Mod:Modding/Weapons and Items

Adding Items and Weapons

Adding Items Videos

TBA

How to Add Weapons

What you Need

• A Model
• Texture(s)
• Time

Getting a Model can be difficult, or easy, depending on what you want to add. There are several places to get free models, but provided they don't fit what you want you'll have to get resourceful.

Blender can be a wonderful tool to do this with, as it already supports FBX format, but more on that later. There is however a steep learning curve to Blender, but once you get the basics down, everything should be fine. And whatever model you decide to make, is only limited in quality by one's own overall artistic capabilities.

Texturing your object can be difficult if anything, There are a lot of Royalty free textures to use, but be sure they're royalty-free, or create your own. You can then load these textures into Ark Dev Kit, via import, more on that later though. The preferred format for textures is TGA, however, PNGs will also work fine but do have a preview bug in the editor that is not present in-game.

Once you have all your assets in the kit, you need several blueprints you need:

• PrimalItemBP - This is your item, here you plug in your icon, change values like weight and stack size, determine what you need to craft it, and add functionality.
• Engram Entry - This is the engram, or blueprint the player learns. Here you determine the level you can unlock, the number of points to unlock, if you can craft it in your inventory, and the prerequisites. If your item is not crafted(eg. spoils from another item, generated passively by a creature, harvested from resource nodes) you do not need an engram entry.

For weapons/tools:

• Weapon_BP - This is the weapon once it has been equipped. Here you can determine things like damage, mesh, animations, the time between attacks, projectiles, and damage type.
• DamageType - This determines what type of damage your weapon does, if it applies torpor if it can damage stone structures, if it lights you on fire(applies a buff) If it penetrates armor, what resources it harvests if it does extra damage to X creature. Some aspects(mostly harvesting rates and what structures can be damaged) are mostly determined by the parent class. So if you want a damage type that damages metal, you want to make a child of arthropluras damage type rather than copy it.

Remember to link all these together so they actually use the new damage type you've made or engram ect.

Time is probably the most precious thing we have, it is finite and needs to be used wisely and well. If you're going to make a Weapon or Item for a game like Ark, you're going to need to have a decent bit of spare time, and PC resources. You will spend a lot of time, perfecting your mod, balancing it, and making it something people want to play with in their game. You will spend a lot of time, loading the dev environment again and again, to test the mode after you update or change something, even a texture, or animation.