Dododex
ARK: Survival Evolved & Ascended Companion
Tips & Strategies

How to slay a dragon? Follow these easy steps and you too can have a dragon’s head on your wall!
Step One: You gotta do some artifact hunting. The fight requires Cunning, Immune, Skylord, and Strong, coords are as follows: Cunning: 46.0, 88.2, BRING AN UNDERWATER TAME!!! Immune: 62.6, 37.2, you need a gas mask or you're dead. Skylord: 19.3, 19.0, no tames allowed for this one. Strong: 29.4, 32.0, this is the hardest cave in the game, your best bet is to bring a high level Yuty(at least level 135 when it was wild), make sure you have full flak and guns on you, this ain’t easy.
Step Two(ONLY APPLIES FOR BETA AND ALPHA): Apex Drops. These are pretty self-explanatory, just get up on a glorious murder machine(I recommend Carchas, except for the gigas), the drops are 5 Allo Brains, 5 Basilo Blubber, 1 Giga Heart, 5 Tuso Tentacles, 5 Rex Arms, and 5 Yuty Lungs, this is for Beta, for Alpha, double these, except Rex Arms, you need 15 for Alpha.
Step Three: Who to bring? This set of creatures will be able to take out Alpha Dragon decently well, bring 18 well leveled Theris, put ALL their points into health(stop at 20-25K), and put the rest into Melee, do not take a Theri below level 225 into this fight, and give them all at least 2 sweet veggie cakes. Your other 2 slots will be for support, bring a Yuty(level into health and stamina), none below level 200, DO NOT USE IT TO ATTACK, the Dragon does triple damage to carnivores with its bite. Your other slot can be another Theri(if you have ASE and hate mods for some reason), otherwise, this slot should be filled by a male Deinotherium, IT MUST BE MALE. Males give an attack buff, and females give defense, and it stacks with Yuty’s buff. They all need saddles with at least 60 armor points.
Step Four: The Fight. After yeeting the artifacts and apex drops at the Red Obelisk Terminal, you and your army are in the dragon’s arena, and it’s hot(make sure to bring something to negate the heat), and look to the sky, and hooway you found the dragon, now here’s the Strat: make sure you are on the Yuty or the Deinotherium, whistle your army to passive, and the dragon will summon hostile dimorphodons and pteranodons, use your mount to kill them. The dragon will shoot easy to dodge fireballs at you, make sure your army is following you, or they’re gonna get nuked. Once the dragon lands, let it come to you, the lava rivers are what ruin most fights. Once you don’t have to cross magma to get to the dragon, immediately whistle your army to attack my target. Your army will maul the dragon, and if you are on the Yuty, spam courage roar, if ur on Deinotherium, use the buff roar, and go maul the dragon, ENSURE YOUR YUTY IS ON PASSIVE AND AUTO COURAGE, if not it’ll run to bite the dragon’s knees, and the dragon will eat it. On the Deino, you can actually fight the dragon. The millisecond the dragon starts flying, whistle passive, so ur tames stay in this life. Watch out for the dragon’s fire breath, it takes away 20% of any tame’s hp. Rinse and repeat, and bam, the dragon is dead. Now you too can thrill the ladies with an authentic Dragon Head(at least until Tek Cave)
Dragon Hp:
Gamma: 432k
Beta: 864k
Alpha: 1.26M
Hope this helps! -Scorchfire
More Dragon Encountering Tips
When fighting this beast, I would recommend to bring herbivores( i recommend the tickle chickens) as the boss does extra damage to carnivores.
For this fight, you will need 19 therizinos and one yutyrannus. Use calien soup and wear ghille armour to deal with the heat. The Portal is situated at the Red Obelisk Terminal. Instead of 3 artifacts, you will require 4 of them.
Artifact of the Cunning: 456904
Use a good Basiliosaurus and scuba diving gear too. In the cave, follow the path in until you see the first archway of stones. Go left from there and you will see a bunch of pillars in the background and a second archway of stones. Go over the second archway and head directly to the right, until you see a half pillar made out of the artifact material. Go in the hole behind the pillar. Keep on following the path, until you see the artifact.
The artifact of the Immune: 627370
Bring a cryopoded megatherium for this cave, AND a gas mask. To craft a gas mask, you need absorbant substrate. You will need sap for this. To get sap, craft a sap tap and place it on a big, fat tree, prefably at redwoods. BRING MORE THAN ONE GAS MASK!!!!! THEY TAKE DAMAGE OVER TIME!!!
Follow the path, till you see two cave passages. Go to the one on the left and keep sticking to the left, till you get to a swamp pool. Go to the left path. At the second swamp pool, go through the middle path, then to the right, until the pathway starts to get smaller and narrower, and bam, you found the artifact. (Yuss queen!)👁👄👁
The artifact of the Skylord:190190
It is an extremely narrow cave that will have to be explored in, without a tame. Yes. Don't even bother bringing in a tame, because the cave is too narrow for that. Instead, you will go there on foot! 😃(as always, bring fria curry and fur armour to keep you warm. And also, use a crossbow and a lot of grapple hooks. And a lesser antidote too!)
Go into the cave, then once you are inside the tunnel with many passages, go all the way to the extreme right. Once you are at the point where you can't explore further, grapple onto the red, glowing thing on the top right of the cave. Defeat a few onyncs, until you find the artifact of the skylord! (Short and simple, am I right?)🌚
The artifact of the Strong:296321
Literally the same tools and technique as the skylord cave, but with an iron pickaxe (you can use a direwolf tho...). (BEWARE THE PULVORIA!!!)
Follow the path into the cave until you reach a junction in the cave. Go left, and crouch into the narrow passage. Turn right, then stick to every single left ground path you can, until you get lead to a pathway that is blocked with crystal. Mine that away, using a metal pickaxe, then follow the ground path to the left, all the way until the end of the cave. There, you will find a giant gorilla statue, holding the artifact in its hand.
You will also need 6 tribute items too.
Allosaurus brain
Basiliosaurus blubber
Tyrannosaurus arm
Yutyrannus lungs
Tusoteuthis tentacle
Giganotosaurus heart
(Play in beta difficulty)
Before the fight, craft 20 sweet vegetable cakes for EACH therizinosaur. This will heal the therizinosaurs every time their health goes below 90%.
Beware the dragon's fire breath attack. If it hits your dinos or you, it will make you/them burn up and you/they will lose 10% of their health. If it uses fire breath on you 5 times, you and your dinos are dead. Please. For the love of God, avoid that fire breath.
Also, the dragon can shoot fireballs that will damage you and your tames, even if you are riding a dinosaur, so be weary of that.
Also, bring med brews to heal yourself if you take a lot of damage.
The best way to defeat the dragon is to have your dinos spread all around it, so if a dino does a fire breath attack, it only gets a few therizinos, instead of a whole pack. ALWAYS aim to attack the dino from behind, cos that is the best strategy for winning this fight.
Once you have defeated the dragon boss, you will have all the tek armour tekgrams unlocked and you can start playing around with it. Hurrah!! 🥳🥳🥳
Here’s my full experience with the alpha dragon which I just beat as of 17 June 2024. My aim is for this to be the one tip that gives you all the extra info you need, along with any info or videos already out there.
Overview on my stats:
I won on single player settings with 12 theris (21k, 1800%) 6 rexes (50k, 1150%) a yuty (21k, 3k stam, 1000%) and a daeodon (21k, 71k food). My armour is 1700, and my health is 700. Hyper insulation is 126. I went in with 150 med brews, came out with 115.
Survivability:
All primitive saddles except yuty, which was 176. There was 3 rex casualties (some had 10k, one didn’t even take damage), 0 theri casualties (some had 1.6k left, some had 16k), and my daeodon died early due to my mistake. My theris had 1-2 cakes each. Only 2 cakes were left in the end. I had hyperthermia throughout the entire fight.
What I learnt:
- Rexes were almost useless, the theris brutalised it on their own.
- The daeodon died almost instantly, so it was pointless.
- don’t cross the molten river, my tames took way too much damage this way.
- The fire rock which he uses while flying damages the rider.
- The Dimorph minions attack the rider.
- When tames protect you from these dimorph attacks, they can swarm you and you can get a bit stuck.
- Tames can easily get stuck on things around the arena.
What happened:
1. When I loaded in, I moved my tames to the open space, ensuring my daeodon was on “ignore group whistles” and following my yuty.
2. I moved around, making sure the dragon doesn’t hit me with its rock blast, and using a shotgun to get in extra damage. I also tried to get some courage roars in.
3. When the minions came in, I whistled neutral and stayed on the outskirts of my tames so they’d kill them. I’d whistle to move after, so I don’t get stuck.
4. When it landed, it was across the river by the monuments. I didn’t want them to attack, but they did, and it was too late to bring them back.
5. I tried to whistle my tames around the monuments to surround the dragon and trap it in the corner. I lost my daeodon to the lava and fire this way, and my tames took a lot of damage due to the fire river. Some theris got stuck in the river too.
6. It took off again, and I repeated the steps from “2” but when it landed, I managed to finish it off.
What I would do better:
- I’d make sure my daeodon stays on my yurt.
- I’d bring a calien soup to keep me cool.
- I’d bring better armour, as my torso and gloves got immediately destroyed by the dimorphs.
- I’d bring 18 theris; I’m never using rexes on a dragon boss ever again.
- I’d bring a few more cakes, I’d go for 3 each. Just in case something went wrong.
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Main tips/TL;DR:
1. Theris > Rexes
2. Dimorphs damage rider.
3. Rock blast damages rider.
4. Get in extra damage with guns when you can.
5. If you can surround any bosses, you should, but it’s extra important for this one as its fire attack destroys tames and has a large attack radius.
I think that’s enough info to ensure that anyone can have a good shot at winning. Hope this helped. Good luck.
Use Dragonrend to make it land, then punch and Fus Ro Dah it until it dies
This is probably the final boss you're fighting before battling the Overseer, prepare for a tough battle survivor... you're almost there, everything has led up to this! You can do it!
I would strongly recommend that you use theri’s and not Rexes bc the dragon does more damage to carnivores and less to herbivores. Also theri’s have great base health and damage. Like!
10 people 10 rexes maybe a yuty but look up and suround it will trap it.
The worst tips are "FeEd iT fORcETaMe" .... We get it, you're bad at the game. Downvote since I upset the whiners. Anyways, Therizinos works best if boosted properly and some decent saddles. Have Veggie cakes in their inventories and the more friends the merrier. If you have the ability, Magmasaurs are great as well!
Hi there nightshade 001 and just hi in with a revolver or gun then put player damage 100 get at least 25 bullets then shoot it on any mode and BOOM done it’s killed also if u try this in the tek cave the cold part of it will instantly kill u
Ok, Havent seen any comments helping us SP players, so here goes. Get 19 theris, for gamma and beta no cakes are needed. Watch out for the meteors tho!!!!! First one that hit beside me, riot armor half gone, the second one took all my armor, and left me with a sliver of health. Bring Health potions!!! Stats were 25k health and around 12-1400 Dam. Gamma melted away first landing in literally 20 seconds, beta in about a minute.
Alpha, bring 5-10 cakes, and should be fine, takes around 5min if it lands alot like mine did. Hope this helps!!