You cannot knock out a wyvern. You cannot feed it into submission. Every wyvern in Ark starts as an egg you stole from a nest, which makes raising one less like taming and more like running a nursery with very expensive inventory.
The stealing part is covered in the egg guide. This page starts the moment the egg is in your base.
Step 1: the incubation temperature
Wyvern eggs do not incubate at normal egg temperatures. They need serious heat: 80 to 90 °C (176 to 194 °F).
In practice that means stacking heat-emitting objects around the egg — campfires, torches, standing torches — and watching the incubation display until it reads inside that range. Too cold and the egg loses health; too hot and it does the same. Adjust the number of heat sources, not the egg.
Keep the egg safe while it incubates. Anything that can reach it will eat it.
Step 2: Wyvern Milk, and only Wyvern Milk
When the egg hatches, the hard part starts, because a baby wyvern does not eat like other baby carnivores.
It will not eat raw meat. Not raw meat, not cooked meat, nothing from the standard carnivore trough. Until it reaches the adult stage, the baby consumes Wyvern Milk and nothing else.
Its food bar also drops slowly rather than rapidly, which gives you breathing room — but the milk requirement is absolute.
Where the milk comes from
You get Wyvern Milk from wild female wyverns. Two routes:
Knockout route. Render a wild female wyvern unconscious and take the Wyvern Milk from her inventory. There is a catch: if you do not pick it up in time, the milk vanishes from her inventory when she wakes up, either from inventory or by killing her.
Kill route. Killing an unconscious or wild female wyvern also drops the milk, and dead Alpha Wyverns drop it as well.
Either way, every milk you stockpile came from a fight with an adult wyvern. Stock up before the egg hatches, not after.
The feeding math
One unit of Wyvern Milk gives a baby wyvern 1200 food.
A growing baby consumes roughly one food unit every 10 seconds, which works out to about 360 food per hour. So a single feeding of milk sustains a baby for approximately 3 hours and 20 minutes.
That number is your planning anchor. If you are going offline for longer than that, the baby starves. Feed immediately before logging off, and make sure the milk is in the baby’s inventory — not in a nearby trough, because the baby will not touch anything but milk.
Step 3: imprinting
Baby wyverns can ask for Wyvern Milk when imprinting, which is convenient because it is the same resource they eat. When the imprint request comes, give it milk and the imprint percentage advances.
Imprinting matters more on a wyvern than on most tames. The damage and health bonuses from a full imprint apply to everything the wyvern does later, and wyverns are expensive enough that a half-imprinted one is a real loss.
Step 4: maturation and the level inheritance
Wyverns mature over a long window, so this is a commitment measured in days, not hours.
The rule that shapes everything: the baby hatches at the same level as the parent who laid the egg, and gets no post-tame level boost. Other tames get levels added after taming; wyverns do not. The level is frozen at hatch.
That is why the egg level mattered so much during the heist. Wild wyverns cap at level 190, so the best possible stolen egg is 190. And remember that low-level eggs can hatch with stats below 100% of base, because wyverns use a negative additive multiplier similar to the Giganotosaurus. A 190 egg is not a luxury; it is the difference between a wyvern that carries boss runs and one that does not.
What you get for the trouble
A tamed wyvern is one of the strongest flyers in the game, and the payoff is real.
Combat. Each variant has its own breath attack. The Fire Wyvern’s breath deals 8% of the target’s maximum health per hit, capped between 72 and 450 damage, applied over 6 seconds, and it ignores armor entirely. The Lightning, Poison and Ice variants trade the fire spray for their own elemental attacks.
Mobility. Wyverns are fast, and they are not shy about using it. In the air they can grab and pick up other creatures, and on the ground they taunt and push enemies away.
Gathering. Landed wyverns collect Wood, Thatch and Cactus Sap with a keypress, which makes them useful on resource runs between fights.
Breeding. Once you have two, successive generations can be bred, which is how a single successful egg theft turns into a permanent bloodline.