How to transfer Ark saves between Multiplayer Servers and Single player

It's fairly easy to transfer between single player and multiplayer, hopefully this will take all of the googling out of the equation for you and save any frustrations (I'm looking at you, config files).

IMPORTANT NOTE ON REMOVING HOST TAG: If you go from a locally hosted game to multiplayer, you will have your name shown from a long distance away with the tag, "HOST" and the distance you are from players. To remove this, you need to do the following:
1) Back up your two profile files.
2) Kill yourself and create a new survivor (this will delete your current character, so put all of your stuff somewhere)
3) Stop the server and replace your profile files with the two you backed up.
4) Restart the server and log on
5) Force yourself into the tribe and force yourself to be the tribe founder (if you were the founder to start with) - this can be done with the "showmyadminmanager" command, and then the "ForcePlayerToJoinTargetTribe" command while looking at your tribe's structure, followed by, "MakeTribeAdmin" or "MakeTribeFounder" commands.

I hope this was useful, please do drop any questions or feedback down in the comments section.

Good luck and have fun!

[itwaskev]

Damn, so glad I googled this. So glad it works. Thank you, this helped me do exactly what I wanted. I'll come back and cry later if anything goes wrong a few months down the line as Ark is buggy enough, we know so messing with servers and single player games...could get nasty haha.

EDIT: Ok anyone wanting to still be in their tribe and continue using their base...don't forget there must be a tribe file somewhere on the server. Didn't see that mentioned unless I missed it? Running around my base now in single player unable to access or do anything hahaha. Back to my server files to see if there is anything else.

Double EDIT: Ok I found my tribe file to copy over...but it did not work.
I am in the game, still not in my tribe so can't access my stuff, making this not worth while. Any ideas how to fix this? Too late now will try again tomorrow. Might it be that I need to add my tribe mate too? even though she won't be playing on my single player. Not sure how I can get the tribe to recognise me

[drstupid]

Thanks. It works on the epic store version too. They were giving it away free recently. 👍

[marcjan]

F*cking Awesome mate ! I made a save of the server that we played with for few hundreds hours with friends "just in case" and now i can get back some of our old stuff in our game ! Fantastic ! Thanks a lot !

[WhamyKaBlamy]

Hi everyone, I'm sorry it has taken me so long to post this, but there is a fix for the crash when you try to load old server saves.
What you need to do is go to your launch options, in steam you right click on the game and select properties and then in the launch options at the bottom type the following:
-preventhibernation

Once you've done that, copy this command ready to go:
destroywilddinos

Load up your save and immediately open the console. Paste in the destroywilddinos command and exit as soon as they've all disappeared. Close down ark as soon as you do the command, remove the launch option and voila! You should have access to your old saves.

I will put a video up about this soon. Sorry I've been slow on this.

[britneynicole]

This was a HUGE help, thank you so very much!

[EchoOkami]

What a legend. You saved me hours of pain!

[flameboy]

Am I able to transfer from an official server to singleplayer on Xbox ?

[SiimukaSusah]

it doesnt work from server to single player, it keep crashed

[Clxwn]

Me and my friend are currently playing on Non-Dedicated Sessions but we are getting a server in like 3 months

[corner]

Question, I did all of this and the characters saved but not anything in the world or the items, any tips?

[KingRusty]

im trying to find out how to transfer a dino from multiplayer to singleplayer. someone told me you could do it by using the dino stats from the export dino option but i havent been able to figure it out

[GaminatorLP]

I have tried to pur my Valguero Server files into Single Player But the Game crashed when its loading i have renamed my char to Local Player the .ark and .arkbak and dont touched the logs and schripts But it didnt work 😢

[elmariachi]

I am trying to move from an old server to a new one .. I copied the whole 'Saved' folder over. But when entering the server it's always the default world. No character data or map data has been ported :( What could be the reason?

[zukii]

Unfortunately this doesn't work for me. It always gives me an error, that says my TheIsland.ark file is corrupted. I tried using multiple backup files but I just cant get it to work.
Weird thing is: The Nitrado server is still up and running, no corrupted files there, eventho they are freshly downloaded from their Data-Browser...
I dont know if it has anything to do with this, but I cant access the FTP server with FileZilla from that Nitrado Server. I tried it with the server running and stopped. No luck. I shouldn't make a difference tho, since I have the files from their Webinterface. Or is it possible that this is why the files are corrupted?

Edit: I got FileZilla to work! That wasn't the fault.. :(

[xombiemike]

@WhamyKaBlamy is this the same for Ark Survival Ascended?

[buyardentme]

K, I hope I'm ready now to export my and my friends Singlerplayer file to multiplayer. I gonna tell you when everything worked correctly.
This is like the only video I can find to this theme what is understandable =D

EDIT:
SUCCES 1: My world and my player included my Inventory and Dinosaurs are on my unofficial server now.
PROBLEM 1: My Character doesn't belong to the Tribe I founded on the local server (I am going to reinstall everything again, probably something went wrong.

[WhamyKaBlamy]

Oh man, everyone can see my man-cat-crush on Raz now >_>

[Pentalax]

This might all work well and is a great video for all who know what they are doing in server administration, but for a dummy, who never set a sever up before it is highly confusing when both directions are basically covered in the same sentence. Instead of covering completely from Single to Multi first and then entirely from Multi to Single, or vice versa, it is confusing when both get covered at once. Plus The video assumes we know the steam ID and where to get it etc. but the thought, that usually server admins who do this all day long, or quite frequently, don't really need tutorial Videos and so to say first time users who have no clue how and what to do, are easily overwhelmed with all the pre assumptions of all we should have knowledge about prior to even trying to understand what this video will be all about.

[pangeagamer]

So does this work for other people's servers or only your own?

[mattpachal]

I got my server swapped over, except my character didnt follow, wants me to create a new one but i wont be in my tribe.