ARK has 144 catalogued resources, but you only need to know about twenty of them well. The rest are niche crafts or boss materials. The ones that gate your progress are listed below, with the real weight and stack numbers from the game data.
The two layers: raw and refined
Every material sits in one of two layers. Raw resources come straight off the ground or a corpse. Refined resources come from a station. The jump from raw to refined is where most players stall.
| Material | Weight | Stack | Rarity | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stone | 0.5 | 100 | Common | Rocks, everywhere |
| Wood | 0.5 | 100 | Common | Trees |
| Thatch | 0.02 | 200 | Common | Trees (palms give more) |
| Fiber | 0.01 | 300 | Common | Bushes |
| Flint | 0.05 | 100 | Common | Rocks, with stone |
| Metal | 1.0 | 300 | Common | Mountain and cave rocks |
| Obsidian | 1.0 | 100 | Uncommon | Mountains, cave walls |
| Crystal | 1.0 | 100 | Uncommon | Caves, mountain peaks |
| Silica Pearls | 0.02 | 100 | Uncommon | Underwater nodes |
| Oil | 0.2 | 100 | Uncommon | Underwater nodes, trilobites |
| Black Pearl | 2.0 | 200 | Rare | Dead Trilobite, Ammonite, Eurypterid |
| Chitin | 0.01 | 100 | Common | Bugs: Meganeura, Pulmonoscorpius, Trilobite |
| Keratin | 0.01 | 100 | Common | Horned creatures: Carbonemys, Trike, Carno |
| Hide | 0.01 | 200 | Common | Most mammals |
| Pelt | 0.5 | 200 | Uncommon | Cold creatures: Direwolf, Mammoth, Otter |
What each refined material unlocks
- Metal Ingot — smelted from metal at a forge. Nothing past the stone tier exists without it. Your first forge is the biggest early milestone.
- Cementing Paste (weight 0.01) — crafted from stone and chitin or keratin at a Mortar and Pestle, or farmed with a Beelzebufo frog. It gates every stone-tier structure, and it is almost free to carry, which is why it is the hidden king of early building.
- Polymer (weight 0.25) — made from obsidian and cementing paste at a Fabricator. The Fabricator is the tech wall that separates stone-era players from metal-era players.
- Electronics — metal ingot, silica pearls, and oil at a Fabricator. The pearl and oil step is what sends you underwater for the first time.
- Gasoline — oil and hide at a forge. It fuels the Industrial Forge, Fabricator, and Chemistry Bench that everything late-game runs on.
- Gunpowder — charcoal and sparkpowder at a Mortar and Pestle. Every bullet and grenade traces back to it.
- Narcotics — narcoberries and spoiled meat. The torpor food that makes taming possible.
Weight changes how you gather
The numbers in the table are the whole game. Black Pearl at 2.0 is a hundred times heavier than Silica Pearls at 0.02, so you refine pearls on the shore and only carry the electronics. Metal at 1.0 is heavy, which is why the Ankylosaurus (250 weight, 50 melee) exists: it carries metal for you and gathers it faster than you ever could.
Resources that spoil
Organic Polymer and Raw Prime Meat decay. This is intentional. The game wants you to process near the source, not haul everything to a distant base. A frog that makes paste on the spot beats a cart of stone every time.
Where each biome hides its loot
Mountains give metal, obsidian, and crystal but expose you to Rexes and Argentavis. Underwater gives pearls and oil but costs oxygen and invites Megapiranha. Caves concentrate everything rare — chitin, paste materials, and the artifacts you need for bosses — behind the hardest fights on the map.
Resources you should never run out of
A few materials backstop every other system, and running dry stops your whole tribe at once.
- Stone and fiber — the base of every structure and every rope. They are free to gather on the beach; keep a chest full.
- Narcotics — the torpor food for every tame. A run that cannot feed its knockouts is a run that tames nothing.
- Gunpowder and bullets — your defense. A stack is cheap and a fight without them is a death.
- Cementing Paste — so light and so central to building that there is no reason to store less than a few hundred.
The rare drops — Black Pearls, Element, blueprints — are the opposite. You cannot stockpile them by gathering, so you plan trips around them instead of expecting them in storage.
The mistake that stalls most tribes
The common failure is hauling raw metal and stone home and refining at the base. It fills your Ankylosaurus and your vault with weight you could have left behind. Smelt at the mountain, make paste at the cave mouth, and fly home with ingots. The trip that carries refined material carries three times the value.