# ARK: Survival Ascended Community Crunch 496: Release the Kraken

- Product: ARK: Survival Ascended (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/ark-survival-ascended)
- Vendor: Studio Wildcard
- Date: 2026-02-28
- Original notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2399830/view/506228886086877905
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/ark-survival-ascended/releases/2026-02-28-community-crunch-496-release-the-kraken

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **added** — Kraken creature arriving later this year in Genesis Part 1
- **added** — Mod-browser added directly within the game for downloading and playing custom content
- **fixed** — Fixed corrupted dino data causing edge cases where destroyed dinos retained server references leading to crashes and data corruption
- **changed** — Expire servers wipe date extended to March 9

Beneath the waves, something new is lurking…

Arriving later this year in Genesis Part 1, the latest community-voted creature brings a new kind of intelligence to the depths.

**[Download in full resolution](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17jxrv5kVtyqizPtBrSRKPBJ0uOu_sN6h?usp=drive_link)**

When exploring the wide underwater biomes, you may notice two very different moods beneath the waves. Sometimes the calm is shattered by a sudden, violent surge—a frantic rush of ink and power that suggests the depths have finally lost their patience. Other times, the seabed gains an extra stone… a coral formation grows a few more “branches”… and the ocean floor becomes suspiciously still.

Disturb it at the wrong moment, and survivors will learn quickly that those eight arms aren’t just for show.

Following the recent Major Version update, we began encountering a series of corruption-related crashes across the Official Network. While the patch introduced a significant amount of new content, this issue was not specific to Astraeos. The release simply exposed something that was already lurking beneath the surface.

To protect player progress and prevent further data damage, we made the decision to take the entire Official Network offline while we investigated and stabilised the environment. That call was not made lightly but leaving servers online while corruption was occurring carried the risk of far greater long-term impact.

Our investigation traced the crashes back to corrupted dino data. In certain edge cases, a dino could be destroyed while the server still retained references to it. The server would then continue attempting to process or save data tied to that non-existent creature. Over time, those “ghost” dinos could trigger crashes and, in some cases, additional corruption. For reasons we’re still actively investigating, certain edge cases were only surfacing under the conditions introduced with the release, which we’re actively investigating.

After taking the network offline, we ran controlled subsets of Official servers with enhanced logging and updated builds. This allowed us to safely reproduce the issue, gather clean crash data, and validate adjustments without putting the wider network at risk to work on the resulting fix.

We will hold on running the EVO event while we continue stability monitoring. If servers remain stable during that window, we’ll kick off a week-long EVO event running through Monday the 9th.

We know downtime on this scale is disruptive, and we appreciate the patience while we worked through this properly. Our goal was not just to bring the network back, but to bring it back stable.

If you prefer more immediate, step-by-step Live Ops updates as we work through this, you can join the **[Official ARK Discord](https://discord.gg/playark)**.

**Expire servers wipe date extended to March 9.**

Expire servers are temporary servers across the network that will eventually be removed, and you can find them by searching for "**Expire**" in the session filter.

These servers will be online until 10 am PST / 1 pm EST on March 9. We're preemptively using our allocation for future maps to host some additional sessions that players can travel onto to farm, tame, and experience the newest content Gameplay. The same transfer restrictions apply in that you are only able to download your character, but you can freely take anything off. This is to help reduce load off some of the other servers, or provide players an option for those who just want to jump onto a new map temporarily.

Please note that **these servers will no longer exist after 10 am PST / 1 pm EST on March 9**, so if you intend to use them, remember to transfer your items/creatures/characters off before that date, as nothing will be saved beyond that time period.

MODSPOLIGHTLINK
Download & play new custom content created by players, including new maps, creatures, items, and game modes, through a dedicated new Mod-browser directly within the game. En

_[Truncated at 4000 characters — full notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2399830/view/506228886086877905]_