Running an ARK cluster without losing everyone’s dinos

An ARK cluster is several map servers that share player data, so a survivor can take their character, tames and items from The Island to Ragnarok and back. When it works it is the best thing about ARK. When it does not, people lose dinos, and they do not forgive that.

The failures are predictable. Here they are in the order they happen.

The parts that make a cluster

Three things have to line up on every server in the cluster:

1. A shared ClusterId — an arbitrary string, identical on every server. This is what makes them one cluster rather than several unrelated servers.
2. A shared cluster directory — where transferred characters and items sit while in transit. On our ARK plans this is provisioned automatically when you add servers to the same cluster.
3. Consistent transfer settings — the NoTransferFromFiltering, PreventDownloadSurvivors, PreventDownloadItems and PreventDownloadDinos flags.

Get all three right and transfers just work. Get any one wrong and they fail in ways that look unrelated to the cause.

Failure 1: mismatched transfer flags

The most common. If PreventDownloadDinos is true on the destination map but false on the origin, a player can upload a dino and then not download it. The dino is not lost — it is sitting in the cluster directory — but it is inaccessible, and the player will assume it is gone.

Fix: set these four flags identically across every server, then treat them as cluster-wide settings rather than per-map ones. If you want one map to be transfer-locked, do it deliberately and tell your players.

Failure 2: maps in different regions

This one is architectural. If The Island is in Frankfurt and Ragnarok is in Dallas, the cluster directory has to be shared across the Atlantic. Transfers become slow, and under load they can time out mid-write — which is exactly when data goes missing.

Keep a cluster in one region. All of it. If your community is split across continents, run two clusters rather than one stretched one; the transfer boundary is less annoying than the data loss.

Failure 3: mod mismatch between maps

If one map has a mod that adds a creature or item and another does not, transferring that creature to the map without the mod produces either a silent deletion or a crash on load.

Fix: the mod list should be identical on every server in the cluster. Same mods, same versions, same order. On our plans you can apply one Workshop collection across the whole cluster in a single action rather than per-server, which removes the chance of drift.

Failure 4: the upload timeout

ARK expires uploaded data after a period set by TributeCharacterExpirationSeconds and its siblings. Defaults vary and are shorter than people expect. A player who uploads a dino, logs off for a week and comes back may find it gone — working as configured.

Fix: if your cluster is for a community that plays irregularly, raise these substantially or set them to expire never. There is no real cost to keeping the data.

Setting one up

On our plans:

1. Create your first map server as normal.
2. Create the second, and in the panel assign it to the same cluster.
3. The cluster ID and shared directory are configured for you.
4. Set your transfer flags and mod collection at the cluster level.
5. Restart both and test a transfer with a throwaway character before announcing it.

That last step is worth doing every time you change cluster settings. A two-minute test with a fresh survivor is much cheaper than finding out from a player who just lost a bred giga.

Evolved or Ascended?

Both cluster the same way and both are supported. Survival Evolved still has the deeper mod ecosystem; Ascended looks far better and needs considerably more memory — plan for 16 GB per map rather than 8.

You cannot cluster across the two. They are separate games with incompatible save data, regardless of how similar the configuration looks.

Backups, specifically for clusters

A normal ARK backup captures the map save and player profiles. For a cluster you also need the cluster directory, because that is where in-transit characters and dinos live.

Ours includes it. If you are running elsewhere, check — it is a common omission, and it is precisely the data that is hardest to explain the loss of.