I have set my Ark server up several times and it runs fine everytime until the server reboots. Then i am no longer able to connect to the server, See the server on the list, or connect via RCON. Only fix i am able to find is to delete the save and let it recreate it which then its fine....until another server restart. I do have several mods installed but doesnt make sense it works fine until the restart.

Known issue affecting Single Player, Official and Unofficial servers since Fjordur's release.

In short, as best as the community can figure out, the save routine for the ARK mapfile randomly becomes stopped before the entire appended data structure is written to disk. Which, ironically, doesn't impact the server or client while in a running state, as ARK continues to work from loaded memory, and only loads the save file during the boot cycle.

But, as the save routine is an appending process, with only minor parts being updated (such as time of day on the server, mob positions, etc) once the map has any corruption on the save, you wind up having a bad save, and once the server restarts, it's toast.

The -best- way to combat this is to ensure your server has a daily restart built in, and that your save intervals are not "too frequent" but also "not too far apart". The reason why we have to say it like that, is as it's random, we don't know what's causing it for certain.

But once the corruption happens, you're sunk for the period of time from that moment onward, till the restart.

I used to do weekly restarts, but the issue I ran into is if I restart my server on Sunday, and my save becomes corruptd on Monday, then next Sunday I'm rolling back to a save from Monday. My save interval used to be every 15 minutes. Which in most normal circumstances is fine, except with the current bug, that means you have 4 chances to corrupt your game every hour.

Now, I restart daily. My save interval on my less active servers is also 2 hours, instead of 15 minutes. That means I have 12 chances a day to corrupt my save file now, and if it does corrupt, I only lose 2-24 hours of gameplay.

Previously, I had 96 chances to corrupt my server daily, and would potentially lose 15 minutes to 7 days of work.

But largely, that math will largely depend on your tolerance and community.

so whats the work around for it? cause it literally happens everytime i change something on the server. whether its gamesettings or a mod, doesnt matter.

The current work around is to wait for ARK Remastered or ARK 2, as for most people it's intermittant. Due to the impending release of both ARK-R and ARK-2, ARK original only has 1-2 devs working on keeping the game alive, so they're focusing on completely game breaking errors and bugs.

On Official it's pretty bad as they do reboots weekly, so some servers have had an entire week rolled back, which causes the populations there to drop. Especially on their PvP cluster, as entire alpha tribes will get wiped to foundation by the beta tribe, and then 2-4 days later, the alpha tribe's back to Alpha due to the rollback.

Im seeing my server might not actually be corrupt. It IS booting up and logs say that it started successfully. I CAN connect with RCON and run commands. but its not showing on server lists and cant manually connect. This is happening with my 3 other friends as well.

If you add the server to Steam Favorites, what map shows, how many players show, and what day is it on?