Tinkering Desk

Merging blueprints into a new one

The Tinkering Desk is a crafting structure in ARK: Survival Evolved and ARK: Survival Ascended that works with blueprints. Its description: "Place Blueprints in this to combine them into a Blueprint more suited to your needs." The ARK Wiki explains that the desk takes 3 blueprints and produces one that can come out better or worse in quality, and it lists the desk under Bob's Tall Tales.

Stable and unstable mode

The desk has two operating modes, which the wiki describes as follows:

• Stable: there is a 20% chance that the result falls below the lowest rating among the inputs, but it can also go past the highest rating and give a better blueprint.
• Unstable: the outcome always equals the average of the three blueprints put in, but it succeeds only 25% of the time.

For the best results, the wiki recommends using 3 blueprints of the same item.

Building a Tinkering Desk

The engram unlocks at level 64 for 21 engram points, and our records name the Fabricator as its prerequisite. The desk itself is crafted in a Fabricator, takes 5 seconds and gives 6.25 XP. Both games ask for the same amounts:

• 600 Wood
• 400 Fiber
• 200 Electronics
• 150 Metal Ingot or Scrap Metal Ingot
• 120 Polymer

Weight and loot

A desk weighs 4 and a stack holds 5, so a full stack weighs 20. Our records list it on 9 maps, and 9 crate types can contain it, for example the Aberration Red crate on Aberration and Valguero and the Aberration Surface Red and Aberration Surface Yellow crates on Aberration.