Industrial Grinder

Breaking items back down

The Industrial Grinder is a crafting machine in ARK: Survival Evolved and ARK: Survival Ascended, and a different machine from the Bio-Grinder. Its in-game text: "Grind up crafted items and certain resources!" Tools, weapons, armor, structures, saddles and many other crafted items can go in, and part of their cost comes back out.

What you get back

• ASE: 25% of each ingredient, rounded up, but never more than 100 of any one resource.
• ASA: 30% of each ingredient, rounded up.

Anything that would return Polymer yields Organic Polymer instead. A few items, Rafts among them, cannot be ground; the grinder's inventory marks them with a crossed-out circle.

Running it

Gasoline powers it: load some and press Turn On. Wood and Stone are ground by placing them inside and choosing the Thatch or Flint blueprint. For items, select one and use Grind Selected Item, or Grind Selected Stack for a full stack. The wiki suggests adding one Gasoline at a time, so the machine is not left running and burning fuel. That single unit lasts 15 minutes, enough for roughly 42 stacks of Wood or Stone at 100 each, though the queue takes only 1000 resources at a time, so grinding that much needs constant attention. Wood and Stone grinding earns solid experience; the item and stack options earn none.

Crafting the grinder

The engram unlocks at level 64 for 45 engram points, and our data names the Fabricator as its prerequisite. The grinder is built in a Fabricator or a Tek Replicator from:

• 3200 Metal Ingot or Scrap Metal Ingot
• 2000 Crystal or Primal Crystal
• 800 Cementing Paste or Achatina Paste
• 600 Oil or Oil (Tusoteuthis)
• 600 Polymer, Organic Polymer, or Corrupted Nodule

Crafting takes 5 seconds and gives 33 XP. The wiki notes that a carefully packed Fabricator can take 460 Organic Polymer (23 stacks) plus 140 regular Polymer (2 stacks) for this craft. As an item, the grinder weighs 4.

Toughness and loot

It counts as a wooden structure: bare hands, stone weapons and non-explosive ranged attacks cannot hurt it, nor can a list of aggressive creatures on the wiki that includes the Raptor, Direwolf, Sabertooth and Titanoboa. 56 crate types can contain it, for example Aberration Red on Aberration and Valguero and Aberration Surface Yellow. Our records list it on 14 maps.