Ark: Survival Ascended is a rereleased version of the original Ark: Survival Evolved, and it came with quite a few changes that most players may not be aware of. Among these is the way how metal is gathered using either tools or tamed dinosaurs. With that said, here’s a brief rundown on things you should keep in mind and how to maximize your metal mining gains.
All credits go to Doth on YouTube for doing the math and testing.
How To Maximize Metal Farming | New Metal Nodes
If you are a veteran coming in from the previous version of the game, you may be wondering why metal nodes do not give as much resources as they used to.
According to Doth, this is because these have been reworked in a way that requires you to have more melee damage in order to get more metal out of them.
By testing several Ankylosauruses that have varying stats and buffs, as well as “good” and “bad” nodes (which are visually similar), it was revealed that the average amount of metal dropped is equivalent to around 30% of the damage dealt to the node.
The good nodes will drop around an average of 270 metal, while the bad ones will only give you about up to 100 each, if not much less.
It was also noted that the amount of hits needed to break the node does not matter, as you will barely, if ever, receive more metal if it takes you more than one to destroy it.
With this information, we now know that you will need around 900 damage to easily destroy metal nodes and still get the maximum amount of average drops from them.
Reaching The Ideal Amount Of Damage
In order to reach the sweet spot of 900 damage, you’ll need to first find and tame an ankylosaurus for mining.
These dinosaurs have a base melee damage of 50, which means you’ll need to level them up until they have around 1042% Melee Damage.
Next, you’ll need to get 100% imprint on it as well as get another ankylosaurus of the opposite sex. This will get you both the max imprint and mate boost bonuses, boosting your damage up to around 900.
This is an incredibly hard thing to achieve, however, as the mate boost will require a lot of work to actually get and move around with, ideally with a group of other well-coordinated players.
Because of this, it may be more practical to simply try and get an Ankylosaurus to 1385% Melee Damage in addition to the max imprint bonus. This will get you to 900 damage as well, though it will require some mutations.
Best Spots To Farm Metal
Although most of the metal spawns in Ascended are similar to those of the original version of the game, they did nerf some of the good spots for metal farming.
Specifically, the snowy area to the northwestern corner of the map have been heavily nerfed to the point where it may not be worth going there at all for rich metal deposits.
The gold dots in the map below indicate rich metal spots and the location east of the volcano is clearly the best spot to mine metal, while the surrounding mountains are pretty okay as well.
And that’s pretty much all you need to know about farming metal and maximizing your mining gains in the new version of ARK. Some of these changes are pretty subtle, but passionate players have done extensive testing to figure out what’s going on in the game!
ALSO READ: Ark Survival Ascended: Resource Guide & Locations | 2023
