ARK: Survival Evolved – Carcharodontosaurus Taming Guide

This guide will teach you how to quickly and easily tame a Carcha.

How to Tame Carcharodontosaurus

Please note: all credit goes to River System!

Introduction

This guide is based on my experience taming a level 140 Carcha. In other words, if you follow these steps you should have no problems taming any Carcha you encounter.

Overview Over the Taming Process

Carchas are not a simple knockout tame.

First, you need to carry the corpse of a dino near it. It will start a sniffing animation and then run over to the corpse and eat it. A progress bar will appear that shows you how much trust you have. Different dinos give a different amount of progress.

Once you reach 100%, it’s not tamed yet, but you can then ride the Carcha. You get taming progress by killing enemies. You may get thrown off its back at some point, if so you have to give it corpses again and repeat the process. Once you kill enough enemies, the taming is completed.

Preparations

  1. First, you will need a getaway dino. It needs to fly too, because Carchas are incredibly fast and can catch up with just about any land dino, especially if it killed something and it has the movement speed buff. Your getaway dino should have a few thousand hp at least as well so it can take some bites without dying immediately. I used an Argentavis for this. Make sure you can very quickly access it too, like putting the cryopod on the hotbar. You can get thrown off it’s back without any warning basically, and the Carcha will immediately attack you. Be prepared for this to happen at any time, and multiple times.
  2. To make your life easy, you will want some cryopodded baby dinos that you’ve bred, of a kind that will immediately give you 100% trust with the Carcha so you only need a single corpse to be able to ride it. Large dinos like Rexes, Quetzals, Paracers or Brontos all work for this according to comments i’ve read (I’ve only personally tried and verified Rexes). However, i highly recommend to use Rex babies because they’re very easy to drag (you would need a very high carry weight to be able to drag some of the others) and Rexes are very easy to get as well.

You want several for two reasons: One, you may have to repeat the process a few times. Two, when a Carcha is aggressive and tries to attack you, it can eat a corpse without giving you any progress. It only works if it’s not aggressive and does the sniffing animation beforehand.

For this reason, and especially if this is your first time trying to tame a Carcha, i recommend taking at least 10 babies with you to give you some room for error. More doesn’t hurt either. You’ll kick yourself if you run out of babies to feed because you’re still trying to get the hang of this taming method.

  1. Never hurts to have some healing items on you in case things do go wrong. Although if the Carcha is attacking you and you are not on your dino, you will not last long. Its attacks also give you a debuff that makes healing less effective.

Something you don’t need is a trap. If you use dino corpses that will give you full trust immediately, it’s just not necessary. Trapping it first is more difficult and takes longer.

Taming: Corpse Feeding Phase

With the preparations done, first make sure the Carcha is not aggressive and not attacking anything (or trying to). Killing surrounding dinos can help with this.

If at any point during the taming process you get aggroed, get your getaway dino out and fly away until you lose aggro and come back.

Start a good distance away from the Carcha. Again, you want to avoid getting aggro, so stay out of range.

Then, get the baby dino out, kill it, and slowly drag the corpse nearer to the Carcha. At some point it will start a sniffing animation. Immediately drop the corpse, and take a couple steps back at that point. Not too far though, because you will want to mount it in a few seconds.

The Carcha will come closer, eat the corpse, and then you will be able to mount it.

If anything goes wrong here, just get away to lose aggro, and try again.

Taming: Riding the Carcha

This is where it gets serious. Be alert at all times, in particular be prepared to be thrown off and to have a Charca in your face that wants to eat you. Be prepared to pop your getaway dino out and get the heck away from it.

With that in mind, you will have up to 10 minutes to kill as many dinos as you can. If the time runs out before you can kill enough, or maybe also before that, you will get thrown off and you have to regain it’s trust with dino corpses again.

Dinos with more health will give you more progress, however it doesn’t make a huge difference. The tiniest dinos, including jug bugs, will give you as much progress as a medium sized dino. Only dinos with several thousand health give additional progress, but those also will take longer to kill, so generally you’re best off in areas with many small dinos and just rack up as many kills as you can. You may have to kill up to a few hundred. I needed 200 kills and 3 rides for a level 140 for the record.

If you get thrown off: don’t panic. Get your dino out. Fly away to lose aggro. And come back. I never lost any progress from taking a while to restart the process, so no need to be too stressed out about taking a little time doing this.

There are two more important things to keep in mind during this phase:

  1. Avoid taking damage at any cost. Any damage the Carcha takes will reduce the taming effectiveness. This includes dinos like Kentrosaurus or Arthropleura which will damage you whenever you attack them, so you should avoid dinos like that at any cost. And obviously be mindful of dinos that are strong and will simply fight back and damage you that way.

Also important: Avoid fall damage! Don’t ever walk near cliffs, large rocks or anything else tall enough to cause fall damage if you walk over it.

  1. Unlike with tamed dinos, you cannot attack if the Carcha is out of stamina. So make sure you have some stamina buffer before you engage in a fight with a dino that will fight back and could potentially damage you. Be mindful of how the knockback from your attacks is what often keeps you safe from taking damage! If possible, only going after dinos that won’t fight back will be the safest option.

Enjoy Your New Carcha!

Congratulations! You can now enjoy your new Carcha. Take them for a ride and you’re sure to have fun.

Egor Opleuha
About Egor Opleuha 8075 Articles
Egor Opleuha, also known as Juzzzie, is the Editor-in-Chief of Gameplay Tips. He is a writer with more than 12 years of experience in writing and editing online content. His favorite game was and still is the third part of the legendary Heroes of Might and Magic saga. He prefers to spend all his free time playing retro games and new indie games.

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