Element Dust

A pile of dust worth refining

Element Dust is a resource from the Extinction DLC that our records hold for ARK: Survival Ascended and ARK: Survival Evolved. Its item text calls it "A small pile of Dust that could be refined into Element or Element Shards." The ARK Wiki points out one way it differs from Element: the dust can be transferred, and survivors who have learned the matching engrams can craft it into Unstable Element Shards and Unstable Element.

Where the dust comes from

• Kills: Defense Units, Enforcers and Tek Creatures can be killed and harvested for it.
• The Sanctuary: its lampposts, benches and tables can be harvested. The wiki rates a Doedicurus as an extremely efficient harvester of these objects, breaking and collecting them the way it does stone. Having an Argentavis or Quetzal carry one through the city while it hits lamp posts can quickly yield large amounts of dust, Crystal and Electronics.
• Element Nodes: nodes spawn around the Wasteland, and finding and defending one gives large amounts of dust, Element Shards and pure Element.
• Other sources: a picked-up Ferox that sniffs can be thrown down for a small random amount, and some Gachas can rarely turn their Gacha Crystals into a moderate quantity of it as one production option.

Breaking Element down

The wiki lists the City Terminal and the Tek Replicator as crafting stations. In our recipe 1 Element becomes 200 Element Dust, and the wiki adds that each Element Shard breaks down into 2 dust; both conversions come at an 80% loss. Our ASE record gives the craft 5 seconds.

What Element Dust goes into

Our records count 8 recipes in ASE and 6 in ASA. The ASE ones include Unstable Element (1000 dust), Tek Gravity Grenade (200), Unassembled Enforcer (500), Exceptional Augmented Kibble (20), Scout Remote (20) and Unstable Element Shard (10). In ASA there are, among others, Element-Imbued Gasoline (10), the Spawner Enforcer City Terminal (500) and a recipe listed as Craft BattleRig (10). The wiki also describes the dust as a power source for the Scout and as food and energy for Enforcers.

Turning dust into Unstable Element works straight from the player's inventory, the wiki says, even on other Arks, and the Unstable Element then spoils into Element. It sees this as an inexpensive route to Element that avoids boss fights, and counts it as the second way of crafting Element the game added, after the Charge Node of the Aberration DLC.

Weight, crates and maps

A unit weighs 0.05 and stacks to 1000, which puts a full stack at 50. Our records count 58 loot crates that can contain it, for example Astraeos Lime, the Astraeos Orbital crates and Extinction Orbital Easy. They list 9 maps: Extinction, Aberration, Astraeos, Lost Colony, The Island, The Center, Scorched Earth, Ragnarok and Valguero.