ARK: SA Custom Level Cap Not Sticking — Troubleshooting

ARK: SA custom level cap not sticking — fixing LevelExperienceRampOverrides

You added LevelExperienceRampOverrides to your Game.ini, set up a 180-level ramp, restarted the server, and your players are still capped at 85. Or 105. Or whichever number they were stuck at before the change. This is one of the most common "I edited Game.ini and nothing happened" failures on ARK: Survival Ascended, and it has four root causes that account for almost every case. See our setup guide for the basic configuration; this page is the troubleshooting companion when that setup does not stick.

The four things that break LevelExperienceRampOverrides

Mistake 1: Edits made while the server was running

This is the silent killer. The in-game admin UI and the running game process overwrite Game.ini on shutdown. If you edit the file while the server is up, restart, and watch your changes vanish — this is why.

Fix:

1. Stop the server completely.
2. Wait until the status shows fully stopped (not "stopping").
3. Edit Game.ini on disk.
4. Start the server.

The order is non-negotiable. Any other order leaves the door open for the running server to clobber your edit.

Mistake 2: Missing OverrideMaxExperiencePointsPlayer / OverrideMaxExperiencePointsDino

The XP ramp tells the game how much XP is needed for each level. The max XP setting tells the game how many levels exist. You need both, and they need to agree.

If your ramp goes up to level 200 but OverrideMaxExperiencePointsPlayer caps total XP at the level-85 amount, players hit the XP ceiling and stop leveling at 85. The ramp keeps going but the XP cap blocks it.

[/script/shootergame.shootergamemode]
OverrideMaxExperiencePointsPlayer=100000000
OverrideMaxExperiencePointsDino=100000000

LevelExperienceRampOverrides=(ExperiencePointsForLevel[0]=5,ExperiencePointsForLevel[1]=10,ExperiencePointsForLevel[2]=20,...)
LevelExperienceRampOverrides=(ExperiencePointsForLevel[0]=5,ExperiencePointsForLevel[1]=10,ExperiencePointsForLevel[2]=20,...)

Set OverrideMaxExperiencePointsPlayer to a number well above your max-level XP requirement. 100,000,000 covers any practical cap.

Mistake 3: Only one LevelExperienceRampOverrides line

The directive ships twice. The first occurrence applies to Player levels. The second occurrence applies to Tamed Dino levels. If you only wrote one, dinos are not getting your custom ramp (or, depending on which one you wrote, players are missing it).

Two lines. Always. Even if you want both to behave the same way, write both.

Mistake 4: Line breaks inside the override array

Every LevelExperienceRampOverrides=(...) entry must be on a single line with no embedded line breaks. The INI parser stops at the first newline. If you broke a long ramp across multiple lines for readability, only the first line is parsed and everything after is ignored.

If your ramp is hundreds of entries long, it will be a thousand-character line. That is intentional — the engine expects it that way.

Bonus mistake: Spaces or extra characters

The directive is case-sensitive and whitespace-sensitive in places. Look out for:

• A space between = and (
• A space between two array entries (after the comma)
• A trailing comma before the closing )
• Curly quotes instead of straight quotes (happens when copying from a Word document)

Each of these makes the engine fall back to default ramping silently.

The 105 hard cap behavior

ARK has a long-standing baseline ramp that goes to level 105 (some players see 85 without engram-completion bonuses; with bonuses you can hit 105 without any custom config). Many admins discover that even with a perfectly valid override targeting level 180, players cap at 105.

This is the cumulative effect of the four mistakes above. The override fails silently, the engine falls back to the default ramp, and the default ramp produces the 85-to-105 range. The fix is not a different setting — it is fixing the parse failure.

How to verify your ramp actually loaded

After stopping, editing, and restarting:

1. Open the server log immediately on startup. Search for LevelExperienceRampOverrides.
2. If the engine accepted your ramp, you will see no warnings. If it rejected the ramp, there is usually a "could not parse" entry naming the line.
3. Connect as a test player. Run cheat ShowMyAdminManager from the in-game console (admin-only) to display your current XP and level cap.
4. Use cheat AddExperience 1000000 0 0 to add a million XP to yourself. Watch the level climb. If it stops at 85 or 105, the ramp did not load.

If you are still stuck, regenerate the ramp with a tool

Typing out a 180-entry ramp by hand is the surest way to introduce one of the bonus mistakes above. Use a ramp generator:

• Beacon Omniverse (paid, full-featured ARK config tool)
• ARK Wiki server config page ships example ramps you can copy
• Open-source web-based generators ship clean text-only output that is safe to paste into Game.ini

Paste the generator's output verbatim into Game.ini. Do not "clean it up" by adding spaces or line breaks.

What "custom level cap that works" looks like in Game.ini

A working configuration for a 180-level player cap and a 150-level dino cap:

[/script/shootergame.shootergamemode]
OverrideMaxExperiencePointsPlayer=100000000
OverrideMaxExperiencePointsDino=100000000

; Player ramp (180 levels) — single line, no line breaks
LevelExperienceRampOverrides=(ExperiencePointsForLevel[0]=5,ExperiencePointsForLevel[1]=10, ... ,ExperiencePointsForLevel[179]=99999000)

; Dino ramp (150 levels) — single line, no line breaks
LevelExperienceRampOverrides=(ExperiencePointsForLevel[0]=5,ExperiencePointsForLevel[1]=10, ... ,ExperiencePointsForLevel[149]=88888000)

Restart, verify in the log, add XP as a test, confirm the level climb.

What to back up before editing

Always take a copy of Game.ini before changing it. If your ramp breaks the engine's load, the server can refuse to start. Restoring the backup gets you back to a known-good state in 30 seconds.

On Supercraft-hosted ARK: Survival Ascended servers the Config tab handles the stop-edit-start sequence for you and warns if your ramp lines have invalid syntax before the server attempts to load them. See ARK: Survival Ascended plans.

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