Breeding Basics

This guide will cover breeding basics such as getting started, merging stats and something you can do to boost an freshly tamed animal's stats a little bit.

Before we start out, we need to get some commons terms out of the way. Most of these will be used a lot throughout this guide.

Clean
An animal with no (0) mutations.
(Usually a freshly tamed animal but can be bred.)

Dirty
An animal with at least one (1) mutation from either parent.
(An animal can officially have 20 mutations from either parent. Officially.)

Max
An animal that has 253 or 254 in at least one stat.
(255 is the maximum points that can be in a stat, but you will not be able to add tamed levels.)

Wild Stats
The stats of an animal before taming.
(Can only be viewed with the use of mods.)

Base Stats
The stats of any animal, tamed or bred, before adding levels.
(These stats are transferable via breeding.)

Tamed Stats
The stats of an animal after adding points or levels.
(These stats are not transferable via breeding.)

To begin, you'll need at least two dinos of the same type. Animals need to be the same species, variant, and of course opposite genders to be bred. (The exceptions are some non-gendered animals that can be bred such as Maewings and Achatina.)

Each dino will have its own stat distribution across 7 stats: Health, Stamina, Oxygen, Food, Weight, Melee Damage and Movement Speed. Wild stats are randomly decided at spawn, and when tamed have a certain amount of points distributed depending on the Taming Effectiveness. These stats following taming are called the Base Stats.

For the purpose of this guide we will not be going in depth into Tamed Stats since these stats can not be bred. Contrary to myth.

Stats & Merging

The red outlined lines are the ones to look at when looking at a dino's stats. If you don't have a mod that shows you the base stats, you can use Ark Smart Breeder to see those stats.

In this screenshot, you'll see two numbers in brackets by each stat. These are the base number, on the left; and the amount of levels put into each stat after taming, on the right. You'll want to focus on the left number for breeding. These numbers and whether or not they are "good" will depend on your game's difficulty settings.

For Æsir, with a max wild dino level of 210 (for most dinos), stats between 50-60 are considered "good", though they can get higher depending on the dino.

This raptor’s speed is higher than it would be normally. This is due to imprinting during taming via the Immersive Taming mod. After vanilla taming, this would read as 120.0% since this is the raptor’s base post-tame speed.
Special note: Vanilla creatures that can't level speed (flyers) won't get a 20% bonus like this. Their speed would read as 100%. The only vanilla flyer that gets a 20% imprinting bonus on speed are Snow Owls. In addition, stats in movement speed (minus imprint bonuses) are wasted on all dinos since it doesn't increase the percentage displayed.

When trying to get the best stats on one or two dinos, you don't need to find that metaphorical unicorn with god-like stats. The best method is tame a lot of one type of dino, pick out the ones with highest stats and merge them.

These two raptors for example, each of the three raptors used in this example have at least one stat better than the others. Normally, it's good idea to tame more than three, but this will do for the purpose of this guide.

The next step is to merge the stats onto two babies. Twins are the easy way, but rare. By the end, you want one male and one female.* There are two ways to get two perfect babies. You can get one, then breed it with the parent that has the most similar stats. Or you can simply keep breeding the parents to get a second baby. Cloning is also an option if you server settings allow you to clone breedable dinos.

We want perfect babies that look like this:

47 HP, 45 ST, 49 OX, 46 F, 44 W, 50 M, 50 SP

Now, you can use the lower speed stat, and that’s really personal preference, but the higher one will give you a higher level for that baby than the lower stat would. For example, a perfect baby with the higher speed stat would be around 331. One with the lower speed stat would be around 312.*

Do you need to use all the higher stats? No. You can only go for one, two, four or all. The point is just to get the stats you want onto two babies of opposite gender so you can breed those two together to get many more like them.

But what if you get a baby that has a mutation while you are merging stats?

Well, you could either kill it or use it for something else. But for now, you want creatures that are clean, meaning no mutations. More on this later.

Now, if you just want a good creature with no mutations, you could stop here.

But, really, why would you not want a super-dino?

So let’s keep going.

*If you are using S+, N+ or any other mod based off S+ with a mutator, you can gender swap to speed the process up.

**The math for figuring out the final level is the sum of all stats+1=level. Plus 1 is added because there are no level 0 animals.

Mutagen

Introduced in Genesis 2, Mutagen is great for breeders. When a certain amount is fed to a wild-tamed dino (not bred) is gain +5 on Health, Stamina, Weight and Melee. These bonuses carry over to babies!

If Mutagen is fed to bred dinos, they only gain a +1 in each of those 4 core stats, and it acts as a leveled stat. Which will not carry over in breeding, so it's important to use it on your best wild tames to get the most use out of it.

Mutagen amounts per species
Mutagen on the ASE Wiki

Mods featured in this section

DinoStorage v2
Bitou2k's Binocular
Nominal Structures v2

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Banner screenshot by Epione on Æsir

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