Cooking meat in ARK offers benefits that you can’t just simply by eating raw meat harvested from creatures. When you need to replenish health or food metrics, eating cooked meat will do a lot more for you – and might help your tames, too.
Understanding not only the different uses for raw or cooked meat but also how to cook, store, and transport meat will help any player in ARK with their adventure.
Cooked meat in ARK is just what it sounds like. It’s a piece of meat that has been cooked so that it is no longer raw.
Unlike dinosaur eggs in ARK, meat isn’t differentiated between types of land creatures. The raw meat you get from a Rex is the same as the raw meat from a Raptor, Dodo, or Trike.
There are a few exceptions. You can get raw fish meat from undersea creatures. However, it’s the same meat, whether it’s a Sabertooth Salmon or a Megalodon. You can also get raw mutton from an Ovis.
Raw meat and raw fish meat can also come in a higher quality called Prime Raw Meat or Prime Fish Meat.
The real difference in types of meat is cooked versus raw. Raw meat has its uses, but cooked meat is an essential food item for any player character in ARK.
Any living critter in Ark has the posibility of dropping raw meat when harvested. Even a dead player can be harvested for raw meat, and there is no distinction between meat harvested from animals or humans. Its all just raw meat. For the most part, the larger the animal the better the chances for raw meat – and the more likely you are to get larger quantities. Dodos are an easy early food source for raw meat, while the Phiomia is a virtual raw meat pinata; the only problem is that its one of the fastest running land Dinos Ive seen so far. One thing to keep in mind is that if your Dino kills something it may harvest the meat. Herbivores simply dont, but a carnivore can and often will. Simply access the Dinos inventory to see if it has picked up any goodies. Now the harvesting of animals once they are dead is rather interesting. In fact, for a premier survival game its quite weird, but there are no proper tools for this task. When you harvest an animal it seems to balance out like this. A Pick, metal is better than stone, and it may yield more meat and less hides. Using a Hatchet, metal is better than stone, will tend to yield more hides and potentially less meat.
Raw Meat is a food item in ARK: Survival Evolved. It can be obtained by harvesting the corpses of creatures with, in order of efficiency, a Carnivore, a Metal Pick, a Sword Stone Pick, a Hatchet, or your fists. It can be found in white, green and blue supply drops.
With the introduction of Genesis: Part 2 the Plant Species R can be grown and harvested for Raw Meat.
Like other perishables, Raw Meat will spoil after a set amount of time (10 minutes in a players inventory), creating Spoiled Meat. When stacked together, the Raw Meat will only spoil one from the stack at a time, and then reset the timer. If meat stacked together has two different timers, the timer from the stack that is stacked on will be used. This can be used to easily reset the spoil time. Especially useful in feeding troughs.
Raw Meat can be used to tame Carnivores when they are unconscious. Open the inventory of the creature you want to tame and put the Raw Meat inside of it.
*Keep in mind that a full stack of preserving salts will spoil in 2 hours for all of these containers and must be restocked periodically in order to maximize the spoil time.
Raw Prime Meat can also be obtained by harvesting Alpha Creatures as they give prime meat instead of Raw Meat. The boss creatures DodoRex and Dragon also drop prime meat. One notable thing is that Wyvern have fertilized eggs in the wild,so butchering a young wyvern could yield prime meat, although most players just raise the baby.
It can also be cooked at a Campfire or Industrial Grill, which boosts the amount of time before expiration by 45 minutes in the players inventory, and 3 hours in a creatures inventory. Cooked Prime Meat can be eaten for ~40-45 food. Cooked Prime Meat can also be fed to carnivores to tame at about 1.5 times the speed when compared to taming with Raw Meat.
Raw Prime Meat spoils very fast. After harvesting, a useful tactic is to store the meat immediately in a tamed creatures inventory for transport, as it spoils in 4 minutes and 40 seconds in a Players inventory, but lasts around 18 Minutes and 40 seconds in a creatures inventory. However, if the Player wants to save Raw Prime Meat this way for later use, it should not be given to a tamed carnivore, as they may eat it if they dont have any normal Raw Meat to eat.
Raw Prime Meat is very useful for taming. It is the fourth best thing to feed any Carnivore you want to tame (with Kibble being the first, Raw Mutton being the second, and Cooked Lamb Chop being the third). Raw Prime Meat replenishes the same 50 food as regular Raw Meat to a dino being tamed, but it tames the Dino at 3 times the speed. It also decreases the taming effectiveness by around .5% each bite, which is more effective than regular Raw Meat.
FAQ
How much food does raw prime meat give to Dinos?
How much food does raw mutton give ark?
Does cooked meat give more food ark?
What gives the most food in Ark?
