Getting ARK: Survival Evolved(From Epic) on macOS working

This is just me using Medium as a blog to store random bits of info…

ARK: Survival Evolved has recently appeared on Stadia®. I got it for “free” as a pro subscriber and after a few hours of taming dinos by myself was interested in playing with my son. Stadia doesn’t support any type of server though.

Once upon a time my son had downloaded ARK for macOS from the Epic Game Store (got it for free if I remember correctly) and so I was interested to see if we could set up a dedicated server so that we could do some head-head dino battles. He had never really gotten it to work well though and had deleted it long ago. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the Epic-Apple joy that has been going on recently, but Epic no longer lists Apple support for ARK. That being said if you have already purchased it, the download link from your Epic Games library appears to work fine, and 96 GB later I apparently had ARK downloaded.

Unfortunately attempting to launch it on my machine using Epic Games Launcher(an Intel iMac with 24G running 11.6) didn’t appear to do anything. After a bit of research with Activity Monitor it came clear that ARK wasn’t signed or notarized and it looks like GateKeeper was carefully checking all 96GB before launching. I don’t know if it will ever launch, as I wasn’t willing to wait that long.

Without any subtlety at all I disabled GateKeeper by disabling SIP, and instead of appearing to do nothing at all at launch ARK quickly crashed.

Taking a look at the logs it was printing:

ICU data directory was not discovered:
../../../Shared/Content/Internationalization
../../../Engine/Content/Internationalization

What was this relative to though? I started tracing the file accesses using fs_usage and noticed that the first place that file commands starting failing was when looking for /Users/Shared/Epic Games/ARKSurvivalEvolved/ShooterGame.app/Contents/UE4/ShooterGame/Binaries so for grins I added the directory mkdir -p "/Users/Shared/Epic Games/ARKSurvivalEvolved/ShooterGame.app/Contents/UE4/ShooterGame/Binaries". I tried to launch it again and saw it made it slightly farther; failing when it looked for /Users/Shared/Epic Games/ARKSurvivalEvolved/ShooterGame.app/Contents/UE4/ShooterGame/Binaries/Mac . I added the new directory usingmkdir -p "/Users/Shared/Epic Games/ARKSurvivalEvolved/ShooterGame.app/Contents/UE4/ShooterGame/Binaries/Mac" and all of a sudden I started hearing theme music.

So in summary to get it launching:

• Disable SIP
• mkdir -p "/Users/Shared/Epic Games/ARKSurvivalEvolved/ShooterGame.app/Contents/UE4/ShooterGame/Binaries/Mac"
• Launch it using the Epic Games Launcher

It takes a glacial amount of time to actually load up in single player but it did work for me. Unfortunately as soon as I tried to start up a server, things started crashing again. I decided I had better things to do like see how well using console codes would make ARK work in Stadia instead.

I’m sorry to say I don’t have an M1 conveniently available to try it out on, so I have no idea if it will run there using these instructions. Given that you can’t actually “buy” it anymore from Epic, I’m guessing it won’t. I haven’t tried buying it from Steam.

Here’s hoping these random nuggets of info will be useful to someone out there… it would be GREAT if we could get a x86_64, Apple Silicon version of ARK that actually worked well on the latest macOS, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Also, fixing up the Stadia version so that it runs as well as it could would be greatly appreciated.