The Survival of the Fittest

See also: Survival of the Fittest

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Standalone game mode for ARK with new battle arena style gameplay

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DLC

Content Type

Game

Price (USD)

$19.99

Server map name

TheIsland_SOTF

Release Dates

Dec 23, 2022

Jan 31, 2023

Unavailable

Spotlight

The Survival of the Fittest is a Battle Royale spin-off of ARK: Survival Evolved. The game is played in rounds and at much faster pace. Its goal is to become the last man standing by killing all other competitors on the island.

Overview

The Survival of the Fittest is played on several servers configured with special settings. The game takes place in an altered ARK at an accelerated pace, with most of the features deactivated to allow for a quicker game. For game balance, stats have been altered as tamed dinosaurs are no longer powerful, and as crafting does not function in this mode, most of the items found are found scattered across in supply drops found around the ARK. Almost like in the Hardcore mode, players cannot respawn on death or fast travel, but if they have any surviving tamed dino when they die as a survivor, the game is not over yet as they will take direct control; they lose if all the survivor and tamed dinosaurs in the tribe are killed/knocked down. Thereafter, they can still respawn as a spectator and go around and watch the game.

The absence of Specimen Implants means survivors cannot open their inventory as per usual, restricting them to up to eight items at a time. Any armor found in supply drops is equipped automatically, and disappears once the durability reaches zero.

The environment consists of The Island with slight modifications. At the start of every game, all players start off in a house on a Quetzal that slowly flies in one direction, until they are (auto-)ejected to fly in a specific direction with a temporary Sinomacrops (which despawns after landing). The area in which the players may move is restricted by barriers and gets smaller as time progresses (every three minutes), eventually forcing confrontation between players. Standing outside the zone will severely damage the health akin to implant instability of Extinction, both survivors and tamed dinos, until they get killed by it.

Note that Tek items do not spawn in this game mode, including those that do not require any boss Tekgrams. However, Tek creatures will still *rarely* spawn among their regular organic counterpart.

Game Modes

Currently the servers have the following game modes:

Free for All (one player tribes)
Duos
4 player tribes

Data Maps

Spawn Map

Changes to Vanilla

Most game mechanics are different compared to the vanilla game to compensate for the short duration of one round.

Main Features

All tribes have a small taming cap of 20 regardless of the number of survivors inside.
All survivors no longer have their implants that permit inventory access; they are limited to a total of eight inventory slots minus the extra item and armor slots which are automatically equipped.
Gravity damage is non-existent.
Each survivor starts off with one Blood Pack as shown in the HUD, with more obtained by slaying other survivors.
Survivors have no levels, which makes "utilizing the dinos to survive" a higher priority, especially with the absence of crafting.
- Stats cannot be viewed aside from Health and Stamina.
- Stats like Food, Water and Torpidity don't exist either, eliminating the need to gather food and water.
Ability to switch to commander mode, displacing your camera into an "RTS" state similar to Exo-Mek as long as you're controlling your survivor or a creature.
Ability to temporarily possess a tamed dinosaur belonging to your tribe, allowing manual control of them without the risk of death when mounting on them as long as you are currently controlling a survivor.
Caves are all sealed off, or partially blocked off to the entry.

Changes from the old Survival of the Fittest

Crafting is non-existent, most of the items are obtained through supply crates only. Structures no longer exist in this mode either, so players will have to utilize the surroundings and dinosaurs to their full usage.
- Exception being ammo for weapons that require it, for which resources can similarly only be obtained from supply drops.
All survivors no longer start at a center, but rather in a housing above the Quetzal's Saddle Platform.
Death of a survivor no longer counts as elimination. As long as the player still has other player's survivors and tamed dinos alive inside the tribe, they are still counted as in-game. They can also take possession of a tamed dino upon death (refer to Dinosaur section). Only when all of the player's survivors and dinos are wiped out in a tribe does it count as a game over.
The defeat of a tribe is now mentioned in the screen with a red box outside the ARK's walls in red as opposed to its near transparent screen.
Evolution Events are removed from the game mode.
Barrier no longer shrinks to the center, but to a random spot instead. Moreover, tamed dinosaurs lose health when outside the barrier and will be considered "knocked out as death" once the health reaches zero.

Harvesting

Killing dinosaurs or survivors earns points, which can be redeemed in form of summoning boss creatures or taming a downed dino. Specific species will give more points when killed.
Survivors can kill a tamed dinosaur with the circular menu (for dino points or freeing a tame slot). This actually kills the dino rather than downing it.

Dinosaurs

Diplodocus can now attack directly much like the ones spawned from the Genesis mission Survive the ARK.
Downed tamed dinosaurs can be stolen by other survivors or reclaimed, with points, as long as they were not killed while downed.
Once the original Survivor gets killed, they can take control of a tamed dinosaur belonging to their tribe.
Dino Points can be used to restore the health of an injured dino over time (Has a pricey cost per heal over time), but with a cooldown upon use.

Taming

Tamable dinos are no longer tamed using tranquilizing or passive taming. Knock them out by getting their health down to zero and tame with points. If a saddle exists, the dinosaur will wear it immediately upon being tamed.
- Note that only Survivor can tame them. Players with dead survivors possessing a dino cannot do it.
All dinosaurs have the starting stats of a level 1 creature based on species (starting off at Tier 0), but can be ranked up on tiers (at max of Tier 3, equivalent to that of level 20 dino) either through killing creatures/survivors or redeeming Dino Points.

Boss Creatures

Bosses appear randomly on the map in terminals to be summoned. Summoning them costs 400 Dino Tokens. They all start off as Tier 3, the highest tier available to level up. Only one of each type exists per round.
The boss creatures in this mode are slightly than the original versions and weaker. Moreover, they don't possess the majority of their natural abilities (i.e: flight, Araneo spawns).
Much like Titans from Extinction, their location will be marked prior to being tamed. A large announcement will be made whenever someone tames a boss creature, with the boss's name displayed.
Boss creatures cannot be controlled by a deceased survivor, even if it's the only creature left in the tribe.
They do not heal over time like other creatures.

Creatures

These dinosaurs exist in this mode:

Utility (only for a specific purpose)

Wild Spawns

Summon Terminals

These creatures can only appear once per match in a summon node that has a similar appearance to Charge Node, minus the charge light. Summoning/capturing them requires 400 Dino Points.

Untameable Spawns

These creature immediately die upon reaching 0 × Health:

Lootdrops

The following loot is randomly found in drops

Green

Blue

Purple

Red

Current Patchnotes - 470.1

Released - January 23th, 2023 -Major Version

Fixes
- Fixed a bug where players weren't dropping their inventory cache
- Fixed a bug where Dinos were not spawning from the Dino Crates
- Fixed a bug where players had to re-equip the paint brush to see dye
- Fixed a bug where Tapping Ping with gamepad would always show the wheel, interfering with the smart ping system
- Fixed a bug where your camera could get stuck during the Quetz phase when using gamepad
- Fixed some incorrect tooltips on gamepad
Quality of Life
- Parachute has now moved to the same keybinding as Healing. When a player is in a fall-state, the game will dynamically adjust the hotkey from healing to releasing the parachute (as you can't heal when in the fallstate anyway). This change also allows us to display how many parachutes a person has, when in the fall state.
- Added Magmasaur control tooltips
- Further iteration on Gamepad support
- Supply Crates now fall 30% faster

Notes

Several dinos that originally did not exist in the original SotF were added in the update.
- This includes the latest addition to ARK, the Carcharodontosaurus, and the exclusive Lost Island creature, the Amargasaurus.
- While Sinomacrops was shown, it only acts as a gliding tool for the survivors to reach a specific point of the ARK before vanishing into thin air. Similarly, Quetzal exists as a carrier to hold all the survivors for them to eject into points of interest within the ARK but can also be found in the wild and cannot be tamed.

External links

Steam Discussions

Images

Keyart

References

v t e Official DLCs
Here are only the official DLCs listed. For various mods, see Mods.
Base Game Map	The Island
Expansion Packs	Scorched Earth • Aberration • Extinction • Genesis: Part 1 • Genesis: Part 2
Expansion Maps	The Center • Ragnarok • Valguero • Crystal Isles • Lost Island • Fjordur
Total Conversions	Primal Survival • Primitive Plus • Survival of the Fittest

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The Survival of the Fittest

Contents

Overview

Game Modes

Data Maps