How To Get High Level Dinosaurs In ARK Survival Ascended

Whether you're a newcomer or a seasoned player in ARK Survival Ascended, one early challenge you'll likely face is the difficulty of locating high-level dinosaurs in the game. It can be quite a time-consuming task to wander around for extended periods, hoping to encounter a high-level dino, only to either be unsuccessful or lose it due to unfortunate circumstances.

Fortunately, there's a relatively straightforward way to acquire high-level dinosaurs in the game by adjusting just a couple of settings. In this guide, we will provide precise instructions on how to obtain high-level dinos in ARK Survival Ascended.

How To Get High-Level Dinosaurs in ARK Survival Ascended

As previously mentioned, when you load into ARK Survival Ascended, there will be tons of low-level dinos roaming around, and finding high-level ones is extremely tough, especially for new players. Thankfully, there are two ways to ensure that your island only spawns high-level dinos through the use of game settings or mods, so let's discuss both approaches below.

Using In-Game Settings to Increase Dino Levels

To get higher-level dino spawns using the game settings (for Unofficial or Solo games), the first thing you'll need to do is head to the main menu, and when creating a new game or Story ARK, open up the "Game Rules" tab. The first thing to do here is in the "Player" sub-tab, change the game difficulty at the bottom in the " Player " sub-tab by selecting "Choose Difficulty" and " Hard.

Then in the "World" sub-tab, scroll down and turn on the "Maximum Difficulty" toggle. And that's all there is to it. While you can change some of the other settings as you like, these two are the only required ones needed to essentially force the game to spawn in higher-level dinos.

It should be noted that this does increase the difficulty of the game (naturally), but in most cases, the dinos do not deal that much extra damage, and by the time you find dinos that do, you'll already be strong enough to handle them.

Using Mods to Increase Dino Levels

Now, if you don't fancy the idea of changing your in-game difficulty, you can use mods to change the level of your spawned-in dinos. More specifically, you can use the "Custom Dino Levels" mod created by kitzykatty, which has this feature built-in. To install it, head over to the mod menu, search for the mod name listed above, and install it.

The mod itself has a few options you can use, such as setting the wild dinos to the previous DLC Ragnarok levels, Equalized levels (dinosaurs of all levels will spawn more equally, including higher level ones), or High Levels where the dinos will spawn with high levels in the same frequency as they used to with dinos at lower levels (it inverts the spawning and level calculations).

So there you have it, two solid methods that you can start using immediately to ensure that you get high-level dinos spawning on the island of ARK Survival Ascended. Credit for both methods goes to YouTuber Teachers Game Too, so be sure to check out their full video detailing these methods in the video below.