Ark Survival Ascended: How to Use All 5 Special Traps Guide

Ark: Survival Ascended is the long-awaited remaster of the 2015 game Ark: Survival Ascended. It features the same massive variety of dinosaurs and beautiful creatures to capture and tame.

It can be quite a challenge to deal with these creatures, so it’s very important to do your research beforehand.

This article aims to teach players about the 5 special traps in Ark, and the best ways to use them. 

How to Use All 5 Special Traps Guide

There are a few special traps included in Ark: Survival Ascended. These include alarms such as the bear traps, the tripwire traps, or even the improvised explosive device trap.

All of these traps do something different and are best used in differing circumstances. Keep reading to learn more about them!

1. Tripwire Alarm Trap: 

The Tripwire Alarm Trap is one of the simplest alarms in the game, application-wise. By throwing two tripwire alarm traps close to each other, you can connect them through a tripwire that can be triggered by wildlife and enemies.

When any creatures walk across this wire, it will generate a noise. The noise itself is extremely loud and sharp and can be heard across extremely large in-game distances.

It’s a perfect way to identify where any dinos are. You can also use them as a way to notify you when an enemy dino enters your area. 

These are single-use traps, so you can only use them once before they stop functioning. Their best application is probably in PvP situations as you can use it to identify members of other tribes invading your territory.

By default, these traps are not triggered by members or creatures of your tribe. You can change this to your liking, however. 

2. Tripwire Narcotic Trap:

The Tripwire Narcotic Trap is extremely similar in terms of how it operates to the Tripwire Alarm Trap. You throw two of them down close to each other and they connect to each other through a tripwire.

This trap is triggered by everything that crosses it. Allied dinos and members of your tribe are unaffected and immune, however. 

Upon being triggered, this trap releases puffs of poisonous gas. This gas applies a total of 240 torpor in a small area around it to untamed dinos and enemy players. However, it does not deal any damage.

This can be useful when building torpor on dinos to tame them and knock out enemy players without killing them.

It’s important to remember that dinosaurs that have been knocked out by this trap’s gas will not be available for taming. They can still be beneficial in increasing the amount of torpor on a dinosaur. Just make sure that the final blow to knock a dino out was dealt by tranquilizer arrows or slingshots. 

Another interesting fact about this trap is that it does not aggro any untamed or wild dinos roaming the world. Also, breaking the trap using any tools or weapons will detonate it. Be sure to use the demolish function when dealing with placed narcotics traps. 

3. Large Bear Trap

The Large Bear Trap is a trap item used to trap and stop the movement of larger dinos in Ark: Survival Evolved. These do not affect players or smaller dinos but are very useful when taming larger creatures.

They also do not work on Alpha versions of animals. They can be placed anywhere on the map except for enemy foundations. 

The trap is automatically activated when a medium or large dinosaur walks across it.

However, placing it under any stationary dinos will not trigger it, the dinos have to be walking. When the trap is activated, it will hold an enemy stationary for 10-15 seconds.

If there is a rider on top of an enemy when it gets trapped, they’ll be forced to dismount. 

This 10-15 second period can be a lot when taming creatures, as it gives you time to shoot some tranq darts into them.

They will break away from the traps eventually but tamed animals caught in them will not. They will have to wait for the timer on the traps to finish, which means they will be trapped for roughly 800 seconds.

These traps are metal structures and will need to be demolished through explosives to break. These explosives will also cause damage to the dinos stuck in them, so be careful! The traps by themselves do very small amounts of damage to creatures.

4. Bear Trap

Bear traps are the smaller versions of large bear traps, both in appearance and application. They capture small dinos and human players. They have some quite interesting qualities though. 

These bear traps can be triggered by any small dinosaur or player in the game. Any player includes the player who placed them too. Once trapped, you can not demolish the trap. The trap lasts a massive 800 seconds or approximately 13 minutes. 

To save time, players can choose to kill themselves by eating damaging food such as Spoiled Meat or Feces. You will have to retrieve your corpse so make sure to be careful when resorting to this method. After being placed, the trap can only be demolished by the placer’s tribe or the owner of the server. 

This trap is a great option for PvP due to its devastating consequences for anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in it. In these situations, it can prove to be a lot more useful than its bigger brother, the large bear trap. 

5. Improvised Explosive Device:

Improvised Explosive Devices are traps that once again use a tripwire to function. These are also called the Trip Wire C4s. Throwing two close together forms a tripwire that can be triggered to cause an explosion. 

These are best used when many are placed together, as the explosion of one can set the others close to it off as well. The damages also stack. All players and dinos can trigger these traps, irrespective of tribe or taming status. 

The damage these do is surprisingly little, so they are not used very often. They can serve as alarms to inform of invading enemies and dinos. All members from the tribe of the trap creator can unwire it and reuse it as they please. 

There you have it, a comprehensive and detailed guide on using all the special traps in Ark: Survival Ascended. Hopefully after reading this, you will be able to be better equipped while challenging enemies and dinos!

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