Sentinel Launch and Summer 2025 Roadmap
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I have been working, off and on, on a monitoring service since before Ark Ascended launched. The idea was to ingest log files using an RCON connection for PC servers and perform basic monitoring. But it never really got past the experimental stage for various reasons.

Then Ark Ascended launched and console servers got access to RCON, so interest in the concept was renewed. I even wrote code to use an FTP connection to download player files to extract things like the player's EOS ID, since there was no way to retrieve that with RCON. And then the new "unified save game" system was launched, and disrupted things once again. There was no practical way to download the entire map save whenever a player connected. Plus, Ark's log data is really lacking.

Since January, I have been focusing almost exclusively on learning Ark modding so that I could get the data directly from the game itself, and Vue 3 to produce a nice web interface for all this. And it's finally ready and launched today.

What exactly is it?

Beacon Sentinel is a moderation platform. Besides performing the basic moderation tasks like monitoring chat, banning players, issuing admin commands, wiping dinos, etc., Sentinel allows admins and developers the ability to do wild new things with their servers. You can do the predictable things like a "/kit" command to give players a starter kit. But you can also do things like keep a count of player deaths against specific dinos. Or make them complain to chat when you neuter them.

With a bit of creativity, developers can even use Beacon Sentinel to create custom game modes, like hide and seek. This is why I like to call Beacon Sentinel a moderation platform. It's not just a tool for monitoring and moderating Ark Ascended servers, but for building whole new experiences without even rebooting the game server.

Plus, Beacon Sentinel gives rude players nowhere to hide. In-game chat messages are not only scored for things like hate, racism, and sexuality, but they are also translated. So even if a player is speaking a language you don't speak, Beacon Sentinel will reveal what they're saying. And thanks to the scoring system, you can automatically warn or ban users who engage in hateful chat without having to blacklist specific words.

You can check out more about Beacon Sentinel at https://sentinel.usebeacon.app/.

What's Next

Beacon is not forgotten. I have a list of things I want to do for the next major 2.4 update. But I need to stabilize Sentinel first. It's a brand new launch with rough edges and less-than-spectacular documentation. I have a ton of ideas for both Sentinel and Beacon, but I've been crunching hard for the past six months and need to slow down a little too. I'm hoping Sentinel is as successful as I think it can be so I can maybe bring on some help bringing these ideas to life.

For Beacon 2.4, these are some of the ideas I've been knocking around:

  • Linux support: I've tried this a few times in the past and have found showstopper issues each time. With SteamOS gaining traction, I'd like to give this another shot, but I can't promise it'll become reality.
  • Webhooks: Beacon could call a URL after certain actions such as deploy, server start, or server stop. This could allow simple things like a Discord notification, or more complicated things like executing a Sentinel script.
  • File templates: Self-hosted servers need to maintain a launch script that Beacon currently can't really help with. File templates would allow you to define your own launch script that Beacon could update and maintain as part of the deploy process. Or maybe even build an HTML file containing key server settings. The idea is you provide Beacon with a template, and it fills in values and writes to disk.
  • New mods manager: The "Mods" button in the project toolbar could use some serious work, especially with the "Mods" tab almost directly above it. It's real easy to confuse the two. I'd like to introduce a much more interactive mods manager that can do things like support config sets.

Again, none of these are promises. But they are things I'd like to do with Beacon in the next version.

Wrapping Up

So that's where Beacon is going both as an app and as a brand. I'm proud of this growth and where the product is heading and I hope to continue to make Beacon and Sentinel indispensable tools for every Ark admin.

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