How To Turn Off Clouds & Fog In ARK Survival Ascended

As players venture into ARK Survival Ascended for the first time, performance worries loom large. While tackling the root performance issues may be out of our hands, there's good news – specific settings, like those tied to fog and clouds, can be tweaked to deliver a substantial boost in FPS during your gaming sessions.

Delving into these settings can be a tad perplexing, especially if you're not well-acquainted with the in-depth settings in the game. Fear not, though, as we've got you covered with detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to disable and turn off the cloud and fog effects in ARK Survival Ascended.

How To Disable Clouds and Fog in ARK Survival Ascended

The first thing you might notice is that there are no "clouds" and "fog" options in the Video settings in the game's menu. This is because the option to turn these features off lies in the game's console command menu. Disabling each of these features requires a specific command, so let's take a look at each of them below:

Disabling Clouds Command in ARK Survival Ascended

The first step in turning off the clouds in the game is to open the console with "~" and enter "r.VolumetricCloud 0". This will remove all clouds from the sky and almost immediately free up a couple of frames. You can re-enable clouds by going through the same steps but using "r.VolumetricCloud 1" instead. 

Removing the clouds might not look as good, but if your focus is on performance rather than getting beautiful photo mode screenshots, it's well worth just removing them for your game sessions.

Disabling Fog Command in ARK Survival Ascended

Disabling the fog in ASA works in the same way as it does with the clouds, except now you'll use the "r.VolumetricFog 0" command instead. This will give you some performance back, but not as much as with clouds, since fog is only going to impact your performance when it's loaded in, and that's not all the time, whereas clouds are always being rendered.

In our opinion and many others, ARK Survival Ascended still looks drop-dead gorgeous regardless of the absence of fog and clouds, so you won't miss them too much unless you want to see the game in all its glory. And if you're willing to lose a couple of frames here and there for the aesthetic, then by all means. Still, if you're barely scraping 30 FPS, it's worth omitting these visual features for the best ARK Survival Ascended experience you deserve.