Today we are proud and excited to announce the launch of the ARK Sponsored Mod Program. ARK has always viewed modding and the ARK Dev Kit as a very important aspect of our game. We want to look into ways to help our modders take their projects to the next step, be it through more robust capabilities in the Dev Kit, hosting competitions with large prize-pools, incorporating them into the game, or just generally working and partnering up with modders and their projects.

Since partnering up with Epic and opening up our ARK Dev Kit in July 2015 and we have seen over 2,500 different mods enter our Steam Workshop. It is an understatement to say how much we truly appreciate and value our modding community and want to do more to help facilitate the progress of mods, as well as modders.

ARK Mods have contributed mightily to the game's longevity and variety, and we’re very grateful to the talented content creators who make them. With the new 'ARK Sponsored Mods' program, we aim to be able to support some of the most promising authors directly, and continue to attract the world's most talented Modders to build amazing new content for ARK.

We believe our latest initiative will allow us to take the next step into assisting modders further. The Sponsored Mods project aims to provide financial, development, and marketing supporting over the course of sponsorship. We will be providing a $4,000 stipend towards player made mod projects each month to assist with ongoing development costs of their projects, with a possibility of completed mods being integrated into the Official Release of ARK: Survival Evolved on PC and Console.

Our first batch of modders that have been selected for sponsorship can be viewed here:

https://survivetheark.com/index.php?/ark-sponsored-mods/

Over the course of sponsorship, the modders will be working with us, and in particular, Cedric Burkes (Creator of Primitive+ and Studio Wildcard Mod Liason) to see how they progress over the month. They will go through reviews to make sure that bug reports players have made are being resolved, and that their projects are progressing and developing. Sponsorship can end for a mod if progress isn’t being made, and we are keeping our eyes open for other modders who we can potentially work with!

For those of you who are itching to get Modding in ARK, you can get started right away! The ARK Dev Kit is a simplified version of the Unreal Engine 4 Editor, specifically compiled to streamline the process of creating Mods, Maps, and Total Conversions for ARK: Survival Evolved which can then be uploaded directly to Steam Workshop for other users to download and play. Follow the "How To Mod" tutorial to get started, then join the ARK community, participate in the Unreal Engine ARK Modding forum to get your modding underway!