Dung beetles can be a great creature to have for your efforts to survive and progress in ARK Survival Evolved. With a tamed dung beetle, you can load its inventory up with feces which it will process and convert into both fertilizer and oil. Fertilizer is great for increasing crop efficiency and oil can be crafted into a number of different things.
It can be a little tricky to tame a dung beetle, but there are a number of things you can do to make the taming process safer and less time consuming if you want one of these little critters to churn out valuable resources for you.
8 Sneak Up On Them
The most basic way to tame a dung beetle is to sneak up on them in the crouched position and start offering them feces. After a certain amount of feces and time, the dung beetle will be considered tamed and you can pick it up and take it to your base.
Sneaking is important as it can be very easy to aggro the dung beetle into attacking you, which hinders the taming process. They’re not inherently dangerous, but it can be annoying to fight off a dung beetle when you’re wanting it alive for your use.
7 Location, Location, Location
The first tip you can implement to assist in taming a dung beetle is picking the proper location to tame it. It should go without saying that you shouldn’t attempt to tame a dung beetle when there are hostile dinosaurs around, so clearing the area of any dangers will prevent any unwanted surprises or the accidental death of the dung beetle.
It can also be beneficial to take the beetle home to a designated pen to tame it in safety. There are a number of ways to move a dung beetle before taming it that the following entries will go over, if you’d rather not bother moving it home, you can always find a dung beetle in a cave and have one of your dinos guard the entrance.
6 Punch It To Safety
This has likely been or will be patched, but some players have reported being able to punch the beetle to a chosen area such as their base or a safer part of a cave. It’s a simple matter of getting close and punching the beetle in the direction you want it to go or around any obstacles that it might get stuck on.
This is obviously not the ideal method of transportation as the beetle can become hostile and, if the destination is too far you can knock it out or punch it to death, but in a pinch, it's a decent way to move it a few feet for your convenience.
5 Drag It Away
Grappling hooks are also a buggy and unreliable method of transporting a dung beetle to an ideal location. It seems to work better with beetles that are in the water, like those found in the North East Cave, but it can still work for land dwellers.
The idea is to simply drag the beetle back home with your grappling hook. The trick is to avoid coming into contact with the beetle while it’s being dragging or it will aggravate it. But, if you can keep your distance and be patient, you can drag it home.
4 Carry It Away With A Dino
By far the easiest way to transport a dung beetle to another location without it being tamed first is to get an Argentavis or a Quetzal to pick it up and carry it for you. This doesn’t aggravate the beetle and saves the time of having to punch or drag it home.
Supposedly the easiest dung beetles to obtain this way are found in the East Lava Cave inside the pit at the entrance. With either the Argentavis or Quetzal the player merely needs descend into the pit, grab the beetle, and then fly off to a safer area.
3 Don’t Aggravate Them
It’s important during the taming process that the player doesn’t aggravate the beetle. When neutral to the player the beetle will remain stationary and docile making it easy to tame. But if the player injuries or aggravates the beetle in any way it will become hostile and try to attack.
It can be tempting to lash out at the dung beetle if taming isn’t going your way, but every time you do you set the process back by a few minutes and make it that much more complicated to tame these critters.
2 Feed It What It Wants
It’s possible to tame a dung beetle with raw, spoiled, or fish meat, but the dung beetle unsurprisingly prefers dung. So while you can resort to meat in a pinch it’s much faster and more efficient to tame it using feces. Large animal, medium animal, small animal, and even human feces can be used for taming.
Considering feces has no use outside of taming dung beetles or producing fertilizer, it’s a no brainer to primarily use feces for the taming process. If possible, try to use large animal feces as it seems to work better, though don’t be afraid to use your character’s own supply to streamline the process a little.
1 Higher Levels Give Better Poop Storage
The level of the dung beetle doesn’t seem to have an effect on the difficulty or time it takes to tame it, so don’t be afraid to tame anything from level 1 to 200. That being said, you’ll be better served focusing on the stronger leveled dung beetles as they can hold more and larger feces.
This doesn’t mean they produce fertilizer faster or in greater quantities, just that their inventory is bigger and can hold more, meaning you make fewer trips when dropping off feces. It’s also important to note that when they are tamed they need to be able to wander around to produce fertilizer and can’t do so if overburdened. So, while level doesn’t matter for taming, you’re better served going after the high-level beetles.