Introduction

The survival game "ARK" has been given for free by Epic Games in June 2020. We started playing it - both local and on servers operated by friends of us. After two weeks of vacation without the possibility to play we where rather disappointed that a lot of things got lost during that time. We continued playing localy then - in this case the game stops as soon as the player exits. But that's not comparable to the multi player game.

So we decided to bring up an ARK server locally on our home server. This ARK server, so the intention, shall be started when we want to play and stopped when the last of us stops playing. We don't want to have it public in the internet, a local server is fine for us.

So this page shows how to set up the ARK server on an Ubuntu based machine. To have the administration easy I am using the ark manager.

github home of ark manager

Installation

Before doing the game server installation there are some preconditions to fulfill.

Preconditions

First thing is setting upe the regular Ubuntu installation as you want to get it.

After that the system requires some additional packages, all coming out of the official Ubuntu resources:

sudo apt install curl libc6-i386 lib32gcc1 libsdl2-2.0-0:i386 steamcmd

Next thing to do is the cration of the user which shall run the ARK server. I call it steam. My decission is to give this user the uid 10000. The following commands have to be executed with an acoount having sudo rights.

sudo adduser --uid 10000 steam

This new user requires sudo abilities

sudo usermod -aG sudo steam

Now the steam client has to be installed. This is also included in the standard Ubuntu resources.

sudo apt install steamcmd

This is the last thing to do with the regular account. The following part has to be done with the user steam, so either log off and log in as steam or do su steam and cd ~.

Install the ARK manager

First we do an update of the steam client and check if it works fine.

steamcmd
<wait for the prompt "Steam>">
login anonymous
<there should be no error and no warning>
quit

Now we do the installation of ARK manager. I want to start the game server manually, so I use

curl -sL https://git.io/arkmanager | sudo bash -s steam

curl -sL https://git.io/arkmanager | sudo bash -s steam --install-service

The ARK manager requires some settings to be able to run on an Ubuntu system. Edit the file /etc/arkmanager/arkmanager.cfg and change the tag as explained here:

• steamcmdroot="/usr/games"
• steamcmdexec="steamcmd"
• steamcmd_appinfocache="/home/steam/.steam/appcache/appinfo.vdf"
• steamcmd_workshoplog="/home/steam/.steam/logs/workshop_log.txt"

• arkflag_crossplay=true
• arkflag_NoBattlEye=true

Now the game server requires your local configuration. Edit the file /etc/arkmanager/instances/main.cfg and adapt these tags to your wishes.

• ark_SessionName
• serverMap
• ark_ServerPassword
• ark_ServerAdminPassword
• ark_MaxPlayers

Install the ARK server

Now we're ready for the game server installation.
Be patient! This may take LONG!

arkmanager install

Configure the server

We prefer playing the server in a way that no player can harm another player. Therefore we want to configure the server to PvE and disable "friendly fire".

To configure the server to PvE edit the file ARK/ShooterGame/Saved/Config/LinuxServer/GameUserSettings.ini and add serverPVE=True to the section [ServerSettings].

With this you can't harm players of different teams. But you can still harm players of your own team.

If you don't want that edit the file ARK/ShooterGame/Saved/Config/LinuxServer/Game.ini. Add the config tag bPvEDisableFriendlyFire=True to the section [/script/shootergame.shootergamemode]. In the default installation this file is empty. So in that case you have to write the following lines into the file:

[/script/shootergame.shootergamemode]
bPvEDisableFriendlyFire=True

Other configuration possibilites can be found in various pages in the internet :-)

Administrate the server

After having the game server installed there are some commands to supervise the game. Here I show the most important once.

arkmanager start

Use this command to start the server. The server is not directly usable! It takes several minutes until the server can be used. If it is accessable can be detected with arkmanager status.

arkmanager status

This command shows the status of the ark server. As long as the server is not accessable it will print

Running command 'status' for instance 'main'
 Server running:   Yes 
 Server PID:   99315 
 Server listening:   No 
 Server build ID:   6011539 
 Server version:   320.38 

This is an example when the server is accessable:

Running command 'status' for instance 'main'
 Server running:   Yes 
 Server PID:   99315 
 Server listening:   Yes 
Server Name: XxXxXxX - (v320.38)
Steam Players: 0 / 70
Active Steam Players: 0
 Server online:   Yes 
 ARKServers link:   http://arkservers.net/server/111.222.33.44:27015 
 Steam connect link:   steam://connect/111.222.33.44:27015 
Active Players: 0
 Server build ID:   6011539 
 Server version:   320.38 

arkmanager stop

Use this command to stop the server. The server saves the actual game during shutdown.

Next steps

Next goal for my personal ARK server is to add it to the automatic shut down mechanism. That means that the automatic shut down - or better - suspend shall only be done if there's no player connected to the server.