Despite being dropped into the world of Ark: Survival Evolved all by your lonesome, the game actually encourages you to find other players and group up into Tribes. You can think of a tribe as a guild or clan if you’ve ever played an MMO, but they do more than just add a tribe name above your head. Bonus experience, shared spawn points and animals are just a few of the perks for joining with a tribe. Of course you have to be careful when joining a tribe, particularly if it’s with people you don’t know.

For a complete look at what tribes can offer your lonely survivor, read on!

How do I Join/ Create a Tribe?

Tribes can be created via the controls in the top right of the character/ inventory screen. There you can choose the name of your tribe and then assign tribe administrators once you’ve added your first few members.

To invite other players to your tribe, walk up to them and while you are facing them, open the interface wheel with ‘E’. You can then select “invite to tribe” to send them an invite. The invited player must then accept to officially become a part of the tribe.

Strength of the Pack

The main benefit of a Tribe is that you don’t have to go it alone. Dinosaurs, starvation, dehydration, and other unfriendly players make the island a dangerous place for solo travellers. Having a group of players to defend, build shelter, gather food and watch each other’s backs makes things much less difficult and more fun.

If you want to build a thriving camp, tribes make it a lot easier by allowing each member to use their points to unlock different things thereby reducing the amount of time needed to gain access to all of the craftables. A solo player would need to level twice as much to unlock them all himself.

Sharing is Caring

Sharing food, items, and even animals is one of the cornerstones of tribe functionality. When you join a tribe you will have access to the other player’s tamed animals and any storage lockers that were created by your tribe. Any future animals you tame will be added to the tribe for everyone to use.

However many tribes assign animals to certain members of the tribe, so make sure you’re in the clear when taking a sabretooth out for a joyride, or risk irking your other tribemates.

Tribes will also benefit from having common stores of food and basic items like stone tools and cloth clothing for tribesmen who get killed in the field. Speaking of which, if you do end up getting killed you can use any one of your tribemates beds as a respawn point. No randomized spawn location for you!

Faster Levelling

Another benefit of being in a tribe is faster levelling. Whenever you are close to one of your fellow tribemates you will gain a small portion of whatever XP they gain. If you group up with a large number of tribesman, you can gather quite a bit of XP in a short period of time, allowing you to unlock new blueprints to use to make your tribe more powerful.

The benefits of the tribe are many, but ultimately it comes down to the type of player you are. If you like grouping up then tribes just make it that much more worth while.