[url=http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=454798698][img]http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/32995786826816539/085C7C989C4E09400AA5535281F9AE17920BC6B9/[/img][/url] [b]Hello Survivors![/b] Welcome to the fourth issue of the ARK Digest! For those who missed the previous issues, check out the Announcement section on the Community Hub and be sure to catch up with what you’ve missed! First off, we want to say to everyone who has purchased ARK: Survival Evolved, how much we appreciate your support and help to make this game the biggest thing to hit the Survival Genre since… well… dinosaurs! The player response has been tremendous, with over 100,000 units solid within just 12 hours of launch. For a small indie team like ours, this exceeded our wildest expectations and it just, frankly, blew us away. Thank you everyone! Rest assured that our commitment to you, our Survivors, is to make ARK the most amazing, transcendent video game survival experience in history -- or prehistory? -- is stronger than ever. This is is who we are, and we are going to build this game up together. We’ve had a very busy week as you can imagine and have pumped out quite a few announcements, so definitely check [url=http://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/announcements]those[/url] out if you haven’t so far! This weekly feature entails information regarding some of the development of ARK, your questions as well as any extra bits of information we want to share! [h1]Dino Dossier[/h1] A new Dino Dossier has dropped, this one is everybody’s favorite versatile apex predator, the Spinosaurus! [url=http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=454798698][img]http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/32995786826816539/085C7C989C4E09400AA5535281F9AE17920BC6B9/[/img][/url] Monday, Wednesday, Friday are still Dossier Drop Days, so get ready for another fantastic new addition to the ARK on Friday :) [h1] New Features [/h1] A lot of the work in the last week has been for preparing for the Early Access launch as well dealing with the hiccups and challenges that arise with actually going live! As our engineers focus on optimization and bug-squashing, we still have the content team blazing forward, and soon we’ll be showcasing the various new content & features! [b]Mod Tools & UE4[/b] We’ll be presenting our modding tools, as well as an example of a basic mod-map to go alongside it, called a “Raptor Rapture”, a simple wave-based survival mode. Definitely excited to show this so you can see what the UE4 Engine is capable of! Keep in mind this is a small mod, so what you’ll be able to produce can be much much more. This Thursday, Wildcard Jesse will be appearing on Epic Games twitch stream, where he’ll talk about the game, the engine and more! [b]Upcoming patches[/b] We’ve just hit v1.60 and are working through the steps of improving the technical game for its many players, members of the content team have also been developing the next set of goodies. Some of this to be steadily rolled out over the coming weeks includes: custom per-pixel custom sign painting, expanded illness and weather states, Plesiosaurus, Spinosaurus, Meganeura, Shastasaurus, the mysterious Cave of the Hunter that didn’t make it into Early Access launch (there are of course already 6 major cave networks to explore in ARK currently, along with 12 underwater minicaves) -- and we can’t wait for you guys to encounter them, and much more, on your ARK soon! [b]Early Access Duties[/b] Since releasing the game we’ve been working on improving performance, stability as well as connection issues. A few of these fixes have been deployed, but this work will be ever-present and ongoing, and just about every day you’re going to get an update that will take a step forward! Our commitment is to you, our player-base, to deliver nothing less than the ultimate large-scale survival experience that you can enjoy on your home computer of choice. We have an excellent veteran engineering team, and they will not rest until we get all the way there, together.