Raising Babies

Babies! We all love em, but how do you keep them alive?

It's far easier than a real baby, though not without some minor struggles.

There are four kinds of babies: Carnivores, Herbivores, Piscivores and the Picky Eaters. All babies (except the picky eaters) will eat their food types by food value first. So the foods that give the lowest food values will be eaten first. This is why you can not raise carnivores and piscivores from the same trough. The carnivores have the tendency to demoish all the fish first and starve the piscivores. Baby otters are quick to die from this.

My go-to method is to have a trough with special foods, and fish sharing a trough; then have carnivores and herbivores sharing a trough.
Another important thing to be aware of is the range on your troughs. If you have a trough with fish, and a carnivore too close, it will eat the fish.

If you are using S+ or any of its various forks, the feeding/tek troughs allow you to either include or exclude animals from that trough, so you can have your troughs together, while making sure your babies are getting their own food.*
*When doing this, make sure to include or exclude the variants as well since they count as separate species in the trough settings.

The sections below will highlight types of foods for each in order of best to worst in terms of how much they need to fully mature. Using better foods will mean less is used overall.*
*Kibble can be any type. Usually the lowest tier is used since it is easiest to make.

If you are unsure about a modded animal, it would be best to check the documentation for that mod.

Maewings

Introduced with Genesis part 2, Maewings are living baby troughs. When nursing is enabled, they will feed babies right to adult (if no troughs are around). Increasing their Weight will up the amount of food they can hold, and upgrading Nursing Effectiveness will increase the range around them that they can feed.

Up to four babies can be placed in their saddle baskets (except for Gigas, Managarmr, Bloodstalkers or any water creatures), and will halt their growth until fully grown.

• Babies will automatically feed from a Nursing enabled Maewing and show a trough icon over them.

• Juveniles will eat food from their inventory first, then trough, then a Maewing if the other sources are not found.

When raising mixed types of eaters, the same rules apply to a Maewing as a trough. Make sure your babies won't steal other babies food. This may require two or more Maewings separated and in nursing mode.

A "secret" fifth type of eater are the Omnivores. These guys will eat just about anything, so be careful of what troughs they are eating out of. If I'm raising Gigas, I will put omnivores on the herbivore trough.

Known Omnivores: Direbear, Maewing*, Megachelon, Megatherium, and Moschops.

*Maewings with nursing enabled will eat from the trough before eating from their inventory, so don't worry about them eating all the baby food.

Imprinting

Imprinting is an important part of baby raising. It will boost their stats while their imprinter is riding them, but vanilla Ark imprinting can be a bit of a hassle - so here's some tips.

• If you have S+ or any of it's forks, the Nanny can be used to imprint for you. It can be powered by an Electrical Generator (if you are using S+ or N+), or a Tek Gen.*

• If your baby wants an imprint food that you don't have, you can use a cryopod or soul ball to cycle the imprint request.

• If you need to go offline and don't want to miss an imprint, put your baby in a cryopod or soul ball before going offline.**

*Check your server configs for Nanny settings such as Nanny max imprint and if Nanny imprinting is disabled/enabled.
**This is also a good idea when going offline anyway to make sure your baby doesn't starve while you are gone if you are playing with slower maturation rates.

Done with this page?
Back- Breeding Basics | Home | Next- Mutations
Otter and Wyvern screenshots provided by Nym and Teela, respectively, from Æsir.