Taming is the heart of ARK: Survival Evolved and ARK: Survival Ascended. Every mount and base guard started as a wild creature someone took the time to tame. The Ark Tame Calculator on this page helps you plan that process before you ever fire a tranq dart: enter the dino’s base level, your food type’s taming effectiveness, and your server’s taming speed multiplier, and you will get a clear estimate of how much food you need, how long the tame will take, and how many bonus levels the finished creature will carry.
How Taming Works in ARK
At its core, taming means convincing a wild creature to join your tribe instead of eating you. Each creature has a hidden taming bar that fills as it consumes food. There are two fundamental methods of filling that bar: knockout taming and passive taming. Understanding the difference is the first step toward efficient taming.
Knockout taming is the method most players learn first. You render the creature unconscious with torpor, then place food directly into its inventory. While unconscious, the creature periodically eats from its inventory, and each bite raises the taming bar. You must keep it unconscious with narcotics or narcoberries until the bar is full. This method works for most carnivores and many herbivores, and it is the standard approach for Rexes, Spinos, Argentavis, and hundreds of other creatures.
Passive taming works entirely differently. The creature stays awake and aware, and you feed it by walking up to it and placing food in the last slot of your hotbar. When the creature is hungry and calm, a prompt appears and you press the feed key. Passive tames are faster in real time for many creatures, but they demand patience and caution: if you spook the animal or take damage, the tame can fail or lose progress. Mesopithecus, Ichthyosaurus, Moschops, and the Gigantopithecus are all passive tames.
Passive vs Knockout Taming
Choosing the right method starts with knowing what each creature accepts. Most creatures are fixed as one type or the other, and the calculator treats both the same way because the underlying effectiveness and bonus-level math works identically either way. What changes is your workflow.
Knockout taming requires a full kit. You need a way to apply torpor, such as tranq arrows, tranq darts, a club, or a scuba tank punch underwater. You need narcotics or narcoberries to keep the creature under. You need the food itself, and ideally a safe area to work, because other predators will investigate a sleeping dino. Many players build a taming pen out of stone doorframes to trap creatures before knocking them out, which removes the biggest risk in knockout taming: the unconscious dino sliding downhill into a river or off a cliff.
Passive taming requires a different kit and a different mindset. You need the creature’s preferred food in your last hotbar slot, and you need to approach without being detected. Ghillie armor makes this dramatically easier, and bug repellant helps with insects and small aggressive creatures. The rhythm of passive taming is feed, retreat, wait, and repeat. Each feeding raises the bar by a chunk, and the interval between feedings depends on the creature. Some players starve-tame passive tames by letting the creature get hungry first, but for most passive creatures the simpler approach is to feed on schedule and stay out of sight between bites.
Kibble and Food Effectiveness
Food is the single biggest lever you control in the taming process. Every food item has a taming effectiveness value that determines how much progress each bite contributes and, crucially, how much of the creature’s taming effectiveness you preserve. Feeding a creature its preferred kibble keeps effectiveness near its maximum. Feeding it raw meat, berries, or the wrong kibble tier drains effectiveness with every bite.
Kibble sits at the top of the food hierarchy. ARK’s kibble system works in tiers: each kibble tier is the preferred food for a set of creatures. Extraordinary kibble is the premium tier, followed by exceptional, superior, remarkable, regular, and basic. Higher-tier kibble can substitute for lower tiers, but not the other way around. Making kibble requires eggs from the right creatures, plus vegetables, mejoberries, fiber, and water, which is why serious tribes maintain egg farms and crop plots long before they start hunting high-level tames.
Below kibble, creatures accept their natural diet foods. Carnivores take raw prime meat, raw mutton, cooked prime meat, and raw meat, in roughly that order of quality. Herbivores take crops like rockarrot, savoroot, and longrass, plus mejoberries and other berries. Mutton is a notable standout for carnivores: it tames faster than raw prime meat and nearly matches kibble for some creatures, which makes Ovis farming a legitimate strategy. Vegetables beat berries for herbivores by a wide margin.
Taming Effectiveness and Bonus Levels
Taming effectiveness is a percentage that starts near 100 percent when the tame begins and decreases with every mistake. Each time the creature takes damage while unconscious, each time you feed it a low-quality food, and each time it eats when its torpor is nearly gone, the effectiveness ticks down. The final effectiveness percentage determines the bonus levels your creature gains when the tame completes.
Bonus levels are extra levels added to the creature’s base level at the moment of taming. A perfect tame on official settings adds up to half the creature’s base level as bonus: a level 150 dino can finish at level 224 with perfect effectiveness. Those bonus levels come with free stat points, and they also raise the creature’s post-tame level cap headroom, which matters enormously for breeding lines. Two otherwise identical Rexes, one tamed at 100 percent effectiveness and one at 60 percent, are meaningfully different animals.
This is where the calculator earns its keep. The bonus level estimate it produces uses the same relationship the game uses: bonus levels scale with the creature’s base level multiplied by its final effectiveness. If you input an effectiveness of 90 percent for a level 150 dino, the calculator shows you roughly 68 bonus levels and a final level of 218. That number tells you whether your food choice is worth it before you commit the kibble.
Starve Taming Strategy
Starve taming is a technique that experienced players use to protect taming effectiveness on long knockout tames. The idea is counterintuitive: you knock the creature out and then do not feed it at all. You let its food stat drain to near zero while keeping it unconscious with narcotics. Only when the food bar is nearly empty do you dump in all the kibble at once. The creature then eats through the entire stack in rapid succession, and the taming bar fills in minutes instead of over an hour of gradual feeding.
Why does this work? Because taming effectiveness drops partly as a function of time and feeding events spread over a long tame. By compressing all the eating into a short window at the end, you minimize the opportunities for effectiveness to decay, and you eliminate the risk of running out of narcotics midway. The creature’s food stat determines how much it can eat at once, so the key number to watch is the food value: once it drops low enough to accept your full stack of kibble, you feed.
Starve taming has trade-offs. You must be certain you have enough narcotics to keep the creature under for the entire starvation period, which can be long for high-food-stat creatures like the Giganotosaurus. You also need to monitor torpor constantly, because a creature that wakes up with an empty food bar is a disaster: it will be starving, awake, and angry. But for high-value tames where every bonus level counts, starve taming remains one of the most effective tools in the game.
Server Settings and Taming Speed
Official ARK servers run at a taming speed multiplier of 1, and everything about the base game is balanced around that number. But most players do not play on official servers. Unofficial servers, single-player worlds, and boosted community servers commonly run taming multipliers of 2, 5, 10, or even higher, and these multipliers change the planning math completely.
The taming speed multiplier divides the time a tame takes. At 5x taming speed, a tame that would take an hour on official rates takes about twelve minutes. Food consumption scales with it, so the total food needed drops proportionally. This is why the calculator includes the multiplier as an input: set it to your server’s actual value and the time estimate reflects your real world, not the official baseline.
Higher multipliers do not change effectiveness math, but they do change your risk profile. On a 10x server, even a Giganotosaurus tame is a quick errand, so the elaborate precautions of starve taming become unnecessary. On 1x official rates, every technique in this guide matters, and underestimating food or narcotics is the most common cause of failed tames. Always confirm your server’s multiplier before you start: it is displayed in the server settings or can be checked with an admin.
Common Taming Mistakes to Avoid
Most failed tames come from a short list of preventable mistakes. Learning them once will save you dozens of ruined tames over your ARK career.
- Underestimating narcotics: the most common failure. The calculator estimates time; multiply that by the creature’s torpor drain to size your narcotic stack, then bring extra.
- Feeding the wrong food: raw meat on a high-level carnivore or plain berries on a high-level herbivore tanks your effectiveness and your bonus levels.
- Taming in the open: an unconscious dino is a dinner bell for every predator in render distance. Build a pen or clear the area first.
- Ignoring the food stat: for starve taming, you must watch the food value, not just torpor. Feed too early and you lose the technique’s benefit.
- Letting torpor bottom out: if the creature wakes up mid-tame, the taming bar resets to zero. There is no partial credit.
- Taming what you cannot protect: on PvP servers, a tame in progress is a target. Tame inside your base walls or with guards posted.
- Forgetting a saddle: some creatures, like the Rex, are useless as mounts until you unlock and craft the saddle. Check the required level before you tame.
How to Use the Ark Tame Calculator
Using the calculator is straightforward, but a few notes will help you get accurate estimates from it.
- Enter the dino’s base level: this is the level shown when you look at the wild creature, before any taming bonuses. Higher levels need more food and time but gain more bonus levels.
- Enter food type taming effectiveness: use a high number like 90 to 100 for kibble, mid-range values for prime meat, mutton, or crops, and lower values for raw meat or berries. This single input drives the bonus level estimate.
- Enter food units per taming cycle: this estimates how many feeding events the tame involves, which helps you plan narcotic usage and feeding schedules.
- Enter your taming speed multiplier: use 1 for official rates, or your server’s actual multiplier. The time estimate scales directly with this value.
- Press Calculate and read the results: total food units tells you what to pack, estimated taming time tells you how long to guard the tame, and bonus levels plus final level tell you what the finished creature will look like.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Ark Tame Calculator used for?
The Ark Tame Calculator estimates how much food a tame will need, how long the taming process will take, and how many bonus levels the finished creature will gain, based on the dino’s base level, your food type’s effectiveness, and your server’s taming speed multiplier.
How accurate is the Ark Tame Calculator?
The calculator uses the same proportional relationships the game uses: food needs scale with level and effectiveness, time scales with food and the server multiplier, and bonus levels scale with level times effectiveness. Individual creatures have quirks that shift exact numbers, so treat the results as planning estimates, not exact predictions.
What is taming effectiveness in ARK?
Taming effectiveness is a percentage that starts near 100 percent when a tame begins and drops when the creature takes damage, eats low-quality food, or is left with low torpor. The final effectiveness determines how many bonus levels the tamed creature receives.
How many bonus levels can a dino gain from taming?
On official settings, a perfect tame adds up to half the creature’s base level as bonus levels. A level 150 dino tamed at near-perfect effectiveness finishes around level 224, with the exact number depending on the final effectiveness percentage.
Which food is best for taming in ARK?
Kibble is the best taming food for nearly every creature, with higher kibble tiers outperforming lower ones. Below kibble, raw mutton and raw prime meat are best for carnivores, while crops like rockarrot and savoroot are best for herbivores.
What is the difference between knockout taming and passive taming?
Knockout taming means rendering the creature unconscious with torpor and placing food in its inventory while you keep it under with narcotics. Passive taming means feeding the creature from your hotbar while it stays awake, which requires approaching it calmly without spooking it.
What is starve taming and does it work?
Starve taming means knocking a creature out, letting its food stat drain to near zero while keeping it unconscious, then feeding all the kibble at once so the taming bar fills in minutes. It works because it compresses the feeding window and minimizes effectiveness loss over time.
How does the taming speed multiplier affect my tame?
The taming speed multiplier divides the time a tame takes and reduces total food consumption proportionally. Official servers use 1, while unofficial servers and single-player worlds often use 2, 5, 10, or higher, making tames dramatically faster.
Why did my tamed dino lose bonus levels?
Bonus levels are lost when taming effectiveness drops during the tame. Common causes include feeding low-quality food, letting the creature take damage while unconscious, and allowing torpor to run too low. Better food and careful guarding preserve effectiveness.
How many narcotics should I bring for a tame?
Bring enough narcotics to cover the full estimated taming time plus a generous margin, since the creature’s torpor drains continuously while unconscious. Underestimating narcotics is the most common cause of failed tames, so always pack extra.
Can I tame a creature that is too high level for me?
You can tame any level creature if you can knock it out and keep it under, but high-level tames need far more food, narcotics, and time. The calculator helps you decide whether you are equipped for a high-level tame before you commit to it.
What happens if a taming creature wakes up?
If an unconscious creature’s torpor hits zero, it wakes up and the taming bar resets completely. There is no partial credit, so keeping torpor topped up with narcotics or narcoberries for the entire tame is essential.
Do tamed dinos keep their wild stats?
Yes, tamed dinos keep their wild stats and gain additional stat points from bonus levels. This is why high-level tames with high effectiveness are so valuable: they start with better stats and gain more bonus points on top.
Is passive taming faster than knockout taming?
It depends on the creature. Many passive tames complete quickly once you learn the feeding rhythm, while knockout tames on official rates can take an hour or more. Passive taming demands more player attention, while knockout taming demands more supplies and guarding.
Should I use the Ark Tame Calculator before every tame?
Yes, especially for high-level or high-value tames. A few seconds with the calculator tells you how much kibble and how many narcotics to pack, how long you will need to guard the tame, and what final level to expect, which prevents the most common taming failures.