Sap breaks a rule the rest of ARK follows. Almost every bulk resource stacks to 100, 200 or 300, so you measure a haul in weight. Sap stacks to 30 — with a 0.5 weight per unit, that is 15 weight per stack — and it forces you to measure a haul in inventory slots instead.
That single number is the whole guide. Everything else about sap follows from it: how you farm, how far you travel, and why twenty stacks of a light resource is a worse plan than five.
All figures below are the cached values in ark-resources.json.
The sap card
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Rarity | Uncommon |
| Weight | 0.5 |
| Stack size (PC) | 30 |
| Stack size (mobile) | 20 |
| Weight per full stack | 15 |
| Hexagon value | 150 |
| Exchange quantity | 5 |
| Mobile purchase | 15 slips |
| Added in | 243.0 |
| Renewable | Yes |
Sap is a thick, unrefined resource you tap from trees with a Tree Sap Tap. — ARK Wiki
Three facts deserve attention. The stack of 30 is the smallest of any bulk resource in the set. The mobile stack of 20 is smaller still. And the hexagon value of 150 is the same as metal ore — a resource that weighs 1.0 and stacks to 300.
Sap is priced like metal and carried like glass
Put sap beside the resources it competes with for saddle space:
| Resource | Weight | Stack | Weight per stack | Hexagons |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sap | 0.5 | 30 | 15 | 150 |
| Cactus Sap | 0.1 | 100 | 10 | not listed |
| Oil | 0.2 | 100 | 20 | not listed |
| Crystal | 1.0 | 100 | 100 | 115 |
| Metal | 1.0 | 300 | 300 | 150 |
The comparison that matters is sap against oil. A stack of oil weighs 20 and holds 100 units; a stack of sap weighs 15 and holds 30. Oil gives you 3.3 times the units for 1.3 times the weight, and it occupies the same single slot. If you are deciding what to bring home from a trip that passed both, oil wins on every metric the data gives you.
Against crystal, sap looks efficient: 15 weight versus 100 for the same slot. That is why sap is worth carrying — but only in small quantities, because the slot cost is what bites.
The slot maths of a sap run
Do the arithmetic on a realistic inventory. A player with 30 free slots and a 900-weight carry budget can hold:
| Load | Sap | Weight | Slots used |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 stacks | 150 | 75 | 5 |
| 10 stacks | 300 | 150 | 10 |
| 20 stacks | 600 | 300 | 20 |
At twenty stacks you have used two-thirds of your slots and one-third of your weight for 600 sap. Compare that with the same twenty slots of fiber: 6,000 units for 60 weight. Sap’s 30 stack makes every slot 30 units instead of 300.
The practical consequence is that sap is a repeat visit resource. You do not plan one big run; you plan a route that passes the taps regularly and collects a few stacks each time. The exploration guide approach — a circuit you repeat rather than a destination — fits sap better than any other material.
The three saps and how they differ
The dataset lists three sap-type items with different profiles:
| Item | Weight | Stack | DLC | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sap | 0.5 | 30 | none | The base item, hexagon value 150 |
| Cactus Sap | 0.1 | 100 | Scorched Earth, Ragnarok, Extinction, Valguero, Genesis Part 1, Crystal Isles, Lost Island | Food value 1, spoils in 600 seconds |
| Red Crystalized Sap | 0.5 | 100 | Extinction | Stacks 3.3x better than plain sap |
| Blue Crystalized Sap | 0.5 | not listed | Extinction | Element charge-node ingredient |
Two of these are worth flagging. Cactus Sap is five times lighter per unit and stacks more than three times higher, but it spoils in 600 seconds and only provides 1 food — it is a desert survival item, not a substitute for sap in crafting.
Red Crystalized Sap is the interesting one. Same 0.5 weight as plain sap, but a stack of 100, so a stack weighs 50 and holds 3.3x more units. If you play Extinction, the crystalized form is a strictly better cargo.
Blue Crystalized Sap appears as an ingredient in the Element charge-node recipe (15 Blue Gem or Blue Crystalized Sap per batch), which ties the sap family into the tek economy. The element page covers that recipe in full.
Farming sap without a spreadsheet
The data does not publish a fill rate for taps, so the honest advice is structural. Sap comes from trees, and a tap converts a tree into a slow, passive source — which means the limiting factor is how many taps you maintain, not how hard you harvest.
Three rules follow:
- Build taps before you need sap. A tap placed today is a stack tomorrow; a tap placed when the recipe is already waiting is a wasted trip.
- Collect small. Thirty units per slot means a full inventory is only 600-900 sap. Empty the taps into storage often rather than waiting for a big haul.
- Store it near the crafting station. Sap never spoils and weighs 0.5, so a chest beside the cooking station costs nothing and saves the return trip.
The base building guide covers the storage layout that makes passive resources painless, and the crafting guide shows which stations actually consume what you collect.
Reading the hexagon number
Sap at 150 hexagons is priced above crystal (115) and far above wood (25) and flint (18). For a 0.5-weight item with a 30 stack, that is a strong valuation — it suggests the game treats sap as a crafted-tier input rather than a raw material.
The exchange quantity of 5 reinforces it: the trade is five units at a time, not fifty. On mobile, the purchase price is 15 slips, which is the same order of magnitude as other utility resources.
None of this changes a PC run, but it does explain why sap feels scarce. The game prices it like metal and stacks it like a trophy, and both signals point at the same conclusion: keep a small buffer, not a warehouse.
Where sap fits in the resource order
Sap is a utility input, not a progression gate. The mid-game structure recipes in this dataset are built on metal, crystal, paste, polymer and electronics, not sap — which is exactly why players run out of it at the worst moment. The resources tier list ranks it accordingly, and the resources strategy page covers how to keep utility stocks from becoming emergencies.
If you are farming the swamp for other reasons, how to get rare mushrooms covers the resource that shares the same biome.