How to play ARK: Survival Evolved with friends

ARK: Survival Evolved is a unique and amazingly addictive survival game. With breathtaking landscapes, consistent content and countless paleontological wonders, players will certainly never get bored while playing this game.

Like many other video games, ARK: Survival Evolved offers a co-op feature, allowing gamers to cooperate with friends to improve their chances of survival in a harsh world, full of dangers lurking. .

In this article, let's learn how to play ARK: Survival Evolved with friends to survive and become the most powerful, effective team.

How to play ARK: Survival Evolved with friends

Join the server

The first way to start playing ARK: Survival Evolved with friends is similar to most other server-based survival games.

1. In the main menu, tap the Join Ark option .
2. Change the filter to match how people want to play the game.
3. Select a server to play and press the Join button to join.

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After you click Join Ark on the main menu, a server browser will open. Like most games, each server has its own name, description, map, player count, ping, server time, mode, and version. Gamers can also see if the server is whitelisted or if it uses anti-cheat.

This is the process that players need to follow to join public servers on both console and PC. ARK: Survival Evolved has many official servers run by developers, ensuring a level of quality and reliability. There are also public servers hosted by individual players.

Server hosting

ARK: Survival Evolved allows players to host their own servers right from the main menu. There are 2 options, so let's look at the differences between them and which one to choose.

Non-Dedicated Session

In the main menu, select Host/Local > Host a Non-Dedicated Session . Non-Dedicated Session is a unique version of the game in which players and friends can play against each other, and be warned about something called 'tether'.

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This tether forces all players playing to be a minimum distance from the server host (who created the Non-Dedicated Session). If a player tries to move further away from the host server, they will be brought back to that host's location.

On PC, this tether is very spacious and allows quite a bit of freedom of movement, but on consoles this distance is quite strict and requires players to be quite close to each other.

Run Dedicated Server

Running a Dedicated Server is a process that requires dedicated hardware that is used to run a game server using resources such as RAM and processing power. Unfortunately, this often requires a separate device and involves many separate processes such as port forwarding, file management, etc.

This is a rather complicated process so it is not chosen by many, instead using a third-party service to set up, manage and operate the server on its own hardware.

However, the Non-Dedicated Session available in ARK: Survival Evolved is enough to meet the need to play co-op with other gamers to make survival in the game easier.

David Pac

Update 15 June 2022