The Loot Drops Editor
This editor is compatible with Ark: Survival Evolved projects.
Ark server admins have a great deal of control over the items players can find in their server’s loot drops, beaver dams, bosses, and creature inventories. This guide will help admins understand the large number of settings and how they all work together.
Video
Loot drop design is a complex topic. See the Welcome to Beacon video for a more visual explanation of the topic.
Glossary
Here are some terms to understand first:
- Loot Drop: Anything that produces loot. This could be a drop that descends from the sky, a cave crate, ocean crate, dino drop, beaver damn, a volcanic rock, and more.
- Item Set: Each loot drop contains one or more item sets. Think of these like a folder.
- Item Set Entry: Each item set contains one or more item set entries. They contain the instructions for picking items, as well as their quality and quantities.
Loot Drops
In Ark, anything unedited remains default, so Beacon works the same way. The Loot Drops column starts out empty because no changes have been made to the loot drops.
Press the New Drop button in the Loot Drops column to open the Add Loot Drop wizard. Or hold the button down to display a menu and quickly add a loot drop.
The Add Loot Drop wizard shows you all the loot drops available for the selected map(s). This means that if you see a drop in the list, a selected map uses it in some way.
There are two additional options at the bottom of the Add Loot Drop window:
- Load Default Contents When Available: This option will add the drop setup exactly as if it had not been changed at all. This is a good place to start if you want to make minor changes to loot, or learn how the drops were originally designed. This option works with almost all loot drops, but Genesis loot crates and mod drops may not have defaults. Checking this option will skip the next step.
- Show Experimental Loot Drops: Shows many additional drops that Ark does not officially support editing. Some have unusual requirements or do not work like normal drops. Fishing, quakes, and orbital drops are the most notable “unusual” drops.
Select one or more loot drops and press Next/Done or double-click a loot drop. If the Load Default Contents When Available option is unchecked, the Customize Loot Drop page will be displayed with the following options:
- Min Item Sets and Max Item Sets: A loot drop will contain one or more item sets. The Min Item Sets and Max Item Sets fields are used to determine how many of the item sets to select when the game generates loot.
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Prevent Duplicates: When checked, Ark can only select an item set once. This does not affect the contents of each set. For example, if two sets contain a metal sword, it is still possible for two metal swords to be included.
If this option is unchecked, Ark will be able to select the same item set multiple times until the number of item sets is reached. For example, if both Min Item Sets and Max Item Sets are set to ten and only one item set is included in the loot drop, the same item set will be selected ten times.
- Templates: Templates are a set of instructions to build an item set. Checking templates in the list will include the item sets when finished. Templates can also be added to a loot drop later. Read more about templates in Using Templates to Automate Item Set Creation.
Additional Settings
After you press Done to add your loot drops, they will be selected in the Loot Drops column. At the top of the middle column, labeled Item Sets, you will find the same settings, as well as an Add Item Sets to Default setting. When enabled, the item sets from the drop will be added to the default loot pool instead of replacing it. This setting is tricky to master, however, and your item sets must use weight values that play nicely with the default weights, which are always between 0 and 1. It is strongly recommended that you load and edit the default content instead of using this option.
Item Sets
Item sets have settings and behavior very similar to loot drops. An item set consists of one or more item set entries, or just entries for short. Each item set has Min Entries, Max Entries, and Prevent Duplicates settings that behave exactly like a loot drop, with one exception. If Prevent Duplicates is enabled for the item set but disabled for the drop, an entry will be removed from the item set as soon as it is selected. If the item set is selected again, the entry is no longer in the item set’s pool and cannot be selected again.
Press the New Item Set button in the Item Sets column to add an empty item set. Hold down the button to display a menu to add an item set based on one of your templates. The new item set is selected.
Item Set Weight
The Weight field is used to influence Ark’s loot selection. The chance of an item set being selected is calculated as Weight / SUM(All weights in drop). This means that two item sets with the same weight have the same chance of being selected. The weight values of each could be 1, 10, 100, or 1,000 and the result would be the same. If “Item Set A” has a weight of 100 and “Item Set B” has a weight of 100, the formula for “Item Set A” would be 100 / (100 + 100) or 0.5 or 50%. If the weight of “Item Set A” changes to 150, the formula for “Item Set A” will be 150 / (150 + 100) or 0.6 or 60%. The formula for “Item Set B” would become 100 / (150 + 100) or 0.4 or 40%.
This means that it is mathematically impossible to guarantee that one item set will always be chosen unless the Min Item Sets is equal to the number of item sets in the loot drop. However, you could set the weights of three item sets to 1 and a fourth set to 1,000,000, effectively guaranteeing that the fourth set will always be selected.
Item Set Entries
Press the New Entry button in the Item Set Entries column to begin adding something to the item set.
In the Possible Items group you can search for items and click the checkbox next to items you’d like to add. Each checked item has a value in the Weight column that works exactly like the item set weight. At the top of the group is a search field for quickly finding items, and below that is the tag picker. The tags can be clicked to change how the list is filtered. A left click will show a menu to pick a mode. A right click will cycle modes. Gray tags are neutral and have no effect on the filtering. Blue tags are required, which means the list will only show items that have all of the blue tags. Red tags are excluded, which means the list will hide items that have any of the red tags. Learn more about tagging.
Enter “Shotgun” into the search field in Possible Items and press the checkbox next to “Simple Shotgun Ammo”. Set both Min Quantity and Max Quantity to 100 so this row will always contain a full stack of shotgun shells. Quality does not matter for ammo. Set Chance To Be Blueprint to 0%, and Weight to 10000. You’ll see why in a moment. Press OK to add the row.
Now, our goal is to add both a Shotgun and a Pump-Action Shotgun to the drop, but only one should be included at a time. There are two ways to accomplish this.
Method 1
Press the add button again and filter to “Shotgun” like before. Then check both Shotgun and Pump-Action Shotgun. Set quantities to 1, qualities to Primitive, blueprint chance to 0%, and weight to 1. Press OK and one row for each item will be added to the list.
Using the settings at the top of the Item Set Entries column, set both Min Entries and Max Entries to 2. Make sure Prevent Duplicates is enabled.
Because the shotgun shells have a weight of 10,000 and the shotguns have a weight of 1, the shells will be selected for the first entry nearly every time. Since Prevent Duplicates is turned on, the entry cannot be selected twice. So the second selected entry will be either the Shotgun or Pump-Action Shotgun entries. They will have equal chances of selection because they have equal weights.
Press the Simulator button in the Item Sets column to open the simulator. The simulator will show you an example of the contents you could find when opening the loot drop. Press the Reroll button to re-run the simulation, and press the Simulator button again if you’d like to close it.
Method 2
While the first method works perfectly fine, it can become complicated using weights when there are more items in the set. Luckily, Ark gives us another option. First, delete the Shotgun and Pump-Action Shotgun entries from the Item Set Entries column. Press the New Entry button again and just like before select both shotguns, and reduce their blueprint chance to 0%. This time though, the weight does not matter, and you will need to click the Merge selections into one entry at the bottom of the Possible Items list. When you press OK, Beacon will add only one row to the list.
When setup this way, we can be 100% certain that each entry will be selected only once because we have still have Min Entries and Max Entries set to 2, and Prevent Duplicates turned on. But when the Pump-Action Shotgun or Shotgun entry is selected, Ark will choose one of the two items instead.
Check the simulator again, and the behavior should be the same as before: a pump action shotgun or shotgun with 100 shells.
More Entry Settings
There are some additional features in the item set entries to note.
- Choose only one item: When Merge selections into one entry is turned on, Ark will normally re-run the loot selection for each unit of quantity. For example, if the minimum and maximum quantities are both set to 100, and the item set entry contains both arrows and tranq arrows, the 100 arrows will be split based on weight. With equal weight this would be about 50 of each arrow. For large amounts, this is very taxing on the server and will cause lag when loot drops spawn. If you enable the Choose only one item option, Ark will choose one item first and then give the full amount to that item. Beacon will automatically use this setting when there is only one item in an item set entry.
- Stat Limits Multiplier: If Item Stat Limits are enabled for the server, the limits for loot selected by this entry can be adjusted. Values greater than 1.0 increase the limit, while values less than 1.0 decrease the limit.
- Prevent Grinding: Enabling this option will generate loot that cannot be fed to the industrial grinder.
More Tips
It’s not uncommon to want one loot drop to be the same as another. Beacon has a few ways to help with this.
First, the Duplicate button in the Loot Drops list allows you to copy a loot drop into one or more loot drops. In the Add Loot Drop wizard that appears, you can shift-click on the drops to select a range. Or hold the Control key (Command on MacOS) while clicking to select non-sequential drops.
Second, you can use the same clicking techniques to select multiple loot drops and edit them at the same time. However, you’ll only see item sets that are identical between all selected loot drops. You can also select multiple item sets.
Third, Beacon supports copy and paste. So you can copy loot drops between projects, or item sets between loot drops. You can even copy a loot drop and paste its config line directly into your ini if you like.