Turns out there’s an easy way to spoil meat quickly in Ark: Survival Ascended

Ark: Survival Ascended has provided plenty of quality-of-life improvements from Ark: Survival Evolved and the most important could well be the ability to spoil meat quicker than ever before.

In the original game, the only way to spoil meat was to wait until the spoil timer on raw meat ticked down to zero, but this only spoiled the first piece of meat in the stack—so you had to split the stack entirely to do things quickly.

Given how important Spoiled Meat is in Ark—it’s a crucial ingredient for creating Narcotic that can be used to knock out and tame dinosaurs to help you survive—the process was time-consuming and frustrating. Ark: Survival Ascended has, however, provided a quicker and easier way to get access to a near-unlimited amount of Spoiled Meat in a huge quality-of-life change—and all you need is the help of Mother Nature.

First, you need to build a Toilet and ensure it is connected to a water source by being in the proximity of a Water Intake—you’ll know if you’ve done this correctly if you can see a “Flush” option when you look at the Toilet. From there, open the inventory of the Toilet and add Raw Meat, then sit on the Toilet and poop away—which turns the entire stack of meat you put into the inventory into Spoiled Meat.

This new mechanic has already proven to be an absolute lifesaver for me as I desperately needed more Narcotic to tame a Casteroides when all my other Tribemates were offline. But it turns out I didn’t need their help in the end because I had Mother Nature by my side.

So, next time you notice your character needs to go and do their business in Ark: Survival Ascended, put the poop to good use by using a Toilet rather than just defecating all over the beach like some sort of caveman monster. Irrigation is a good tool. Use it.