With ten official maps and several others that are fan-made, many people choose to run a few different servers to have one on Ragnarok and one on Extinction, for example. Some people choose to run private, password-protected servers that require authentication to join or local servers only on their local machine.Īn ARK Server is set up to run a specific instance of ARK. Many people host their servers and leave them open to the public as well. Wildcard hosts its official servers that anyone can join.
An ARK server is basically a computer that contains an instance of ARK: Survival that other people can connect to and play on.