How to tame dinos in Ark Survival Ascended

Ark Survival Ascended, naturally, retains the ability to tame and ride dinos like in other Ark Survival titles. A highlight of many players’ experience with this game, being able to ride and use dinos for battle and traversal is a crucial feature that you’ll need to get a grip on soon.

There are many steps, but it isn’t too complicated, thankfully. Here is how to tame dinos in Ark Survival Ascended.

Taming dinosaurs in Ark Survival Ascended

There are a few steps to this process, but when you’ve got the necessary equipment, it really isn’t difficult.

Choosing your dino

For your starting tamed dino, I’d recommend to go for the Parasaur, Phiomia, or the Carbonemy, as those have saddles you can access early on in the game and they’re all herbivores. If you’re not looking to ride them just yet, then any local herbivore will do.

You can tame carnivores, but in the start of the game that’ll be a bit tricky considering they could do substantial damage to you before you get around to taming them.

Once you’ve picked your dino, preferably a local herbivore that you can ride, then move on to the next step.

Getting them unconscious

To tame a dino in Ark Survival Ascended, you need to feed them. To do that, however, they must be unconscious. There are two main ways to get a dino unconscious, either through knocking them out cold, or by administering a tranquiliser.

For the early game, bashing them around the head with a wooden club will do the trick. You can use a Bola to get them in one spot to help you do this if they keep running away. Naturally, if you have access to tranquilisers, then use them instead.

Feeding and taming the dino

Make sure that you have plenty of that dino’s food in your inventory, as you’ll need to feed them a lot. Go up to the unconscious dino’s body and access their inventory. Simply cram a bunch of meat or fruits into their inventory and wait for the taming process to begin. It’ll happen slowly but surely.

Make sure to do this before the dino wakes back up again. Before too long, the dinosaur will rise back up, and will be tamed.

Related: How to find Parasaur spawn locations in Ark Survival Ascended

What you can do with tamed dinos in Ark Survival Ascended

Tamed dinos are more than companions. They can play an integral part of your defences and can form a party for your expeditions.

Upon holding ‘E’ to your tamed dino, a plethora of actions and orders will pop up. From here, you change if they follow you or not, their targeting preferences, which groups and parties they’re a part of, and much more.

Until you make a pen for your dino, it would be wise to get it to follow you. Eventually, you can build turrets and platforms for your dinos to be truly a force to take down the mightiest of bosses. But for now, allowing them to accompany you will allow them to protect you from danger using whatever limbs or defences they have to hand.

I hope this has been useful, survivor, and that you’ll go forth and amass all the dinos you want. For more Ark Survival Ascended help, check out PC Invasion.