You have hundreds of hours in a single-player ARK world, and now there is a server. The good news: ARK: Survival Evolved stores everything in a handful of files, and moving them to your server brings the world, the buildings, the tames and even your character along. The whole operation is copying files from one folder to another.
Where your single-player world lives
On your PC, the world sits in the game's save folder:
Steam\steamapps\common\ARK\ShooterGame\Saved\SavedArksLocal\
The files that matter:
- The map save, named after the map:
TheIsland.ark,Ragnarok.arkand so on. This is the world itself. LocalPlayer.arkprofile, your character.- Any
.arktribefiles, your tribe data.
Close the game before copying, so the files are not mid-write.
Step 1: Stop the server
In the game panel, open your server and press Stop. Uploading save files into a running server ends with the server overwriting them at the next world save.
Step 2: Upload the files
Go to the Files tab and navigate to:
ShooterGame/Saved/SavedArks/
Upload the map .ark file, your renamed profile (next step) and any .arktribe files there. For a large world the Files tab upload can be slow; SFTP is the faster road for big files, and the connection details are on the same page.
Step 3: Rename your character profile
On a server, ARK identifies players by Steam ID, not by "LocalPlayer". Rename the copy you uploaded from LocalPlayer.arkprofile to your SteamID64 with the same extension:
76561198000000000.arkprofile
You find your SteamID64 on steamid.io by pasting your Steam profile URL. Skip this step and the world still works, but you spawn as a fresh character.
Step 4: Set the server to the same map
The server loads the map its Server Map startup variable names, and that must match your .ark file. On the Startup tab, set Server Map to the map name without the extension: TheIsland, Ragnarok, TheCenter and so on. A mismatch does not produce an error, just a freshly generated world on the configured map, which is confusing to diagnose.
Step 5: Start and verify
Start the server and join. You should be standing in your world, buildings and tames where you left them. If you renamed the profile correctly, you are also your old character.
If the world came up empty
- Wrong map name in Server Map is the usual cause. It must match the
.arkfilename exactly. - Files in the wrong folder. They go directly in
ShooterGame/Saved/SavedArks/, not a subfolder. - Modded single-player world: the server needs the same mods installed before the world loads correctly. Add the mod IDs on the Startup tab first.
Take a backup from the Backups tab once everything checks out, so the freshly moved world has a restore point. Stuck anywhere? Open a ticket from the support page.