Handcuffs

Restraints for captured survivors

Handcuffs are a hands-slot item in ARK: Survival Evolved for restraining a survivor who has been knocked out. Put them in the hands armor slot of an unconscious player, and that player stays restrained after waking up. A cuffed survivor cannot fight back but can still walk around, so a prisoner needs watching.

What a cuffed player can and cannot do

• Blocked: opening the inventory, using items, and dealing damage to players or creatures.
• Still possible: walking and running, opening doors, whistling commands to creatures, using consumables that were already on the hotbar before the cuffs went on, swinging without doing damage to hasten starvation, and, on Genesis, using HLN-A to teleport.

Keeping prisoners

The ARK Wiki collects several methods. A cuffed player standing close enough to a bench can be locked to it and can then only look around; this works on online and offline players and makes moving prisoners by raft possible. Some captors empty the prisoner's inventory and load it with stone or other harmless materials, so the prisoner cannot walk or run and burns no stamina. A determined prisoner can still wait for starvation or dehydration, and punching speeds that up. Force-feeding food and drink during unconscious periods keeps a prisoner alive longer, and narcotics keep an online prisoner unconscious. The wiki also carries an untested report that cuffs have occasionally come off after a server restart, possibly because of a short rollback.

Crafting a pair

The engram unlocks at level 28 for 16 engram points. The recipe takes 50 Metal Ingot (or Scrap Metal Ingot), 10 Cementing Paste (or Achatina Paste) and 5 Obsidian, crafted in a Smithy, an Argentavis Saddle or a Tek Replicator. Crafting takes 5 seconds and gives 24.5 XP, and the cuffs weigh 1. Our records count 90 crate types that can contain them, such as Aberration Blue on Aberration and Valguero and the Aberration Dungeon crates, and list them on 14 maps.