Ark patch 254, with Tek Tier content and real-time beard-growing, delayed 10 days

Ark: Survival Evolved's patch 254, originally scheduled to arrive today, has been delayed 10 days until January 30. The highly anticipated patch will include Tek Tier 1 content, which will add endgame technology like power armor, jetpacks, and dino-mounted laser cannons. The patch also promises to deliver a whole mess of new dinosaurs, craftable lances for dino-mouted jousting, and most importantly (to me, anyway), hairstyles and facial hair that grow in real time.

In a post on the Steam forums, Ark's 'Community Overlord' Jatheish Karunakaran posted the following:

"We're going to be delaying the release of Patch 254 until the 30th of January. I know a lot of you are excited and trust me, we are too. This patch is much larger than we first anticipated and we need more time to work on it in development, and through internal QA process prior public release. However soon you will get to enjoy a hell of lot of new content, and we're cooking up an extra-special surprise feature for the patch!" 

Meanwhile, Ark's free Primitive Plus DLC did receive an update today to v1.4, promising bug fixes, balancing, and new items such as a battering ram and recurve bow. It was, however, quickly rolled back fix the problems caused by the patch (there were bugs with the placement of brick walls, lumber glass walls had vanished, and birds were not dropping poultry and feathers when killed, only normal meat and hide). Hopefully that will be sorted out soon.

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.