Can You Tame Alphas in ARK?

I’m no zoologist, but based on my admittedly limited understanding of animal social dynamics, the alpha member of a pack of animals maintains their position because they’re the biggest, baddest dude with the biggest, baddest attitude. This is why, unless you’re an even bigger dude with an even badder attitude, they’re not going to give you the time of day. This brings us to today’s question: can you tame Alphas in ARK?

In ARK: Survival Evolved, the Alphas are special versions of nearly every dinosaur species. They’re bigger, they’re badder, and unlike their subservient contemporaries, they don’t take any guff from anyone, least of all some scrawny human. Alpha versions of dinosaurs simply cannot be tamed, no exceptions. Even if that wasn’t a hard and fast rule of the game, all Alphas are either aggressive by nature or extremely territorial, so even standing in their presence is going to start a fight. There simply aren’t any opportunities to even try and tame Alphas.

Can You Tame Alphas in ARK?

You cannot tame Alphas by default in ARK. Technically, there are ways to make an Alpha subservient to you, but not in the vanilla game. Tamable Alphas can be made possible in the game through modding, either on your own copy or by joining a modded server. 

If you don’t have any hangups about cheating, you can also use the admin console to force subservience on any dinosaur, Alpha or not. Assuming you have cheats enabled (or the password to do so if you’re on a multiplayer server), you can bring up the admin console by pressing the Tab key, putting your crosshairs over the dinosaur you want to tame, and typing “cheat forcetame.” Just make sure you’re not mounted while trying this, as attempting a force tame while mounted will immediately crash the server.