Wildcard still hasn't learned a fucking thing, sigh!
On January 23, 2023, Wildcard noted the following with Patch v356.3 (Clients v356.1): "Disabled unintended client-side visual config". This initially prevented the known INI's from being usable. Finally, after X years, Wildcard successfully prevented simple "cheating" in the game.
This lasted for a while but was unfortunately circumvented again in a slightly modified form (different INI file). See for example in the video by The FattStuff or here a guide from May 2023. Somehow, the issue probably got lost at Wildcard due to the chaos with ARK2 and ASA, and not much was optimized anymore. However, the hope remained that the ARK developers had learned a lot and would successfully implement this in the remastered version. Let me tell you straight up - no such luck!
The YouTuber Searsy and "Cream Puff" Gato (see videos below) have however discovered that Wildcard has simply forgotten about this issue. We hope this happened due to the much too early LIVE release of ARK ASA a few days ago, and not intentionally. I also want to emphasize that the LIVE date was practically forced - thanks to Snail Games and Nitrado.
The problem now is that it's not even necessary to edit your own INI anymore, but anyone can simply enter the following commands in the "console" while the game is running. A few examples to make the game run more smoothly beside cheating (that's the way it is!) are:
- Grass = grass.enable 0
- Fog = r.VolumetricFog 0
- Clouds = r.VolumetricCloud 0
- Shadows = r.shadowquality 0
For more commands please see the videos. I do not support to use anything of those cheats!
Comments
I wouldn't personally…
I wouldn't personally consider those 4 cheating. Some are. But those 4 + 1 other make the game much more playable without screen tear on older equipment. They also don't completely remove foliage. If they had a basic grass foliage that still rendered things would be better. I would really like them to remove the spammed small rocks decal as it is.