Ark mutation guide Taming & Combining

Taming For Stats

With a line in mind, taming is a completley different game. If not stated before, a line (or bloodline) is what we'll call your dinos that are specifically and meticulously bred for stats. To start a line, you'll want to get some dinos that have high base points in a couple of desirable stats. Lets say you are going for spinos, you are looking for health and mele. If it's a soaker, you'll only be looking for health and if its a stamina intensive tame like a mana, go for stamina as well. So, you have 1-3 stats in mind, go tame high levels of that type until you find one with high stats. 45+ points is what I personally would consider acceptable to start a line. Do not get too attached to getting some crazy stat like 50+ because its incredibly rare even with mods such as super spyglass that allow you to check pretame points and decide weather you want to tame it at all. 25-30 points pretame sets you up nicely for getting 45+ post tame but you can only see this if you have the superspyglass or binocular mod. I would not reccomend taming anything under 135 since it's not just 15 points you're missing out on, when accounting for taming effectiveness, the difference between a 201 and 224 is quite big when you're looking for stats. Here is a tip when looking for a health stat on a vanilla server, you can use a magnafying glass to check the health stat pretame. It's time to get taming for stats, good luck! Below is an example of 10 random high level spinos you'd tame with an explanation below if any part is confusing.

10 Wild Tamed Spino Stats and Uses in Breeding

Wild Spinos stats
	Level	Gender	Health	Stamina	Food	Oxygen	Weight	Speed	Mele	Name
Spino 1	224	Male	31	37	42	33	35	18	28	M 0/0
Spino 2	224	Male	30	21	35	40	29	37	32	-
Spino 3	201	Female	28	26	30	27	25	32	33	F 0/0
Spino 4	209	Male	28	15	30	41	31	14	50	M 50M
Spino 5	224	Female	38	33	31	30	23	32	37	F 0/0
Spino 6	209	Female	27	29	14	22	43	33	41	F 0/0
Spino 7	224	Male	22	41	38	28	33	19	43	-
Spino 8	217	Male	26	32	29	24	43	40	23	-
Spino 9	224	Female	45	32	38	31	10	35	34	F 45H
Spino 10	217	Female	10	29	42	24	34	43	35	F 0/0

Chart Explanation

There you can visually see the stats, level, gender, and use for each wild dino you tamed. You need to pick out dinos with the highest mele and health stat (as well as any other stats you want to mutate) and name them accordingly. I would reccomend M or F based on their gender followed by their desirable stat. Immediately begin breeding them to combine their stats to move on to the next step. As for the rest of the dinos, you'll want to keep one wild tamed male named M 0/0 and as many wild tamed females (F 0/0) as you have. These will begin your mutation line and Ill get deeper into all that in the mutation chapter. For now, just know that a clean dino has no mutations from it's dad or mom, wild dinos have no ancestory and are always clean.

Removing Stats

This little method for getting your perfect pair to prepare for mutation breeding is very useful on official servers and servers that force the maximum level of a dino. When doing this, your goal is to keep very high level important stats you need for combat while combining very low stats that hardly matter such as food and oxygen to lower the overall level of your tame. This can serve to allow more points into the stats you want and can also fool players into thinking your dino is weaker than it is. I tried this on a 4x server that wiped every 6 or so months. Mid season, our spinos were hardly lvl 200 unleveled but had 1500%+ mele (leveled) and would absolutely destory everything. I would not reccomend this unless you have a lot of extra time on your hands since it involves lots of combining will hinder your acual progression by taking longer until you can stack mutations. If you are interested in having super low level but insanely strong tames,start by taming extremley low level dinos of the same type. hit them to lower the taming effectiveness to its minimum and try to get the lowest stats possible. Then simply breed them, prioritizing the extremley low stats as well as high ones. I cannot stress how important names are,especially when more desirable stats are added, low or high. A name like M H S M W, each letter represents the desired stat, it can be low or high, it will take many cycles to get a perfect pair when combining more than 3 stats, but just keep at it and replace any parents with dinos that end up with more desirable stats, as long as there is an oppurtunity to get all of them.

Keeping Track of Stats

You may be wondering how to know exactly how many points are in a stat only given the numbers Although it is not nessecary for breeding, it is very helpful later down the line to put points to stats. That is where Dododex or Smartbreeder can be used. Dododex is considered less accurate but will give you the general idea, it's a website you can search up and look under "stat calculator" tab shown below: Smartbreeder is an application you can download for free that allows you to keep tabs on your line. I personally don't like using it because I keep very good track of the dinos stats and position in the line based on their names but some swear by it.

The screenshot (above) is a random stat sample of a spino shown on dododex. It is a free and helpful resource but keep in mind that the stats you plug in may not always reflect accurate points. Even so, it will be very helpful, showing you stats, points, and affinity when leveling

Naming

Aright, you've tamed around 20 promising looking dinos and have found 45 health and 50 mele (you lucky bean!) I would reccomend naming them as following: F or M for their gender followed by the points and an indication of the stat they have points in. Your Female Spino with 50 points into health would be known as "M 50H" I can't stress how immensely helpful this is for the breeding processs that follows. We'll get into combining stast soon but will go over their names now. Once you've bred a dino with both the health and mele, it can be called M 50H 45M. I will call back to the naming process often, It is incredibly helpful to name your dinos for breeding and make sure to tell your tribemates not to touch any dinos with funny looking breeder names! A single level put into a dino or your tribemate with 2 extra chromozones pressing E to cuddle a raising breeder will throw off the stats and or level. If you simply look at the stats without a proper name, you'll get very confused after one small mistake. You can use points or stats in the name to keep track, whatever you prefer. I personally reccomend points all the way, especially if you have it easily accessable with modded items.

Combining Stats

Congrats! You have your good stats and its about time to combine them. This is a process where you start with dinos with good stats seperately and end up with one or a pair of dinos that both have the desirable stats. After this process, you'll finally begin to get some benefit from your hard work. High level dinos with 2 or 3 combined stats often have a level of 230-250, that can be 300 after leveling, exciting stuff for a new breeder! To combine stats, you want to breed parents so the child has the possibility to inherit both. When dinos breed, the baby has a 50% chance to inherit each individual stat from the mom or dad. Breeding your 50 health spino with one that has 34 points into health. The baby has a 50% chance to get the mothers good health and a 50% to get the fathers lower health, its just luck of the draw. I have heard from somewhere that there is a slightly higher chance (around 60%) to get the higher stats. There is no real way to find out wich is true without being able to see the source code or extensive testing. Regardless, the main goal is to get the proper dinos breeding and just breed them until one with the stats you need pops out! A problem that stumps many new breeders is when you need to combine 2 seperate stats when they are both on one gender, males for example. For that, simply choose one, the one with the highest health stat in this chance and breed it with a random female until you get the health and female on the baby. Its a 50/50 for gender and 50/50 for the stat so thats a 1 in 4 that you get the female with the health. Once you have it, breed it with the mele male until you get one with both the mele and health. Remeber, there are a couple of things you can do to speed up this process as a whole, makes do not have a breeding cooldown, use this to your fullest advantage. Lets say you have a male with both stats but want a female with both stats so you can breed them and get perfect stats every time. You can breed this male with every female you have to increase at a chance for that 1/8 you'll get the stats and gender. Its always best to keep in mind the chances and maxamise your potential to combine them faster. Lets say you are breeding a male mele with a female health, if you get a female with health and mele, breed it with both for two chances, one being better since it has both desirable stats. Below, the chart shows the process of a combination the best I can. This is a very confusing part for some people, don't hesitate to ask me directly!(my discord is in the intro)

Perfect Pair

Now you know how to combine stats, your end goal is to get a perfect pair with your preferred stats. Some say they need to have every stat the same with the only difference being their gender, this can help set up a nice line because you'll be able to see mutations because of the 2 level increase. It is nice if you have it, but takes a while to combine 7 stats, way too long to be useful in my opinion. Once you get a perfect pair, you can drop all of the stat labels in the name and just call them "perfectM and perfectF". Keep these guys safe, combined dinos with good stats and no mutations are incredibly valuable to breeders and they can be traded and bred for very good FFA and personal dinos for your tribe! They are not good enough for us breeders however, the following page will deal with everything to know about mutations and how to stack them, prevent the 20 cap and keep your line clean.

What to do with Mutations

We'll get into what a mutation is, what it does, and how to properly stack them in the next section, but you want to avoid all mutations in this stage. It may be tempting to replace your base mele dino with the one with 1 mutation into it but it will hinder your ability to properly stack in the future, use the mutated dino as a personal or FFA and continue your breeding with clean stats. If you click "ancestory" the button below the torpidity count, if there are two 0/20s in the top left and right, its a clean dino with no mutations.

Fire's Complete Guide To Stat Combining And Mutation Breeding