Feeding Trough

A shared food supply for tames

The Feeding Trough is a container in ARK: Survival Evolved that lets nearby tames eat from one shared supply instead of from their own inventories. In the game's words: "Put food for your nearby pets in this, and they'll automatically eat it when hungry!" According to the ARK Wiki, this can reduce the food lost to spoilage across many separate stacks.

How tames feed from it

• Any feed: it holds whatever any tame can eat, even sulfur or stone for Rock Elementals, and berries, meat and other foods can all be mixed in one trough.
• Trough first: tames in range eat from the trough before their own inventory, and tames from allied tribes can use it as well.
• Same diet: a creature only takes what it would eat from its inventory, so herbivores leave the meat and carnivores leave the berries.
• Babies: only from the Juvenile stage onward can they eat from it.

Range and placement

The trough covers a cube of up to 11 foundations horizontally and 15 walls vertically from where it stands. Tames anywhere inside can feed without moving, and those passing through can eat too. The range works through walls and from higher up, so a trough in a base above or beside a water pen still reaches the creatures in it, and animals in separate pens can share one. An icon over a tame's name shows it is in range, even when the trough has nothing it can eat, and a green circle showing the range has been an option since patch 311.74 or earlier.

It needs no foundation, which keeps it from interfering with natural resources spawning, and it does not snap to other structures. It can even be placed and used underwater for marine creatures.

Spoilage and security

A trough multiplies the spoil time of the food inside by 4, matching what happens when a creature carries it. The wiki therefore suggests storing food in a Refrigerator or Preserving Bin close by and refilling the trough now and then. Other players can steal from a trough that is left unlocked. As a thatch structure it can be damaged by anything other than ranged attacks that do not explode.

Crafting it

The engram unlocks at level 18 for 12 engram points. A trough takes 5 seconds to craft, gives 3.7 XP and costs 120 Wood (or Fungal Wood), 60 Thatch, 40 Fiber and 8 Metal. It weighs 4 and stacks to 100, a full stack weighing 400. 56 crate types can contain it, Astraeos Blue and Genesis Cyan among them, and our records list it on 9 maps.