Adding Unsupported Engrams, Creatures, or Spawn Points to Beacon

Beacon maintains a database of nearly all items in the game, as well as a few mods that list their contents with Beacon, but most mod items need to be added to Beacon by the user.

If you find that something missing, that Ark supports without mods, please let us know.

What You Need

Beacon needs the full blueprint path to everything you want to add. Beacon can extract the paths from the spawn cheats, such as cheat giveitem or cheat spawndino. Note that simplified variants, such as cheat giveitemnum or cheat gfi will not work, as they do not contain the full blueprint path. If you don't have the cheat codes, you can add items one by one.

If you only have the class strings, such as PrimalItemStructure_Something_C, Beacon will allow you to enter the value as a blueprint path. You will be warned that doing so is not recommended, because Beacon will need to make up a fake path for the item. It will not be correct and could cause confusion should the correct path ever be added to Beacon.

Getting Started

In the Library drawer on the left, press the Blueprints button. This button looks like a stack of squares. In that drawer, press the Manage Blueprints button to open the Blueprint Manager tab.

In the Blueprints Manager there are four buttons. From left to right, they are:

New Blueprint, which is used for adding a blueprint manually.
Import from Clipboard, which will be disabled until you have copied cheat codes. Pressing it will import from the copied cheat codes.
Import from Website, which imports all available blueprints from the provided url. The url must contain the cheat codes.
Import from File, which imports all available blueprints from the selected file. The file must contain the cheat codes; it cannot import from Ark game files.

Adding From a Website

The easiest way to get items into Beacon is using the Import from Website button described above. Enter the full URL to a web page containing the cheat codes, and Beacon will attempt to do the rest.

Importing blueprints from a web page. .

This feature works with most websites, but some websites such as Google Docs will not work with Beacon.

Adding From the Clipboard

When adding from a website isn't practical, you can also copy the cheat codes for Beacon to import. Beacon can find any number of codes through just about any formatting, so selecting a copying an entire column of codes from a Google Docs spreadsheet should work just fine. Once you have copied at least one working cheat code, the Import from Clipboard button will become enabled. All you need to do is click it.

Adding From a File

Beacon can also import from a file on your computer. Just like the other methods, formatting is not important to Beacon. Select a file containing cheat codes in some form, and Beacon will try to find them.

Adding Manually

Pressing the New Blueprint button will present an empty editor for the new blueprint.

See the next step for editing blueprints.

Editing Blueprints

Everything that Beacon has imported will be listed in the Blueprints list on the left. Selecting a blueprint allows it to be edited.

Every field is important in some way. For imported blueprints, the Type and Blueprint Path fields should almost never be changed. Manually created blueprints will need these filled in though.

Beacon will guess at the blueprint name based on its path. While these are reasonable guesses, if you wish to fine tune the names, use the Name field to do so.

The Tags field allows you to add organization to your blueprints. You can add as many tags as you like, separated by commas. Beacon uses a few special tags. Blueprintable means the blueprint can be a blueprint in the game, and causes Beacon to enable the Chance To Be Blueprint setting in the loot drop editor. The Blueprint tag is tells Beacon the blueprint is a recipe, such as the "Element from Dust" blueprint that crafts Element. The Generic tag tells Beacon that the blueprint is non-specific, such as "Any Egg" or "Any Artifact" and is intended for use in crafting recipes. The loot drop editor will not export or deploy drops containing engrams with either the Blueprint or Generic tags.

The Map Availability checkboxes tell Beacon which maps to pre-select when adding the blueprint to a Preset. Most users choose to leave all maps selected.

When done editing a blueprint, use the checkmark above the editor to save, or the x to discard changes.

Multi Editor

Users can select multiple blueprints to edit them at the same time.

When selecting multiple blueprints, only the Tags and Map Availability options will be available. Blue tags will be added to all blueprints that do not already have the tag, and Red tags will be removed from any blueprint that has the tag. Gray tags will be left alone, neither added nor removed from any blueprint.