How to Spawn Dinos on Your ARK: Survival Evolved Server

This guide will show you how to use admin commands on your ARK: Survival Evolved server to spawn in Dinos and creatures. You will need to have admin privileges on your server, and also know how to use the admin commands.

We have a guide on both these subjects located here: How to Use the Admin Console on your ARK: Survival Evolved Server

Commands to Spawn Dinos

The game has two basic commands for spawning in creatures. The two main commands are Summon and SpawnDino.

• The Summon command just creates the dino exactly where you're standing (for a split second, you will be overlapping), then it pops out. The dino level is random, and if it's a normally hostile dino, it's going to instantly attack you! There's also a related command, called SummonTamed that spawns in a dino fully tamed, which is safer.

• SpawnDino gives you a lot more control over how you spawn the creature into the game, including setting a specific level, and the distance and relative location to your character.

There are other summoning commands as well. Some of which are very similar (they work almost exactly the same), while some have some weird twists. These commands include: SDF, SpawnActor, SummonActorSpread, GMSummon. The ARK: Survival Evolved Wiki has more information on these other specialized spawn commands.

There are other admin commands that will might be super useful to avoid being eaten by what you just spawned! They're listed in a separate section at the end of this guide.

How to Find Dinos IDs for Spawning

To use the spawn commands properly, you need to have specific IDs for each dino or creature. The best source of the ID labels required for the spawn commands is the wiki for ARK: Survival Evolved, at Gamepedia.

This usually has the most up to date information on the creatures, and it also has a ton of other useful information about the game. It's really worth checking out in general!

https://ark.gamepedia.com/Creature_IDs

This page contains information about using both the spawn commands, and a large table of information about the various dinos labels that are required to tell the game which creature you want to spawn.

There are two major columns the table, for "Entity ID", and "Blueprint Path". Some spawn commands use one or the other.

• Entity IDs are shorter, with words and letters separated by underscores. The Entity ID is used for the Summon command.

• The Blueprint Path is an actual file path to where the dino information is stored in the game files. It's much much longer, enclosed by quotes, and has slashes in it. The Blueprint Path is used by the SpawnDino command.

When using either one, the uppercase letters matter, and they should be copied exactly as is.

Using the Admin Commands

• The commands require "Admincheat" (or just "Cheat") in front of them.

• The uppercase letters aren't required at all, and the commands can be typed in all lowercase. "Admincheat Summon" works the same as "adminchat summon".

• You can repeat previously used commands in the admin console. When you open the admin console, hitting "up" arrow on your keyboard opens a history of previously used commands. Press up or down to move through the list, and then "enter" to instantly repeat the command.

The "Summon" Command

• This command only uses only one argument, the creature's "Entity ID".

Examples:

Admincheat Summon (EntityID)

Admincheat Summon Dodo_Character_BP_C

Admincheat Summon Bigfoot_Character_BP_C

The "SummonTamed" Command

This works exactly like the "Summon" command above, but the dino will be automatically tamed when it appears! Woot!

The "SpawnDino" Command

This command is a little more complicated then the Summon command, and has five different arguments:

• "Blueprint Path"

• Spawn Distance

• Y-offset

• Z-offset

• Dino Level

They should be separated by spaces. If you don't want to set any of the last 4 arguments, just replace them with zeroes.

These arguments are explained below.

• Blueprint Path The label that determines which creature is summoned. Needs to be enclosed in quotes, and uppercase letters matter.

• Spawn Distance How far away from your character the dino appears. This is relative to where your mouse view is aimed, so look above the ground. If you're looking down into the ground that's where the dino will spawn, which would be bad. If it's not set to a pretty high number, the dino will appear directly on top of your character. A value of "500" is only roughly about 2 foundations away, for example (so if you're spawning in a T-Rex, that's way too close!).

The dodo in the screenshot below was spawned with a spawn distance of "2000" as an example (the player is floating in midair with the "Fly" command).

• Y-Offset Horizontal position left or right of your character's view. Positive numbers are right, negative numbers are left.

The screenshot below has the same "2000" spawn distance, and a Y-offset value of "1000" (which moved it to the right).

• Z-Offset Vertical spawn position relative to your character's view. Positive numbers are higher, negative numbers are lower.

• Dino Level The exact level you want the dino Spawned at. The stats the creature ends up with will be set by random distribution of it's "wild" levels each time a creature is spawned.

An example of this put together:

Admincheat SpawnDino "Blueprint'/Game/PrimalEarth/Dinos/Bigfoot/Bigfoot_Character_BP.Bigfoot_Character_BP'" 500 0 0 120

This example would spawn in a level 120 Gigantopithecus (Bigfoot)

Other Useful Admin Commands

If a dino is normally hostile, it will be spawned in hostile and will attack! So, some of the following other admin commands might be useful to prevent getting eaten by the things you spawned!

Like most admin commands, you need to precede these with "Admincheat". It can also be shortened to "Cheat". The upper case letters aren't required either, so all lowercase works fine too.

• EnemyInvisible True

Admincheat EnemyInvisible True

Admincheat EnemyInvisible False

Setting this to "True" make you invisible to all dinos. They will completely ignore you, even if you attack them. They will move around normally, and might attack other dinos (meaning they can wander away). Use Admincheat EnemyInvisible false to turn it off.

• Fly

Admincheat Fly

Admincheat Walk

Turns on flight, allowing you to rise into the air when you press SPACE, and lower when you press C. Hostile dinos are much easier to deal with when you're floating 100 feet above the ground! You turn it off by using the command Admincheat walk (don't do that while floating 100 feet up).

• God

Admincheat God

Dinos can't damage you. They will still try to attack you though, which can be sometimes be pretty annoying (blocks your vision, camera shake, etc). While they're busy attacking you, it does keep them from wandering off though! It also makes aiming some of the other admin commands very easy since the hostile dino will be right in your face trying to eat you. Type Admintcheat God again to turn it off.

• PlayersOnly

Admincheat Playersonly

Turns off the AI for dinos. They will still have idle animations, but they won't move or attack. Players are unaffected by this command. Useful for keeping dinos from wandering off. NOTE: When the AI for the dinos is disabled, it may prevent some admin commands from working correctly (like "DoTame" and "ForceTame"). ALSO: When you turn off the creature AI, you may see some strange glitches like fish and sea creatures floating in the air. It's just one of those wacky bugs. These glitches end when you turn the AI back on. Repeat Admincheat PlayersOnly again to turn the effect off.

• DoTame

Admincheat DoTame

This command automatically tames whatever creature your viewpoint crosshairs are targeted on. According to the Wiki, If you use this command while mounted on another dino, it may crash the game/server. This command can be extremely hard to target dinos with if you have aiming crosshairs disabled (as is on most servers). Using the God admin command and letting a hostile dino attack you is one easy way to get around this (it will literally be in your face trying to eat you, making targeting very very easy).

• ForceTame

Admincheat ForceTame

This command also automatically tames whatever creature is under your veiwpoint crosshairs. Dinos tamed this way can be ridden even without a saddle. If you cryopod the dino, and then deploy the cryopod, it will lose that saddle effect. This command may also crash game/server if it's used while you're mounted on another dino. Same targeting issues apply to this command as well (see "DoTame" above)

• ForceTameAOE (radius)

Admincheat ForceTameAOE 2000

This automatically tames dinos within a certain radius. It doesn't have any of the finicky targeting issues as the regular "ForceTame" command. See the screenshots above in the "SpawnDino" command for an idea of how far the radius will be.