Gasoline is the item that converts a base from a campfire economy into an industrial one, and its recipe is one of the few in ARK where the numbers are genuinely clean: 6 oil, 5 hide, a craft count of 5, and 0.1 weight per unit. Everything else about fuel planning can be derived from those four figures.
The values below are the cached fields in ark-resources.json and ark-items.json. Where the dataset is silent — burn rates, per-node yields — this page says so rather than guessing.
The gasoline card
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Crafted in | Refining Forge |
| Alternate stations | Industrial Forge, Chemistry Bench, Phoenix, Magmasaur |
| Oil per cycle | 6 |
| Hide per cycle | 5 |
| Craft-quantity field | 5 |
| Weight | 0.1 |
| Stack size | 100 |
| Weight of a full stack | 10 |
| Rarity | Uncommon |
| Renewable | Yes |
| Combustible | Yes |
Gasoline is an advanced fuel refined from oil to run generators and vehicles. — ARK Wiki
That is the whole item in a single line. Gasoline exists to be burned, and the interesting question is never what is it but how much oil does my base actually need.
The 1.2-oil ratio
Assume the craft-quantity field of 5 means a cycle returns five units — the same convention the data uses for Sparkpowder, where 2 flint plus 1 stone yields 2. Then the conversion is:
| Input | Weight in | Gasoline out | Weight out | Oil per gasoline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 Oil + 5 Hide | 1.25 | 5 | 0.5 | 1.2 |
| 60 Oil + 50 Hide | 12.5 | 50 | 5.0 | 1.2 |
| 120 Oil + 100 Hide | 25.0 | 100 | 10.0 | 1.2 |
The weight column is the useful one. Oil weighs 0.2 and hide 0.01, so 6 oil plus 5 hide is 1.25 weight of input for 0.5 weight of output. Fuel is weight-negative: you lose 60% of the mass in the conversion.
That is why a fuel run is never a weight problem. One hundred oil is 20 weight and becomes roughly 83 gasoline at 8.3 weight — an amount of fuel that will run a station for a long time and costs almost nothing to carry.
Hide is the free half. At 0.01 weight and a stack of 200, a single hunting trip produces more hide than a forge session can consume, and every saddle, sleeping bag and armour recipe competes for it. Oil is the half that costs a trip.
What actually burns it
The cached item slice is alphabetical, so it does not contain every station in the game. Within it, exactly one structure lists Gasoline in its fuel field:
| Structure | Fuel field | Level | Engram points | Health |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Industrial Forge | Gasoline | 80 | 90 | 27,000 |
That is the mass-smelting station: 2,500 metal ingots, 250 crystal, 600 cementing paste and 400 oil to build. The build cost alone is 80 weight of oil, which is four full stacks of the raw material — before a single ingot is smelted.
This is the trap the gasoline page exists to warn about. The Industrial Forge is not a fuel-efficient upgrade; it is a structure that demands oil twice, once as a construction material and once as a fuel. A tribe that builds it without a passive oil supply has built a very expensive decoration.
The oil page covers the supply side: oil rocks, oil veins on six maps, dung beetles and the Hesperornis egg route that turns 1 egg into 12 oil in an Industrial Cooker.
The Aberration alternative
Gasoline has a second recipe, and it does not use oil at all:
| Gas-Crafted recipe | Quantity |
|---|---|
| Congealed Gas Ball | 20 |
| Green Gem or Fragmented Green Gem | 20 |
| Output | Gasoline |
Congealed Gas Ball weighs 0.1 and stacks to 100; green gems weigh 0.5 and stack to 100. On Aberration, where gas veins are the local resource and oil rocks are scarce, this is the intended route — and it is why the map plays differently from every other: fuel comes from the ceiling, not the seafloor.
The Aberration map guide covers where those veins sit, and the element page explains why green gems appear in so many Aberration recipes.
Building a fuel budget that holds
The arithmetic gives a simple planning frame. Since one craft consumes 6 oil, the unit of account is six:
| Oil on hand | Gasoline produced | Weight of fuel | Forge cycles’ worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | 25 | 2.5 | 5 |
| 60 | 50 | 5.0 | 10 |
| 120 | 100 | 10.0 | 20 |
| 300 | 250 | 25.0 | 50 |
Nobody can tell you how many seconds a gasoline burns — that number is not in this dataset, and inventing it would be worse than leaving it out. What the data does support is the stock ratio: keep oil in multiples of 6 and gasoline in multiples of 5, and the inventory stays clean.
Three habits that follow:
- Smelt in batches. Craft gasoline when the forge is already lit for ingots, not as a separate session. The Refining Forge is listed as a gasoline station and an ingot station, so one fuel load serves both.
- Store fuel, not oil, at the station. Gasoline is 0.1 per unit and stacks to 100 — 10 weight per stack. The same 100 units of oil is 20 weight and still needs crafting.
- Keep hide separate. Hide is 0.01 and stacks to 200, so a dedicated hide chest costs almost nothing and removes the “where did my hide go” moment mid-craft.
The crafting guide shows the station costs that decide how much fuel you need, and the base building guide covers where to put the forge so the fuel run is short.
Reading the fuel as an economy
Gasoline’s hexagon value is not published in the cached fields, unlike oil’s exchange quantity of 20 or metal’s 150. What the data does show is a clean chain: oil (0.2 weight, stack 100, exchange 20) becomes gasoline (0.1 weight, stack 100, combustible). Every step halves the weight and doubles the utility.
For a player, that means the correct mental model is not “I need gasoline” but “I need six oil per batch and a reason to light the forge”. The resources strategy page applies the same batch logic across the set, and the resources tier list ranks oil and its products against the rest.