Setting Harvesting Rates While Avoiding Server Lag

Note: This feature requires Beacon Omni.

Harvest rates (also known as gather rates) are a popular thing to adjust on a server. There are 3 different ways to do so, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

Beacon can handle all three options with the Harvest Rates editor.

Harvest Rate

Method 1: Global Harvest Rate Multiplier

By far the easiest and most natural option is to adjust the Global Harvest Rate Multiplier. Setting this to 2 would give you 2 stone instead of 1 when picking one up off the beach, for example.

The problem with this setting is how Ark handles it behind the scenes. Every time you harvest something, the game creates a harvest event to determine what resources to reward the player. Increasing the multiplier creates more harvest events per action, and that means more work the server has to do. For this reason, setting this multiplier very high can easily case the server to lag while players are harvesting.

Method 2: Clamping Harvest Amounts

Beacon has a setting called Use Optimized Harvest Rates that is designed to combat this. Instead of creating multiple harvest events, the client and server exchange a single harvest event, and simply multiplies the rewards by the Global Harvest Rate Multiplier. This is a pretty reasonable solution, but it has the side effect of reducing the number of rare resources rewarded.

Imagine the Global Harvest Rate Multiplier is set to 50. With Use Optimized Harvest Rates turned off, it is as if you are flipping a coin 50 times. It takes a bit of time per flip, but you'll get roughly 50% heads and 50% tails. With Use Optimized Harvest Rates turned on, the coin is flipped only once and the result is multiplied by 50. So rather than the 50%/50% split that would be normal, you'd get either 100% heads or 100% tails.

Method 3: Overriding Each Resource

The third option is to set the global harvest rate multiplier to 1.0 and override every resource type. This of course takes some time to setup, and still has the side effect of reducing rare resources, but allows adjusting rates on a per-resource basis.

Overriding individual resource rates is not mutually exclusive to the other two options either.

To override a resource harvest rate, click the plus button in the upper left to bring up the resource picker.

Use the field at the top to search for an item, and the tags picker below it to filter the list to only the types of engrams you're interested in. By default, Beacon filters to only harvestable items. Select an item and press Select or simply double-click an item.

Once the item is added to the list, there will be two columns to the right: Rate Multiplier and Effective Multiplier. Click the value in the Rate Multiplier column to adjust it. The Effective Multiplier cannot be edited, because it is the result of multiplying the resource's Rate Multiplier by the Global Harvest Rate Multiplier. It is there for reference only.

Setting the Global Harvest Rate Multiplier to 2.0 increases the Effective Rate column accordingly.

Other Settings

Global Harvest Health Multiplier

This setting increases the amount of damage required to fully harvest a resource. Increasing resource health does not allow for more resources to be harvested though. It only requires more hits to obtain the same amount of resources. Higher numbers increase health.

Player and Creature Harvest Damage Multiplier

These two settings change the amount of damage done by players and creatures. Higher numbers increase damage.

Clamp Harvest Damage

Turning this setting on limits the amount of damage that can be done by players and creatures.

This editor affects the following Ark config keys: ClampResourceHarvestDamage, DinoHarvestingDamageMultiplier, HarvestAmountMultiplier, HarvestHealthMultiplier, HarvestResourceItemAmountClassMultipliers, PlayerHarvestingDamageMultiplier, and UseOptimizedHarvestingHealth