ARK: Aquatica and A.S.E. Progress 7/18 #2

Posted on July 18th, 2025 09:15 PM EST

Good Evening,

As we continue to post updates and some outlook into the issues revolving around the Aquatica DLC as well as issues in ARK: Survival Evolved. Studio Sirens remains dedicated to providing updates daily as issues are being logged or addressed. We are maintaining visibility regarding bugs reported into the #「📩」support channel on the Official ARK: Aquatica Discord[discord.gg].

Our top priority remains to fix an issue with the game engine on the live version of ARK: Survival Evolved (360.1) ; proving to be complex, a solution continues to be developed in order to address mods from instantly crashing and we look forward to posting an update when possible. Once this specific issue is addressed, only then will the team be able to chase down specific mods with issues that may require an update with the updated devkit.

We are looking into issues that relate to shader issues built into the engine
We have been able to identify content that was pushed to the base game that may be conflicting with mods

To continue to remind everyone of the current solution, the team was able to push a pre-aquatica release version of A.S.E. This allowed people to return and play a version of the game before the launch of ARK: Aquatica and progress has and will continue to be made to address lingering issues.

The branch is called "preaquatica". To navigate to the branch:

Right Click ARK: Survival Evolved in your Steam Library
Click Properties
Betas
Beta participation
Opt into "preaquatica" branch

The branch is available for clients and dedicated servers now.

Scope of updates for the ARK: Aquatica DLC

Low performance/FPS fixes continue to be in progress, we hope to be able to post more progress into the weekend.

Fixing broadcast issues for pushing server updates, this way updates/server downtime can be announced in-game to give prior notification to players in-game.
Dino taming issues related to:
- Mantis Shrimp
- Kathreptis
Boss combat music issues
Pygocentrus boss issue, we have logged instances where eliminating the boss from a far distance can put users out of range for rewards, as some users obtained engrams as rewards and some have not.
Other boss issues pertaining to boss engram rewards
Continuing to search for mesh holes/gaps in the level
Continuing to search for killboxes and instadeath locations.

Planned Developer Stream:

A member of the Studio Sirens Development team will be doing a live stream

The focus of this stream would be to showcase the fixes made in the game client
The stream will go live at 2:00 PM PST, 07/21 Monday
Stream link: https://twitch.tv/Z_Swell

For All ARK: Survival Evolved MOD Creators:

This is an outreach for all ARK: Survival Evolved Mod creators. We would love to get in touch with you all as we are actively tracking the mods that will need updates as a community. Please contact the team via the ticket system in the #「📩」support channel on the Official ARK Aquatica Discord[discord.gg].

Look forward to more updates soon, we are dedicated to making sure that fixes continue to come.

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