In our guide about how to hatch eggs easily, we will show you important tips and tricks to make hatching eggs in ARK: Survival Evolved as easy as possible, whether you’re just starting ARK or are more advanced.
Do you have a male and a female specimen? Or, in exceptional cases, two sexless specimens capable of mating? Then let’s start!
Step 1: Breeding in ARK
First, you must build a pen in which both animals fit well. Don’t make it too big, you should be able to find an egg quickly. Now go to both animal menus and choose “Disable following”.
Option 1: If you have enough time for waiting, open your pet’s menu, click on Behavior and turn on “Enable Mating”. You have to do this with both animals. If you go close to one of the animals, you will see the breeding progress.
Option 2: If you don’t want to stand next to your animals all the time, select “Enable Wandering” instead of “Enable mating”. Especially here, it is important that both animals are alone together in the pen. Otherwise, they will try mating with all animals of the opposite sex of their species, which are also set to “wandering”. Of course, if everyone is mating, that would be problematic because you have to search your entire base for an egg.
After each mating, the female specimen, or the gender-neutral specimen that has laid an egg or produced offspring, needs a certain amount of time to become capable of mating again.
Step 2: Fertilized egg or baby in ARK
When mating is complete, the species that lay eggs will give you an egg. For those that give birth to babies, the female specimen is pregnant. The thing you have to do after the baby is born is to provide the baby with food, which you put in their inventory. Another option is using a Maewing to take care of the baby.
But if you have found an egg, you can tell from the red or orange smoke, which surrounds it, that this egg is fertilized.
Step 3: Hatch eggs in ARK
If you have found a fertilized egg, you can pick it up and check it in your inventory. For checking, just hover with your mouse over the egg in your inventory or select the egg with your controller. Now you see the health of the egg and how long the hatching process will take. If you remove the egg from your inventory, go near it, and a window opens, showing you whether it is too cold or too hot. The incubation process only starts when the temperature around the egg is right.
If you want to know what temperature the egg you got needs, you will find the answer in our Dino taming guides since the temperatures vary between the different species.
Hatch eggs without electricity
Eggs that need heat: Especially at the beginning, when you haven’t unlocked a lot, it is more time-consuming to hatch an egg. For eggs that require a lot of heat, you’ll need to set up several campfires in a circle beforehand, which you’ll later need to throw the egg into. But first, you have to put burnable resources into the campfire’s inventory, like wood or thatch, but don’t start the fire yet.
Now throw the egg into the campfire circle by turning towards the circle and removing the egg from your inventory. Now you light the campfires one by one up, but you keep checking up on the egg to see if it’s too hot or too cold. Depending on the situation, you must light another fire or extinguish one. If the temperature is right, the hatching will start with counting down. How long the hatching takes depends on the species. You can read the standard times for each species in our taming guides about them.
You can unlock the campfire after reaching level 2 and spending 3 engram points. Now you can craft it in your inventory with the following resources:
- 16x stone
- 12x thatch
- 2x wood
- 1x flint
To start the campfire, place one of the following resources in the campfires inventory:
- Thatch: 1x Thatch burns for 7.5 seconds
- Wood: 1x Wood burns for 30 seconds while producing additional charcoal
- Sparkpower: 1x Sparkpower burns for 1 minute
- Angler Gel: 1x Angler gel burns for 4 minutes
Eggs that need cold: While you can easily hatch the eggs that need heat in your base with the help of the campfires, you have to take the eggs that need cold to the snow biome. Remove the egg from your inventory and see if it’s cold enough in place. If it’s too cold, you must regulate the temperature again with campfires.
Other: Some species have additional requirements, such as being able to hatch only in the depths of the sea or ocean. You can also find all the specific information about the conditions in our taming guides.
Hatch eggs with electricity
If you have already unlocked electricity and built an electrical generator, you can place the eggs that require cold in a room with a few air conditioners to face the egg with their opening. Based on the info you get from the egg, you can see how many air conditioners you require.
To get the Air Conditioner recipe, you have to reach level 61 and spend 21 engram points. Now you can craft it with the following resources in the fabricator:
Hatching Eggs with the Egg Incubator (Genesis: Part 2)
Within the Genesis: Part 2 DLC, the egg incubator made its way into ARK: Survival Evolved, which brings a lot of advantages along, which we will list after the crafting instructions.
To unlock the Egg Incubator recipe, you must have learned the Air Conditioner recipe. Once this recipe, you can get the recipe for the egg incubator after reaching level 89 and spending 55 engram points. Now you can craft the Egg Incubator with the following resources:
- 500x metal ingots
- 350x polymer
- 250x electronics
- 200x crystal
- 100x cementing paste or achatina paste
What are the advantages of the egg incubator?
The egg incubator can hatch 10 eggs simultaneously, but it is only effective if they require a similar or the same temperature.
The egg incubator will also show you what gender the new baby is and what colors it will be. In addition, the egg incubator has a huge display that shows you directly how much of the hatching process has already been completed.
If you stand in front of an egg that is placed in the egg incubator, you will see a temperature gauge with a white stripe in the middle, which indicates the ideal temperature for this egg. Now you can set the temperature via the Egg Incubator menu precisely. Once you have set the ideal temperature, the hatching period will speed up permanently.
Once the egg is ready, you can hatch the baby, which will stand in front of the egg incubator.
Are you looking for more helpful guides on ARK: Survival Evolved? Then look at our ARK guide overview, where you will find more of our dinosaur, crafting, resource, and technology guides. You can also chat with us and other players on our Discord server. We’re looking forward to seeing you!
