Valentines Dino Candy

A Valentine's candy for your tames

Valentines Dino Candy is an event treat in ARK: Survival Evolved and ARK: Survival Ascended. The game only hints at what it does: "Has a curious effect when consumed by a dinosaur." The ARK Wiki covers it on its shared Dino Candy page, which explains the effect: force-feeding a candy to a tame gives it randomly chosen colors that last 20 hours, and it shows you exactly which color each of the 6 regions will get.

Speed bonus and how the colors behave

Each candy also grants a temporary movement speed bonus that depends on its quality: +5% for Primitive, +10% for Mastercraft and +15% for Ascendant. Grades below Ascendant pull their colors from a fixed pool. Paint applied with a Spray Painter or Paint Brush still covers the candy colors. When the effect wears off, or once a frozen creature is released from its Cryopod, it goes back to its own colors, and babies never inherit the candy's color changes.

Finding the candy

Our records list one crate that can contain it: Fishing Meat (Valentine's), which covers maps such as The Island, Ragnarok, Valguero and Lost Island. The wiki adds that candies are caught by fishing for special Coelacanths with hearts above their heads. It also notes that Dino Candy is removed from the game once the event is over. A candy weighs 0.1 and the stack size is 1.

Emotes and skins it goes into

Our records count 25 recipes that use it in each game, all of them emotes and skins. Among them are the Flirty Emote (2 candies), the Cuddle Rex Sweater (5), the Teddy Bear Grenades (4) and the Pillow Club (3). In ASE most of these names end in Skin, such as the Pillow Club Skin.