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ARK Survival Ascended is now available to download and play on PC. It is a complete remake of ASE using the Unreal Engine 5, and it is a lot of fun. That is when it’s working. The unfortunate news is that ASA is out in early access meaning there are lots of rough edges. Some of these rough edges include glitches, poor FPS, and bugs. In addition to hopefully alleviating these problems, here you will find how to fix ARK Survival Ascended crashing on PC.
As mentioned, ASA is only in early access right now. Studio Wildcard has shared a release schedule for maps in their roadmap for 2023/24, but it’s possible delays could occur. Alongside PC, the game is now available on Xbox, and there is crossplay with cross-platform mods. The inclusion of cross-platform mods is particularly great for console players as it means users on Xbox can download creations from the PC community.
While everything about the game looks and sounds great, it is sadly plagued by problems similar to ASE when it first launched in 2015. There is a flood of negative reviews on Steam because of its performance issues, but you can resolve some of the faults through custom settings.
How to fix ARK Survival Ascended crashing on PC
There are several ways to fix ARK Survival Ascended crashing on PC as well as other issues such as poor FPS and stuttering. One of the ways to possibly fix the issue is simply running the game in compatibility mode. All you have to do here is right-click the game’s shortcut on your desktop home screen and select ‘run this program as an administrator’. Another possible and popular fix shared on Steam forums is entering the console command ark.VertexCountScaling 1. This is said to resolve the infamous Render Thread Core crash.
As for settings, suggestions on Reddit include turning off Foilage and Fluid Interaction in the graphics settings. You can also try disabling Frame Generation and lowering the quality of shadows to medium or even low. If there are still issues, try disabling grass, too. Other suggestions include turning off Nvidia overlay and Steam overlay.
If none of the above still works, you may need to use the lowest settings possible:
- Advanced Graphics: Low
- View Distance: Low
- Textures: Low
- Post Processing: Low
- General Shadows: Low
- Global Illumination Quality: Low
- Effects Quality: Low
- Foilage Quality: Low
- Motion Blur: Off
- Light Bloom: Off
- Light Shafts: Off
- Low-Light Enhancement: Off
- Enable Foliage & Fluid Interaction: Off
- Foilage Interaction Distance Multiplier: 0.01
- Foilage Interaction Distance Limit: 1
- Enable Footstep Particles: Off
- Enable Footstep Decals: Off
- GUI 3D Widget Quality: 0.5
Studio Wildcard is releasing updates and patches to fix problems. Not everything will be resolved right away, but the game is already in a better state than it was at launch. ASE players will remember the torrid state of launch back in 2015, so the current issues with ASA are not too surprising.
For more guides, here are all of the new features for ARK Survival Ascended, and here’s how to change from third-person to first-person.
