Black pearls are the only resource in ARK whose main design constraint is your saddle. At 2.0 weight each and 200 per stack, a full stack is 400 weight — heavier than a stack of obsidian or crystal (100 per stack) and than metal ore (300 per stack, because metal stacks to 300). Ten black pearls weigh exactly as much as a thousand silica pearls.
That single fact reorganises how you farm them, spend them, and decide whether a trip was worth it. All figures below are the cached values in ark-resources.json.
The pearl card
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Rarity | Rare |
| Weight | 2.0 |
| Stack size | 200 |
| Weight of a full stack | 400 |
| Added in | 238.0 |
| Renewable | Yes |
| Hexagon value | not listed |
Black pearls are a rare resource pulled from the deep sea and certain creatures. — ARK Wiki
The official description is deliberately sparse — it tells you where black pearls are found and nothing else, which is why the community knowledge around them is mostly about how to survive getting them home.
The weight comparison that changes the plan
Put black pearls next to the other seafloor resources and the design intent becomes obvious:
| Resource | Weight | Stack | Weight per stack | Relative to black pearl |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Black Pearl | 2.0 | 200 | 400 | 1x |
| Silica Pearls | 0.02 | 100 | 2.0 | 100x lighter |
| Crystal | 1.0 | 100 | 100 | 2x lighter |
| Obsidian | 1.0 | 100 | 100 | 2x lighter |
| Ammonite Bile | 0.2 | 50 | 10 | 10x lighter |
A pearl is heavier than the obsidian you mine on the same dive, and a hundred times heavier than the silica pearl you probably picked up on the way. That is deliberate: black pearls are a “return to base” resource, not something you scoop up while exploring.
The practical version: 20 black pearls is 40 weight, which is a serious chunk of a mid-game water mount’s capacity, and 200 is 400 weight, a load that will stall most routes before you get home. Plan on twenty to forty pearls per trip, not two hundred.
What they are for
The cached recipe data names black pearls in one place, and the quantity is small:
| Recipe | Black Pearl | Oil | Level | Engram points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Absorbent Substrate | 2 | 2 | 84 | 60 |
Two pearls and two oil, at level 84 for 60 points. Absorbent Substrate’s description calls it “a sticky compound that excels at absorbing other chemicals”, and it is the item that turns black pearls from a curiosity into a material with a purpose.
That recipe shape is unusual. Sixty engram points is a serious spend, and it buys a recipe that consumes the two rarest fluids in the game — black pearls from the seafloor, oil from rocks, veins, dung beetles or a Hesperornis farm. The oil page covers the second half, and the pairing is why black-pearl farming and oil farming tend to happen in the same week.
Because the recipe consumes 2 pearls, the useful unit of measurement is a pair: 4 weight and 4 oil per craft. Twenty pearls is ten crafts. That is the number to hold in your head when deciding whether a dive is worth it — not the stack.
Where black pearls come from
The infobox gives one source and one phrase: “from the bottom of the sea”. The wiki Black Pearl page splits the answer into three parts: creatures you harvest, map-specific sources, and routes that need no dive at all.
Which creatures drop them
A dead body is the main source. The wiki names seven creatures whose corpses yield black pearls: Trilobite, Deathworm, Eurypterid, Ammonite, Tusoteuthis, Alpha Tusoteuthis and Alpha Mosasaur.
- Eurypterid — the wiki advises an Ichthyosaurus or a Manta. Neither takes knockback and neither gains Torpidity, so a eurypterid goes down without much of a fight. The same entry warns that the eurypterid drains your mount stamina fast, which leaves you exposed to the rest of the deep.
- Tusoteuthis — the endgame route is a Megalodon with a Megalodon Tek Saddle. The element pulses kill one, and the Megalodon harvests the pearls afterwards. A Mosasaurus works too, but it is harder to kill and gives fewer pearls.
- Alpha Tusoteuthis and Alpha Mosasaur — the wiki draws a clear line between the alphas and the ordinary versions, and puts the bigger haul on the alphas. Hunt them when the trip takes you deep enough to reach one.
- Ammonite and Trilobite — plain body harvests with no special route attached.
- Deathworm — a body harvest, and on Scorched Earth a desert source rather than a sea source.
Two techniques raise what you bring home without a body. A Beelzebufo does increased damage against eurypterids and gathers black pearls at an increased rate. And a Grappling Hook can hook a eurypterid so a fast water mount drags it to shore, where a Therizinosaur harvests it for extra pearls.
Where to find them
Open water and underwater caves. Most pearls come off creatures you kill in the water, so the sea floor is the main source. Fjordur adds two underwater cave systems: the wiki changelog records black pearls being added to the Poison Wyvern Trench and the Lightning Wyvern Trench.
Shore and desert. On Scorched Earth, Deathworms and Alpha Deathworms drop black pearls in the desert, so no dive is needed there. On Aberration, a black clam like a silica pearl clam spawns near the rivers at Graves of the Lost. The wiki warns that ground is radioactive, with Nameless, Rock Drake and aggressive dinos dropped from above.
Clams on four more maps. Ragnarok, Crystal Isles, Valguero and Lost Island each carry a black clam variant. You harvest them the same way as a silica pearl clam, and the collection scales with your server Harvest Amount setting. On Crystal Isles the clams sit in the water bubbles of the Eldritch Isle: a small one you can take by hand, with an Anglerfish collecting faster, and a large one only a Dunkleosteus can harvest. On Lost Island they are in Shoola Falls Cave and in a sunken shipwreck at 78.3 lat, 20.6 lon.
Two maps that skip the sea. On Extinction, corrupted carnivores such as the Corrupted Spino, Corrupted Rex, Corrupted Wyvern and Corrupted Giganotosaurus drop them in the north, and Hard and Legendary orbital supply drops have a chance. On Genesis Part 2, the light blue pearls on the pearl asteroids in the -Space- biome respawn quickly, and dead Carniflora in the Corrupted Gardens drop them.
Sources that need no dive at all. A Fishing Rod can pull black pearls as rare loot when you catch fish. A tamed Otter can rarely collect black pearls from fish corpses. A tamed Phoenix will sometimes poop them out instead of its usual silica pearls. And a Gacha produces black pearls along with other items. On Extinction the wiki calls the Gacha the best way to get black pearls.
What to bring
- A mount with real carry weight. The Basilosaurus is the durable deep-water option, and the Mosasaurus lets you stay down long enough for the trip to count. The Ichthyosaurus is the wiki pick for eurypterids specifically.
- Tools. A Grappling Hook if you plan to drag a kill to shore, a Fishing Rod for the fish-carried pearls, and a weapon for the deep, because a stamina-drained mount cannot fight back.
- Capacity. At 2.0 each, forty pearls is 80 weight. That is a realistic one-trip load for a mid-game water mount.
- The trip home. A full stack is 400 weight, and the deeper you swim the less room you have to spare. The wiki is blunt about the other half of the problem: the eurypterid drains a tamed mount stamina fast, which leaves you exposed to the rest of the deep. That is the argument for a short trip with a light load.
- A way to spend them. Tusoteuthis prefer black pearls as food. Each pearl restores 30 Food and grants 50 Taming Affinity, so a spare pearl is also a step toward taming the next one. The Phoenix and Gacha routes feed that habit too.
Farming that respects the numbers
The dataset does not publish yields per creature or per node, so the advice has to be structural rather than numeric. Three rules follow from the weight data:
- Dive light. Every slot of metal or crystal you carry down is capacity you cannot use on the way up. The exploration guide covers the loadout discipline for underwater trips.
- Bank in small batches. Forty pearls is 80 weight and covers twenty crafts. Banking two hundred means one long, dangerous trip instead of five short ones.
- Never mix the trip. Silica pearls, crystal and obsidian are all 2x to 100x lighter per stack. Fill the light cargo first, then top off with black pearls if capacity remains.
An aquatic mount with real carry weight is the difference between a pearl run and a pearl loss. The Basilosaurus is the durable deep-water option, and the Mosasaurus is the one that lets you stay down long enough to make the trip count.
Why the rare tag matters for trading
Black pearls are marked Rare and are not listed with a hexagon value, unlike silica pearls at 125 and crystal at 115. In the cached data that omission is consistent across the rarest items: the economy fields are filled in for bulk resources and left blank for trophies and endgame materials.
What you can say from the data is that the stack economics are inverted. A stack of silica pearls weighs 2.0 and holds 100 units. A stack of black pearls weighs 400 and holds 200. Per unit, a black pearl is 100 times heavier than a silica pearl — which is why tribes treat them as a scheduled expedition rather than a resource.
The resources tier list places them in context with the rest of the set, and how to get silica pearls shows the light alternative used in electronics.
Where black pearls fit in progression
The level 84 requirement on Absorbent Substrate puts black pearls firmly in the late mid-game, well after the Fabricator at 48 and the Chemistry Bench’s 250-polymer build. By the time you need them, you should already have a water mount, a route, and a reason to go.
If you are still choosing what to farm first, the resources strategy page sequences the late-game materials, and the crafting guide shows which stations sit above the pearl tier.