ARK: Survival Ascended's reworked Giga has to be beaten before you can tame it

Studio Wildcard revealed the dossier for its reworked Giganotosaurus in the Community Crunch on 10 October. The TLC arrives on 6 November, and it changes how you tame the thing more than how it looks.

According to the dossier, you first have to catch a Giga’s attention by killing alpha creatures. What follows is what the studio calls an “omega-level fight”. You let the Giga wear itself out attacking you, then hit back to provoke its rage, and hold on until it gives in. Only then can it be tamed.

Its rage mechanic stays: a wounded Giga gets tougher the more damage it takes. What’s new is that it now passes some of that fury on to allies fighting next to it, as long as they stay out of its path. Anyone dodging around its rear or under its feet gets scattered by stomps and tail slams. The Giga follows the Therizino, whose TLC went live on 1 October.

The Unreal Engine 5.8 Public Test Realm is now live on Steam, running on The Island. It doesn’t yet include the two optimisations that showed the biggest GPU gains in internal testing. Nanite Voxels and Lumen Lite are due in a PTR update early next week.

Principal Engineer Evan explained both. Nanite Voxels swaps distant clusters of foliage for roughly pixel-sized voxels instead of thousands of overlapping triangles, which is cheaper and should look fuller at range. Lumen Lite places its lighting probes on a grid around the camera and spreads the tracing over several frames. Evan expects consoles, lower-end PCs and low graphics presets to benefit most.

Then the less welcome news. On 29 November, Studio Wildcard will sunset a long list of inactive official servers in every region. Many of them run Lost Colony, Aberration or Scorched Earth. The affected servers get a “SUNSET” prefix first, which also drops them from your in-game favourites, so you’ll have to search for them manually.

The studio says it is working with Nitrado to make those saves available after the shutdown, with details still to come. If your tribe lives on one of the listed servers, note the exact server name now. You’ll need it to find the right save later.

A new Conquest season starts in early November. Until Monday, 12 October, the official network runs boosted harvesting, taming, experience and breeding: 2x on PvP and PvE, 4.5x on Small Tribes (4x breeding) and 5x on ARKpocalypse.