Oil

Oil across both games

Oil feeds into 29 recipes in ARK: Survival Ascended and 28 in ARK: Survival Evolved by our count, from Gasoline and jerky to industrial machines. The wiki gives its in-game text as "A thick blob of unrefined oil. Can be refined with hide to make gasoline." Each unit weighs 0.2 and a stack holds 100, so a full stack weighs 20.

Where Oil comes from

• Oil nodes: the oil patches in the ocean have dark rocks nearby that can be mined with a pick. The ARK Wiki gives 0-1 Oil per node with a Stone Pick and 0-10 with a Metal Pick, and an Ankylosaurus or a Dunkleosteus also mines them well.
• Above the waterline: on The Island, deposits sit in and around Whitesky Peak; on Ragnarok, on the snow mountain in the top left.
• Creatures: killing a Trilobite, Leech, Basilosaurus or Enforcer gives Oil, as does harvesting dead tek creatures. A tamed Dung Beetle produces Oil and Fertilizer from Feces while it wanders.
• Cooking: one Hesperornis Egg in a Cooking Pot or Industrial Cooker gives 12 Oil in 2 seconds.
• Loot: 62 crate types can contain it, including Fishing Items (Net), Fishing Items (Pole) and Astraeos Blue.

A variant, Oil (Tusoteuthis), builds up slowly in the inventories of tamed Tusoteuthis and Basilosaurus and can be looted from a dead Tusoteuthis.

On The Island, the wiki names three settings for nodes: the ocean, underwater caves and the beach of the Snow Biome. Ocean nodes give themselves away with a dark stream of oil rising upward, and underwater caves hold the highest density.

Recipes that call for Oil

Refining Oil in a Refining Forge or an Industrial Forge produces Gasoline, which takes 6 Oil per craft in our records. Combined in a Preserving Bin with Sparkpowder plus Cooked Meat or Cooked Prime Meat, it yields Cooked Meat Jerky and Prime Meat Jerky.

Amounts range widely among the recipes we list. A Silencer Attachment takes 5, Soap and the Tripwire Alarm Trap 2 each, and Propellant 1, while the Industrial Grinder needs 600, the Industrial Cooker 300, the Metal Storage Box 70 and the Industrial Grill 40 in both games. The ASA list includes, for example, the BattleRig Garage (225), BattleRig Wheels: Truck (80) and Underwater Mine (15); the ASE list includes the Industrial Forge (400), Jar of Pitch (180), Vault (70), Unassembled TEK Hover Skiff (62) and Fabricator (10).