A dedicated ARK server gives your tribe a persistent world with full control over rates, mods and rules — for ARK: Survival Ascended (ASA) and Survival Evolved (ASE). Here is how to set one up and dial in the settings.
The settings most groups change first (in GameUserSettings.ini, editable from the panel):
ASA uses CurseForge mods (added by mod ID); ASE uses the Steam Workshop. Running several maps? A cluster lets players transfer characters and dinos between them — fully supported on GGameHost.
The ASA dedicated server is a 64-bit Windows executable, and the wiki states that ASA does not support Linux natively. Two runtimes have to be present on the machine before the server will run: the Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable (x64) and the June 2010 DirectX End-User Runtimes.
The official ARK community wiki lists a fixed set of ports for an ARK: Survival Ascended dedicated server. These ports have to be open on both the router and the host firewall.
| Port | Protocol | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 7777 | UDP | Game port; players connect here |
| 7778 | UDP | Peer port, always game port + 1 |
| 27015 | UDP | Query port, used for server browser listings |
| 27020 | TCP | RCON, optional remote console |
RCONEnabled and RCONPort sit in the [ServerSettings] section of GameUserSettings.ini, and RCONPort defaults to 27020. For several maps on one machine, the wiki assigns each instance its own set of ports: 7777/7778/27015/27020 for the first, 7779/7780/27016/27021 for the second, and so on.
Crossplay on an unofficial server is controlled by a single launch argument, -ServerPlatform=. The documented values are PC for Steam, WINGDK for the Microsoft Store, XSX for Xbox, PS5 for PlayStation 5, and ALL for crossplay between PC and all consoles. The wiki's own examples are -ServerPlatform=PC and -ServerPlatform=PC+XSX+PS5.
The -crossplay flag carried over from ARK: Survival Evolved is marked obsolete; use -ServerPlatform instead.
Cross-ARK transfers between your own maps need two more launch arguments: -clusterid=, which takes the same cluster name on every server in the group, and -ClusterDirOverride=, which points them all at one shared storage location.
To limit what is allowed to move between maps, use PreventDownloadSurvivors, PreventDownloadItems, and PreventDownloadDinos, plus the matching PreventUpload settings.