The humble Achatina – the vibrant snail you might see making its way across the bottom of many ARK maps – is a quiet and unassuming creature. It won’t attack you even if you ride in on a Giganotosaurus and pick a fight with it.
It also helps provide you and your tribe with one of the most valuable and coveted substances in the game if you can tame it.
About Achatinas
One of the most notable things about an Achatina is the slime that it secretes. This is called Achatina paste and is a substitute for cementing paste in crafting. It creates this instead of feces, so Achatina isn’t a great species to tame for those who are farming dung.
You’re most likely to encounter Achatinas in the swamps or forest settings. They’ll often blend into the environment unless you spot a very brightly colored one. Since these snails move slowly, they don’t attract much attention and can be challenging to find for newer adventurers. Once you’ve located one, though, you can look around in the same area to spot more.
Taming an Achatina
Even though the Ahcatina is a kind and unaggressive creature, you still have to knock it out to tame it.
Knocking the Achatina out without killing it is the most difficult part of the taming process. To increase your chances of success, aim carefully. If you hit the snail in the shell too often, you’ll probably kill it. Hitting it in its flesh is a better way to knock it out without damaging it so much that it dies.
The taming food for an Achatina is Sweet Vegetable Cake. These aren’t easy to make at the beginning of the game since the recipe requires Giant Bee Honey and crops you have to grow yourself.
- Approach the Achatina with your preferred knockout method and knock it out.
- Press F by the Achatina to access its inventory.
- Drag Sweet Vegetable Cakes into the inventory of the Achatina. The number you need is dependent on the snail’s level. For example, a level 90 Achatina would require 11 Sweet Vegetable Cakes for taming.
- Drag more narcotics into the Achatina’s inventory. This helps keep it unconscious during the taming.
- Wait while watching the information panel on the Achatina. You can see its torpor and the progress of the tame here. Force it to eat the narcotic in its inventory if the torpor drops too low.
- Name and change the behavior of your tamed Achatina once the process is finished.
Remember that unconscious creatures are entirely defenseless, even though they can still draw aggression from others. Be prepared to defend your Achatina if you’re taming in the wild, or else you might watch another creature gobble it up for dinner.
If you’re far from your base, you probably also want a flying mount to carry other creatures to help get your new Achatina home. If you’re going to tame two at once, use an Argentavis since it can bring both to your home simultaneously.
Caring for Achatinas
One thing that makes Achatinas difficult to care for is that they require large amounts of Sweet Vegetable Cake, even after they’re tame. You want to have a working farm with crops, honey, and sap being produced so that you can keep your Achatina fed. Otherwise, it might starve to death over time.
Other than keeping the Achatina fed, it doesn’t require much care. You can create a pen for it and leave it in the enclosed space to wander and produce.
Uses for Achatinas
Achatinas have a few uses that make them desirable pets. A snail might not seem that exciting in the land of large predators and flying dragons, but it has its niche.
- As long as you set the Achatina to wander, it produces Achatina Paste and Organic Polymer. It can hold 100 paste in its inventory before you have to clear it and makes one every minute. It can also hold 100 organic polymers, though it only produces one every hour, which doesn’t account for the spoil time.
- Achatinas increase the spoil timer for Organic Polymer and Corrupted Nodules, as long as the items are in Achatina’s inventory. These items can last for 90 minutes without spoiling while being carried by the snail, making it much easier to get them home and use them after harvest.
You can also put a hat on your Achatina, which makes them funnier around the base.
Breeding Achatinas
For a long time, you couldn’t breed achatinas. The only way to have them was to tame them and bring them home. However, eventually, Wildcard updated the game so that tribes could breed their tamed achatinas.
Create a breeding room or pen where the achatinas won’t be attacked by other creatures. Remember, the Achatina doesn’t have much natural defense, and when you leave them to wander, they can encounter hostile creatures that might attack and kill them.
When you have two Achatinas in the pen, simply set each to wander and enable mating. It takes about eight hours for them to finish if you don’t increase your taming multiplier.
When they’re done mating, a baby Achatina will appear. These snails are one of the creatures that have a live birth in the game, unlike many who lay eggs. You should give it Sweet Vegetable Cake in its inventory right away.
Sneaky Ways to Farm Achatina Paste
Before you can make Sweet Vegetable Cake early in the game, you can still use Achatinas as an easy paste source for crafting. One way that my tribe and I have done it in the past is by creating an Achatina farm of untamed Achatina.
Simply take a flying mount to a wild Achatina, pick it up, and deliver it directly to the pen you created. It won’t fight or struggle. It will just retreat into its shell during transport.
You want to build a place that will contain them. Since you can’t control what wild Achatina do, you can’t stop them from wandering. So create a space where they can safely move around and drop their Achatina paste. When you have wild Achatinas at your base, they don’t require food to survive. Only once they’re tame do you have to feed them.
Warning: There’s a risk that they’ll despawn when you log off the game or intermittently. However, we don’t usually have a lot of issues with it. Generally, they stay in their area, or we can quickly collect them again.
Picking Up the Paste
You want to use an item nearby to pick up dropped items for you. The Achatina drop their paste slowly, and it’s not worth your time to stand around waiting to collect one piece at a time. You’ll need to have a modded server for this since the commonly-used Item Collector isn’t part of the vanilla game.
As long as you have the Item Collector nearby, you can have it passively pick up the paste from the wild Achatinas.
Achatinas are good tames to have because they make building more accessible. Since the recent update, it’s easier to get a large flock since you can breed them. Start with two and then go from there. It will make all your construction needs easier.