers where players take week-long breaks and shouldn't come back to ruins. Bad for large public servers where abandoned bases pile up like a digital landfill.
How long PvE structures last between visits before decaying. Higher = more grace time for players who only log in on weekends. Only relevant if PvE decay isn't disabled outright.
Maximum structures allowed in close proximity to each other. Default 10500 is the ARK official cap. Lower this to prevent mega-base lag bombs on busy servers; raise it on creative/build servers where players want to build castles bigger than common sense allows.
Removes the 30-second timer on picking up placed structures. Quality-of-life win — players can correct mis-placed walls forever, not just within the panic window. PvP servers sometimes keep this off to prevent base-rebuild exploits during raids.
How long after placement you can still pick up a structure for a refund. Default 30 seconds is brutal — raise it to 300 (5 min) for a sane build experience. Only matters if "Always Allow Pickup" is off.
Allows multiple floor levels on platform saddles — needed for serious mobile-base builds on Quetz, Paracer, or Brontosaurus. Off by default on official PvP because it lets you build flying fortresses that are basically tanks.
How many structures you can put on a single platform saddle, relative to the official cap. Raise this for build servers, lower for PvP to keep platform-saddle bases from becoming raidable forts.
When enabled, tribes can't be raided while all their members are offline. Hugely controversial — pure PvP purists hate it because it kills the "raid them at 4am" meta, casual players love it because they can sleep without losing everything. Pick your community.
How long after the last tribe member logs off before offline raid protection kicks in. Default 900 (15 min) prevents people from "I logged off!" cheese during active raids. Only relevant if ORP is on.
Stops players from transferring uploaded dinos onto this server. Useful for single-map servers that don't want PvP raiders bringing in fully bred Rexes from another cluster. Standard on "vanilla economy" PvP servers.
Stops players from transferring uploaded items in. Same logic as preventing dino transfers — keeps the economy local. Almost always paired with PreventDownloadDinos.
Stops players from transferring their character onto this server. Forces fresh starts. Used on competitive servers and "wipe-fresh" PvP launches.
Hard cap on how many dinos a tribe can have uploaded to ARK cross-server storage at once. Lower this on resource-constrained clusters to prevent hoarding.
Cap on uploaded items per tribe. Same idea as the dino cap — prevents stuffing 10,000 saddles into cross-server storage.
Tribe / PvP / Notifications
Tribe limits, PvP-specific behavior, and the global notification toggles. Tribe size is the second-biggest decision after PvE vs PvP — capping it at 10 vs unlimited completely changes how your server plays.
Cap on how many people can be in one tribe. 0 = unlimited. Small-tribes servers run 4–6, mega-tribe servers run unlimited. Cap matters because it limits how many people can coordinate against a single tribe — competitive PvP servers always cap this.
How many alliances a single tribe can be part of. 0 = unlimited. Restricting this prevents "everyone's allied with everyone" stalemates on PvP servers.
Maximum tribes in a single alliance. 0 = unlimited. Same principle — prevent server-wide alliance blobs.
Stops tribemates from damaging each other. Prevents trolling and accidents during raid prep. Most PvP servers turn this on — there's no good reason for your own tribe to be able to kill you.
Lets players crank their gamma to see in the dark on PvP servers. Hardcore PvP keeps this off so night actually matters. Casual PvP turns it on so people stop dying because their monitor is too dim.
Forces dark caves and nights on PvE. Niche — most PvE servers leave gamma free because there's no competitive reason to gatekeep visibility.
Adds extra no-build zones around obelisks, cave entrances, artifact rooms. Standard on PvP servers to prevent boss-arena trolling and cave-entrance pillaring. Casual servers often leave this off.
Lets PvE tribes opt into a temporary mutual war state for organized fights. Adds optional PvP flavor to PvE servers without going full PvP.
Prevents accidental damage between PvE tribemates. Most PvE servers leave this on because nobody enjoys explaining why they shot their own Rex.
Tags chat messages with the speaker's tribe name. Useful on social servers, awful for stealthy PvP where you don't want your tribe name leaked.
Master switch for the obelisk transfer system. Disable to lock players to this server only — useful for fresh-launch PvP wipes where nobody should be bringing in established characters.
Shoots a beam of light above your dead body so you can find it. Essential quality-of-life on PvE — finding a corpse in a dark cave or jungle without this is a special kind of misery. Off on hardcore PvP where losing your loot should hurt.
Cryopod Settings
Controls cryopod behavior — the biggest QoL feature added since launch. ARK: Survival Ascended ships with a cryofridge requirement that the community largely hated, so most unofficial servers turn it off.
Removes the requirement for a powered cryofridge nearby to release cryopodded dinos. Restores the old ASE behavior — chuck cryopods anywhere, anytime. The single most-requested QoL toggle on every ASA server.
Lets you place a cryofridge on a platform saddle (Quetz, Brontosaurus). Useful for mobile-base players hauling cryopodded armies around the map.
Lets you cryopod your dino even when enemies are nearby. Off by default on PvP to prevent "uh oh, cryopod my Rex" cheese during fights. PvE servers turn it on for convenience.
How many seconds after release a dino deals reduced damage. PvP servers raise this to prevent "cryopod-spam" tactics — releasing 20 Rexes mid-raid for instant damage.
How much damage a freshly-released dino deals during the nerf window. 0.01 = basically zero — they can't damage anything until they "wake up". Standard PvP setting.
Network & Performance
Save intervals and chat behavior. These don't change gameplay much but they keep the server running smoothly. The autosave period in particular is something every admin should know — too frequent and you get save stutters, too infrequent and a crash costs you an hour.
How often the server writes the world save. Default 15 minutes is fine for most servers. Lower means less progress lost in a crash; higher means fewer save-stutter hitches on heavy bases. Don't go below 5 — it'll thrash your disk.
Lets all players hear each other in voice chat regardless of distance. Most servers leave this off because it turns into a chaotic mess instantly. Proximity voice (the default) is almost always the better call.
Restricts text chat to nearby players only. Niche — almost everyone leaves global text chat on because it's how players coordinate, trade, and ask questions.
Shows a server-wide message when anyone logs off. Helpful on small community servers, awful on PvP servers where you don't want raiders watching the player list like hawks.
Opposite of the leave notification. Community servers love this for the social vibe. PvP servers turn it off so raids stay stealthy.
Hard override that silences join notifications even if other settings would show them. Stealth-focused PvP setting.
About the ARK GameUserSettings.ini Generator
The GameUserSettings.ini file is where most ARK server admins spend 90% of their config time. It controls server identity (name, passwords, max players), the multipliers that define how your server feels (taming speed, harvest amount, XP rates), structure damage and decay, PvP rules, and the cryopod behavior that ARK: Survival Ascended introduced. The other config file, Game.ini, handles the deeper stuff like breeding multipliers and per-level stat scaling.
This generator turns every relevant GameUserSettings.ini setting into a slider, number field, or toggle with a plain-English explanation. You change what you care about, leave the rest at defaults, hit Copy, and paste the result into your server's GameUserSettings.ini file. Done.
Where does GameUserSettings.ini actually live?
For dedicated servers, look in:
\ShooterGame\Saved\Config\WindowsServer\GameUserSettings.ini(Windows servers)/ShooterGame/Saved/Config/LinuxServer/GameUserSettings.ini(Linux servers)- Nitrado, GPortal, and most managed hosts: in your control panel under "Configuration Files" or "Expert Settings"
The file gets auto-generated the first time the server starts, so if you don't see it, launch the server once and check again. Stop the server before editing — changes made while it's running get overwritten on shutdown.
Common ARK GameUserSettings.ini examples
- Boosted PvE — TamingSpeedMultiplier 10, HarvestAmountMultiplier 5, XPMultiplier 5, ServerPVE true. The classic "I have a job" combo.
- Casual PvP — TamingSpeedMultiplier 5, HarvestAmountMultiplier 3, XPMultiplier 3, StructureDamageMultiplier 1.5, PreventOfflinePvP true. PvP without the 4am wipe trauma.
- Hardcore PvP — Multipliers at 1× or 2×, no ORP, no transfer-in protection. Pure misery, the way some people like it.
- Breeder paradise — Everything bumped up, plus the breeding settings in Game.ini. This generator handles half the equation; Game.ini handles the other half.
What's the most-changed setting in GameUserSettings.ini?
Easy: TamingSpeedMultiplier. Almost nobody runs official 1× taming on an unofficial server. Right behind it are HarvestAmountMultiplier, XPMultiplier, DifficultyOffset paired with OverrideOfficialDifficulty (to get wild dino levels up to 150), and the cryopod fridge requirement toggle — the single biggest QoL complaint about ARK: Survival Ascended at launch.
Does this work on Nitrado, GPortal, and self-hosted servers?
Yes. The GameUserSettings.ini format is identical across every ARK server host — it's just a text file. Whether you're on Nitrado, GPortal, ASMR, a self-hosted Windows VPS, a Linux dedicated box, or running a non-dedicated session out of your single-player save folder, the same settings apply. The only difference is where you paste the result.
More ARK tools
- ARK Game.ini Generator — for breeding, XP, stats, structure decay
- Top Shared ARK Configs — see the most-shared configs from other admins
- All ARK generators