Raw Meat

Food, taming bait and a cooking staple

Raw Meat is a food item in ARK: Survival Evolved and ARK: Survival Ascended. Carnivores eat it, tamers feed it to unconscious meat eaters, and a Campfire turns it into Cooked Meat. The description sums it up: "Eating raw food will sate hunger, but is unhealthy for humans. Most wild carnivores prefer raw meat to cooked meat."

Harvesting meat

Meat comes from carcasses. A carnivore harvests it most efficiently, then a metal pick; swords, stone picks and hatchets get less, and bare fists the least. Our records name gatherers such as the Rex, Giganotosaurus, Allosaurus, Carnotaurus, Baryonyx, Sarco, Daeodon, Mosasaurus and Argentavis. 77 crate types can contain it, including the Aberration White and Astraeos Blue crates, and the wiki mentions white, green and blue supply drops. Genesis Part 2 added one more source: Plant Species R, a plant you can grow and harvest for meat.

Eating it and taming with it

• Survivors: a raw piece restores 10 food but takes away 5 health.
• Carnivores: tamed or wild, a carnivore gets 50 food and 5 health from one piece.
• Taming: to tame an unconscious carnivore, place Raw Meat in its inventory.

Cooking it

A Campfire or Industrial Grill turns Raw Meat into Cooked Meat, which restores more food and spoils more slowly. On a Campfire each piece takes 20 seconds. Our ASE records also list it as an ingredient of Trap Bait.

A 10-minute timer

In a player's inventory Raw Meat lasts 600 seconds, or 10 minutes, before it turns into Spoiled Meat. A stack loses one piece at a time and the timer then starts again. When two stacks merge, the stack you drop onto keeps its timer, an easy way to refresh meat in a feeding trough. Splitting a stack leaves both halves on the same timer, so breaking it into single pieces makes them all spoil together, which is useful when you want Spoiled Meat. One piece weighs 0.1, and a full stack of 40 weighs 4.