Hey survivors! Welcome to our monthly update, where we review recent updates and share what is to come on Astral ARK.
New Servers
Wildcard has released The Center and Club ARK, and we’ve added them to our cluster!
Transfers of items and dinos to The Center are still locked for around 2 months post-release, but the shop is now fully open there. Club ARK is available for everyone and features mini-missions to earn tokens, which you can spend for a chance to get some great loot!
Events & Shop Points
As mentioned in the last roundup, making our own events map is not feasible at the moment. However, we have found a simple map, created by someone else, that might work for future events. Since Arena is a major event requiring significant preparation, we will first prioritise setting up other automated events (bosses, raids for example). This way, we can dedicate the necessary time to refining Arena later on.
We’ve also heard your feedback about the limited ways to earn points currently, mainly through extensive playtime or donations. We are working on implementing new ways for you to earn points more organically while playing the game.
New Incentives for Earning Points
As a first step, from next restart, we will trial the addition of two unique items that have a chance to spawn in supply crates: Mysterious Snow Globes and Revealed Snow Globes. These items can then be sold back in the shop for points. Console players can type /shopsell in chat to find the ID for each item, and /sell ID Amount to sell them.
We hope this new system will encourage active gameplay for earning points. The trial will run for a week, and your feedback will be greatly appreciated as we work to create a more engaging experience for everyone.
Expanding the Shop
We’re aware of your feedback regarding the limited selection in the shop and the lack of incentives to spend accumulated points sometimes. We’re exploring ways to expand the variety of purchasable items, including weapons, armour, saddle packs, and loot boxes. Our goal is to cater to as many players as possible while maintaining balance. As always, if you have any suggestions for the shop, please post them in the Shop Suggestions thread on Discord.
We also want to take this opportunity to clarify that all donations go towards server upkeep and purchasing new hardware when required. Without these contributions, we wouldn’t be able to sustain hosting ASA servers due to their high resource demands.
A Note on the Shop Timeline for The Center
With The Center, we initially intended for supporters to be able to claim their dinos and chibi rewards once the shop was fully open for everyone, as we did for Scorched Earth. However, after receiving feedback, we realised that we enabled this too early. As a result, we pushed forward the full shop opening on The Center, reducing the “early access” period for supporters from around two weeks to one. We apologise for any confusion this may have caused.
Despite the accidental early launch, moving forward, we will consider whether to keep a short early access period for our supporters. We want to emphasise that any perks provided to our supporters are meant as a gesture of appreciation for their help in keeping the servers running. Our intention is never to give anyone an unfair advantage; veteran players know how hard we work to maintain balance. However, we believe that our supporters deserve access to exclusive perks as a token of our gratitude for their contributions, and are continually reviewing what we can offer in return.
PVP Servers
We’ve decided to take the difficult decision to close the Astral PVP servers. This comes following our previous notices about this in Discord and in our last roundup post. Unfortunately, it is not sustainable for us to continue, especially as we get closer to requiring additional hardware to support new servers. We want to thank everyone who has played on the servers and supported us so far. Some of you have played on and off on our PVP servers for many years and we hope you will still remain a part of this community, even if just on Discord. If you have any questions about this, we’re happy to discuss this with you directly. Simply open a ticket on Discord.
The PVP servers will shut down later this evening, at around 8 PM (UK time).
