The Mosasaurus is the apex of the water and a knockout tame, which means you are fighting it and your own air at once. Tame one and you own the ocean — but the tame is an endurance test first.
The numbers
| Stat | Value |
|---|---|
| Taming type | Knockout Taming |
| Health | 3,600 |
| Food | 8,000 |
| Weight | 1,300 |
| Melee Damage | 100 |
| Torpor | 3,000 |
| Preferred food | Exceptional Kibble |
| Found on | Ocean-capable maps (The Island, The Center, Ragnarok, Valguero) |
Base stats from the official ARK wiki creature data. Its preferred taming food is Exceptional Kibble.
The method, in one sentence
Lure it into a water cave, break aggro and dive so it comes back up into your crossbow fire, and keep your own air under control with a SCUBA Tank and Flippers or a Lazarus Chowder while you work through its very large food requirement.
That is the whole tame. Everything hard about it is in the execution.
Step by step
- Lure it into a water cave. Use a mount to find one, then lead it into a cave and shoot arrows or darts at it there.
- Work with its depth behaviour. It follows a similar AI to the Plesiosaur and does not want to go too high above a certain depth — it dives back once it reaches it, so you can hit it with arrows to aggro, swim up, then break aggro. Repeat until it is knocked out.
- Use a crossbow, not a bow or slingshot. Neither of those can be used underwater.
- Kite it with movement speed and flippers. At 120%–130% speed it is possible to kite a Mosasaurus, because of its large turning radius.
- Bring your own air plan. A SCUBA Tank plus SCUBA Flippers is the standard answer for the underwater knockout, and a Lazarus Chowder (or Lazarus Combination) buys you the time to work without the constant surface trips. Without any of these you are swimming up to breathe between shots, which is where most Mosasaurus tames are actually lost.
- Plan for the food. In ARK: Survival Ascended it needs the second largest amount of food of any carnivore — much more than a Giganotosaurus, and more than double any other Apex Predator (ARK: Survival Evolved values differ). It can starve all the way down its taming process, which gives you time to gather meat.
- Watch the torpor level and feed narcotics in bulk. As with other starve-taming, wait until the torpor drops, then feed narcotics or narcoberries in bulk to push it back up to maximum before it starts falling again.
- Keep the newest meats in your last hotbar slots. Its consumption speed means no meat is wasted that way.
- An alternative: grab it with a pterosaur. The torpor from the grab will eventually knock it out, but it takes a very long time.
- Manage your own oxygen. Watch it above all — more Mosasaurus tames fail to drowning than to the bar dropping.