ARK: Survival Evolved Valentine’s Event ETA Revealed - Update Today

ARK: Survival Evolved wants to share the love with its community during a 48-hour Valentine’s Day event. Starting around 6 p.m. EST on Tuesday, survivors will be privy to boosted taming and mating as well as special Dino skins. In case you missed Saturday’s Community Crunch blog post, here’s a quick recap of each holiday perk.

• Tames have a 5 percent chance of dropping a Chocolate Cake when mating. This will either fully heal your survivor or advance a Dino’s tame bar by 50 percent.
• Red, pink and white wild creatures can be found wandering the ARKs in search of love’s kiss.

Certain servers (including official ones) using the -vday parameter will get additional mate bonuses:

• Mate boosted range doubled
• Mating speed and recovery tripled
• Maturation and egg incubation speed tripled
• Baby food consumption decreased

In case that’s not enough, Studio Wildcard will also let fans create customizable ecards to download and share on social media. Simply pick the image you want, compose a custom message and save the resulting image to your computer or smart device. It’s not the most in-depth card creation tool on the web, but it’s probably the only one that lets you reveal your truest emotions in a totally prehistoric way. Now’s the time to let your tribemates know how much your appreciate them saving your butt during that last ambush.

The event lasts for a full 48 hours, so, provided it truly begins at 6 p.m. EST today, it will conclude at 6 p.m. EST on Feb. 15.

The ARK: Survival Evolved Valentine’s event arrives days after the game’s biggest post-launch update for free players. As Wildcard detailed on Thursday, the Dino TLC update added new skins and functions for underused creatures. The full patch notes also feature dozens of small fixes designed to encourage a greater sense of overall Dino balance. If you haven’t experienced the changes yet, a brief period of mating boosts is a solid temptation to learn more about these new developments.

The Valentine’s Day event is much meatier than last year’s Christmas celebration. Because Wildcard was busy trying to finish the Aberration DLC, that holiday perk was entirely skin-related. This time, the limited Chocolate Cake makes things slightly more interesting.

ARK: Survival Evolved is available now on PC, Xbox One, PS4, OS X and Linux. Assuming deployment goes smoothly, the Valentine’s event content should go live simultaneously across all platforms.

What are your thoughts on ARK’s Valentine’s event for 2018? Were you expecting more? Tell us in the comments section!