Spoiled Meat

What old meat turns into

Meat that sits too long rots into Spoiled Meat, in ARK: Survival Evolved as well as ARK: Survival Ascended. The game's own line is a warning: "Eww... do not eat. This must have a use, right?" It does have uses, mostly in taming and fertilizer.

Building up a supply

The ARK Wiki names the sources: Raw Meat and Cooked Meat, Raw Mutton and Cooked Lamb Chop, any Jerky, the prime cuts (Raw Prime Meat and Cooked Prime Meat) and the fish variants, from Raw Fish Meat to Cooked Prime Fish Meat. Spoilage only ticks on one piece of a stack at a time, so 40 meat in a single stack lasts much longer than 40 separate pieces. To make a lot quickly, use the Split Stack - Split All option to spread the meat across slots, which is handy before crafting Narcotic in bulk.

On Crystal Isles the wiki points to sunken carcasses in the southeastern swamp: a Dunkleosteus brought along in a cryopod can harvest them for thousands of pieces within minutes.

Why it is worth keeping

Eating it is a last resort, since a piece gives back 3.5 food but takes away 12.5 health. A stock in a Storage Box pays off later, though. One piece combined with 5 Narcoberries in a Mortar and Pestle becomes Narcotic, a key taming item, and our ASE recipe data lists 1 Spoiled Meat for it. Bonemeal Fertilizer takes 3 in both games.

It is also the favorite food of the Karkinos, Vulture, Araneo, Arthropluera and Pulmonoscorpius: they tame faster on it than on Raw Meat, and each piece refills the same 50 food points. Tamed Mantis, Dung Beetle, Vulture, Karkinos, Arthropluera and Araneo regain 10 health for every piece they eat.

Shelf life, weight and loot

Spoiled Meat rots as well: after 900 seconds (15 minutes) a piece disappears from the inventory. A piece weighs 0.1 and a full stack of 100 weighs 10. It also turns up in loot, with 44 crate types that can contain it, among them Genesis Blue, Genesis Green and Genesis Red on Genesis Part 2.