ARK: Survival Ascended GameUserSettings.ini generator

ARK splits its settings across two files with overlapping names, and putting a setting in the wrong one is the most common reason a change appears to do nothing.

Start from a preset

Visual Settings

ini Format
Identity

Name shown in the server browser.

Gameplay

Disables player-versus-player damage server-wide.

Experience rate.

Taming speed. Higher is faster — one of the two settings every private server changes.

Resources per harvest action. The other one.

Scales wild creature levels. Works with OverrideOfficialDifficulty, which is the setting that actually raises the level cap.

Sets the real difficulty value. 5 gives max wild level 150; this is the one to change, not DifficultyOffset alone.

Third-person camera.

Shows players their own coordinates on the map.

Displays a crosshair.

World

Overall day length.

Night length specifically. Most servers shorten nights rather than whole days.

How much damage structures resist. Higher means tougher buildings.

Allows building through terrain clipping. Almost universally enabled on private servers.

Structure limit per area. This is the practical cap on how heavy a server can get — raising it is how servers end up running out of memory.

Players & Access

Slot limit. ARK memory grows with what tribes build far more than with slots.

Join password. Blank means public.

Required for admin commands. Change it — the default is the first thing anyone tries.

Seconds before an idle player is kicked.

RCON & Query

Remote console access.

RCON port. Keep it off the public internet.

GameUserSettings.ini

[ServerSettings]
SessionName=Spawnly ARK SA
MaxPlayers=70
ServerPassword=
ServerAdminPassword=changeme123
ServerPVE=False
XPMultiplier=3
TamingSpeedMultiplier=10
HarvestAmountMultiplier=3
DifficultyOffset=1
OverrideOfficialDifficulty=5
AllowThirdPersonPlayer=True
ShowMapPlayerLocation=True
ServerCrosshair=True
DayCycleSpeedScale=1
NightTimeSpeedScale=1
StructureResistanceMultiplier=1
bDisableStructurePlacementCollision=True
TheMaxStructuresInRange=10500
KickIdlePlayersPeriod=3600
RCONEnabled=False
RCONPort=27020

How GameUserSettings.ini syntax works

GameUserSettings.ini uses sectioned INI format, and the section header matters: a setting under the wrong header is silently ignored. Booleans are True and False with capitals. Multipliers are floating point — write 2.0 rather than 2, because some values are parsed strictly enough that an integer is discarded.

The mistake that costs people hours

Some settings only work in Game.ini, not GameUserSettings.ini, and the game will not tell you which is which. If a rate change has no effect and the syntax looks right, the setting is probably in the wrong file. Ascended also differs from Survival Evolved here, so a configuration copied from an older server is not a safe starting point.

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