Ark: Survival Evolved is killing hundreds of official servers on August 29

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If you've got pets, belongings, or characters you want to save, you'd better get packing.

Ark: Survival Evolved is inching ever closer to leaving Early Access, and in preparation of its launch, hundreds of official servers are going extinct. These low-population servers, which make up about 33% of all existing servers, are being wiped on August 29, so if you've got pet dinos or other belongings you don't want to lose, it's time to pack them up and stuff them (and your character) into an Obelisk or Tek Transmitter so you can retrieve them from a different server later.

"Any existing server that is not considered a low pop server and is not taken down will become a Legacy server," the post on Ark's official site reads. "Legacy servers will remain on a separate cluster from the new cluster, which means you will not be able to transfer anything between Legacy servers and the new servers."

Legacy servers will "receive all of the same fixes and content that the new cluster will" the post says. However, Legacy servers will no longer be supported by Ark's customer service:

"All outstanding tickets to our Customer Support team will be wiped clean on launch day, and no future tickets submitted by those playing on Legacy servers will be accepted. Going forward our Customer Support team will be focused on assisting those present on the new cluster, which will not be plagued by many of the issues that occurred during the Early Access process."

If you can't bear to say goodbye, you'll also be able to download save files for the deleted official servers. "We will make the save files available as soon as we can, which will likely be sometime before Saturday. We will host these files which anyone can download and then you are welcome to re-host the save file for your own use. We'll include a link to where you can download server saves in this post when they are available."

Christopher Livingston
Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.