ARK: Survival
Taming Time & Levels
Server multipliers change taming more than anything else you can configure, and they change it in two directions at once: how long it takes, and what level the creature ends up. This works out both from the numbers your server is actually running.
How this is calculated
Taming time divides by your TamingSpeedMultiplier — double the multiplier, half the wait. The level side is separate and often misunderstood: ARK adds bonus levels equal to half the creature's level, scaled by how much taming effectiveness survived the process. A level 150 creature tamed at full effectiveness gains seventy-five levels and arrives at 225. Lose a quarter of your effectiveness and you lose a quarter of those bonus levels.
The arithmetic
- taming minutes = base minutes ÷ TamingSpeedMultiplier
- bonus levels = floor(creature level × 0.5 × effectiveness)
- final level = creature level + bonus levels
What people get wrong
We deliberately ask you for the base taming time rather than holding a creature database. There are hundreds of tameable creatures, each with its own food values and torpor rates, and those change with updates — a table we could not keep correct would give confidently wrong answers for every creature in it. Look the base figure up for your dino, then this tells you what your server does to it. Note also that effectiveness falls as the creature eats, so the figure to enter is what it will be at the end, not what it starts at.