Best way to run pipes & water in ARK: Survival Ascended

One of the more tricky aspects of ARK has always been managing water flow and piping to properly irrigate your crops. Thankfully, ARK: Survival Ascended changes how piping and irrigation work a bit, making it easier to manage. This is the best way to run pipes & water in ARK: Survival Ascended.

How the Water Intake works

The first part of setting up your piping network to bring in water is building a Water Intake. You can build a Stone Water Intake early on with just a few levels to unlock the engram, or you can build a Metal Water Intake later. Both will serve the purpose of giving you permanent access to water and irrigating your crops.

As long as the Water Intake is placed anywhere in water, it will work. When you go to place the Water Intake, you will see a big blue circle in an area around you. This is how far the Water Intake will automatically supply running water. Therefore, if you need to utilize water somewhere within that blue circle area, then you’re already good to go.

In ARK: Survival Ascended, Studio Wildcard has actually removed the necessity to build intricate piping networks. Instead, everything has an automatic radius in which water is available. At this point, you can simply put down a Water Tap—once again there are Stone and Metal variants—and you will have access to water at that tap.

Extending your water radius using Water Tank in ARK: Survival Ascended

If you need to run the water over a longer distance than the blue circle provides when putting down your Water Intake, you can do so it just requires some extra work.

Building a Water Tank and placing it down inside the circle area radius provided by a Water Intake will cause that Water Tank to essentially become a small water source. From here, you can place a new Water Intake in the Water Tank, which will create another blue circle area in which you will have running water.

Utilizing Water Intakes and Water Tanks you can create a chain of water sources to get running water anywhere you need it on The Island.

This is without a doubt the best way to run pipes & water in ARK: Survival Ascended, and using just these three items you can essentially have a water source anywhere.