Grappling Hook

Crossbow ammo for climbing and pulling

Loaded into a Crossbow in ARK: Survival Evolved, the Grappling Hook latches onto terrain, structures or creatures. With it you can scale cliffs, pull players or small creatures toward you, or hang on to a flying creature. Each shot uses up one hook, which the ARK Wiki says cannot be recovered, and a hook reaches surfaces about 70 m away.

Firing and reeling

• Reel in: primary fire.
• Reel out: secondary fire.
• Detach: crouch; the wiki advises against it when you are high above the ground.
• Vault: reel in, then jump as you reach the hook to spring upward, for example onto the top of a building you hooked near its upper edge.

How the line behaves

Reeling in pulls you in a straight line toward the anchor, and the hook never pulls you past it: to get up on a ledge, aim at a rock or tree further back than where you want to stand. The rope ignores terrain and objects, and it can drag you against a rock face. When the anchor is below you, you fall normally until you are level with it, then move sideways without fall damage; to break a fall, hook something higher than the point where you would land. Holding primary fire fires a new hook at once whenever one misses before the line runs out.

What the hook grabs

It holds on rocks, trees (not every branch), structures including water pipes, rafts, the ground under water, survivors (even unconscious or dead ones) and all dinos. It does not catch on leaves, bushes, loot drops, unconscious creatures or fleeing dinos, and it lets go if you become encumbered. Whether a dino can be hooked depends on what it is doing, not on its species: one that turns to flee breaks the line. Hitting a dino with the hook does not anger it, which the wiki calls important for Quetzal taming.

Crafting and finding hooks

The engram unlocks at level 47 for 40 engram points. Hooks are made in a Smithy or on an Argentavis Saddle. One craft takes 1 second, gives 0.05 XP and yields a single hook from:

• 35 Fiber
• 9 Metal Ingot (or Scrap Metal Ingot)
• 3 Stone Arrow
• 2 Thatch
• 1 Cementing Paste (or Achatina Paste)

A hook weighs 1 and they stack to 10, so a full stack weighs 10. Our records count 39 loot crates that can contain hooks, for example the easy, medium and hard crates of the Bulbdog Fetch and Circuit Chase missions on Genesis Part 2. The item is listed on 12 maps.