Flint looks like a starter resource and behaves like an industrial one. It weighs 0.05 per unit, stacks to 100, and every single piece can be manufactured from stone at a 2-to-1 ratio in an Industrial Grinder. That combination — cheap to carry, infinitely convertible, and sitting under every explosive in the game — makes flint the quiet backbone of ARK’s crafting chain.
The numbers below are the cached infobox and recipe values from ark-resources.json.
The flint ledger
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Weight per unit | 0.05 |
| Stack size | 100 |
| Weight of a full stack | 5.0 |
| Hexagon value | 18 |
| Supply crate colours | White, Green, Blue |
| Rarity | Common |
| Renewable | Yes |
Flint is a ferroceric material that holds a cutting edge better than ordinary stone. — ARK Wiki
That hexagon value is the lowest of any resource in the cached set. Wood is 25, stone is 40, crystal 115, metal 150, electronics 700 and element 2,000. Flint at 18 tells you the game prices it as near-worthless in bulk — and yet the recipes built on top of it are not cheap at all.
Stone becomes flint at 2-to-1
The Industrial Grinder entry on flint lists quantity1: 2 against Stone with a craft quantity of 1. Two stone in, one flint out.
Run the weight through that:
| Input | Weight in | Output | Weight out |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 Stone | 1.0 | 1 Flint | 0.05 |
| 200 Stone | 100 | 100 Flint | 5.0 |
| 2,000 Stone | 1,000 | 1,000 Flint | 50 |
Smelting stone into flint compresses weight by 20x. That is the single best weight-conversion trick in the early economy, and it matters because stone is the resource you always have too much of. A Doedicurus run that fills twenty stone stacks produces 2,000 stone — which is 1,000 flint, or ten full flint stacks, for 50 weight.
The Doedicurus is the stone half of that equation. If you already run one for building material, the grinder turns the surplus into ammunition without a second trip anywhere.
Flint is really a sparkpowder ingredient
Almost nothing consumes flint directly beyond tools. What consumes it is the powder chain:
| Recipe | Flint | Stone | Output | Level | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sparkpowder | 2 | 1 | 2 Sparkpowder | 6 (8 mobile) | 3 |
Sparkpowder weighs 0.1 and stacks to 100. Two flint and one stone weigh 0.6 combined; the two sparkpowder that come out weigh 0.2. The chain is weight-negative in your favour at every step, which is a rare thing in ARK.
Then the chain continues:
| Recipe | Inputs | Output | Station | Level | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gunpowder | 1 Sparkpowder + 1 Charcoal | 1 Gunpowder | Mortar and Pestle, Chemistry Bench | 15 | 2 |
| Charcoal | 1 Wood or Fungal Wood | 1 Charcoal | Cooking Pot, Refining Forge, Industrial Forge | — | — |
Gunpowder weighs 0.1 and comes from 0.1 sparkpowder plus 0.25 charcoal — so it is lighter than its own charcoal input. Charcoal is free fuel by-product once a forge is running, which means the only thing you are genuinely spending is flint and stone.
The Chemistry Bench scales all of it at once: 8 flint and 4 stone for 12 sparkpowder, and 4 sparkpowder plus 4 charcoal for 6 gunpowder. That is 0.67 flint per sparkpowder instead of 1:1, and it is the reason a bench pays for itself on ammunition alone.
The campfire is your first flint sink
The earliest recipe that names flint is not a weapon — it is the thing that keeps you alive on night one:
| Campfire input | Quantity |
|---|---|
| Thatch | 12 |
| Flint | 1 |
| Stone | 16 |
| Wood | 2 |
Level 2, 3 engram points, and one flint. That single unit is why every new player already knows what flint looks like: you cannot cook meat without it, and you cannot survive the first night without cooked meat. The beginner guide sequences the campfire before anything else for exactly this reason.
Beacon colours and the harvesting habit
Flint lists White, Green and Blue as its crate colours — the same trio as Fiber, Hide and Thatch. It is filler-tier loot, which means early beacons deliver it incidentally. If you are running a drop route anyway, you will accumulate flint without trying.
For deliberate gathering, the habit that works is proximity: flint comes from the same rocks you break for stone, so the correct answer to “where do I farm flint” is “wherever you are already farming stone, with a pick rather than a hatchet”. The best gatherers guide page maps harvesters to resources if you want the specialist route, and where to find crystal covers the cave runs where flint and crystal appear together.
What one stack of flint actually becomes
Because every step in the chain has a fixed ratio, a single flint stack can be traced all the way to finished explosives. Start with 100 flint and follow the conversions:
| Stage | Input | Output | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sparkpowder | 100 Flint + 50 Stone | 100 Sparkpowder | 2 flint per 2 powder |
| Gunpowder | 100 Sparkpowder + 100 Charcoal | 100 Gunpowder | 1 for 1, charcoal is forge waste |
| C4 Charge | 60 Gunpowder each | 1.67 charges | ignoring crystal, paste, fiber, hide |
| Grenade | 30 Gunpowder each | 3.33 grenades | plus stone, fiber, hide, ingot |
Five weight of flint, plus stone and charcoal you were burning anyway, is 100 gunpowder — most of a C4 charge or three grenades. The best weapons tier list covers what those explosives are for, and it is worth noticing that the flint line contributes almost nothing to the cost of either item.
Why the flint maths matters later
Every firearm round, every grenade, every C4 charge traces back through gunpowder to sparkpowder to flint. A C4 charge needs 60 gunpowder — which is 60 sparkpowder, which is 60 flint and 30 stone, before you count the 10 crystal, 5 paste, 50 fiber and 5 hide. Sixty flint is 0.6 of a stack and 3 weight. The explosive is expensive because of the crystal and paste, not the flint.
That inversion is the lesson of this page. Flint is never the bottleneck; it is the multiplier. The crafting guide shows the station costs that sit above it, and how to get cementing paste covers the ingredient that actually slows C4 production down.