Drakeling Tweaks - ASA Mod

ModsArkASABlueprintsSystems Design

Overview

Drakeling Tweaks is a small ARK: Survival Ascended mod focused on lightweight runtime adjustments for the vanilla Drakeling without turning it into a remap or replacement.

The first feature restores Drakeling Gift of Knowledge stored XP when the kill comes from:

  • XP_TAMEDKILL
  • XP_UNCLAIMEDKILL

The mod now also exposes cooldown scaling for:

  • Breath
  • Biome Boost
  • Gift of Fortune

The main constraint from the start was keeping it lightweight. I did not want a remap, a replacement creature, or anything that would tie the save to a custom Drakeling class.

What It Does

  • restores only the excluded non-wild stored XP cases
  • adds percentage-based cooldown control for three Drakeling abilities
  • leaves wild-kill behavior alone
  • works with existing and future Drakelings
  • exposes simple server-side percentage config values through GameUserSettings.ini

Why It Was Worth Doing This Way

The most interesting part was not the XP amount itself. It was finding a clean way to hook into vanilla shoulder logic without touching the Drakeling class.

That same compatibility-first approach also mattered once the mod grew beyond XP restoration. Expanding the config surface was useful, but I still wanted the project to stay focused on targeted Drakeling behavior changes rather than drift into a broader creature overhaul.

Implementation Summary

The final setup uses two buffs:

  • one buff on the player detects when the vanilla mounted Drakeling buff appears
  • from there it resolves the Drakeling reference and applies a second buff
  • that second buff lives on the Drakeling
  • it listens to BPNotifyExperienceGained
  • it filters XP_TAMEDKILL and XP_UNCLAIMEDKILL
  • and it handles the XP restore logic from the Drakeling side

That keeps the XP feature narrow and avoids turning the project into a creature overhaul.

For the newer cooldown settings, the mod reads integer percentage values and applies them against the Drakeling’s current base cooldowns:

  • BreathCooldownPercent
  • BiomeBoostCooldownPercent
  • GiftOfFortuneCooldownPercent

Using percentages keeps the config readable:

  • 100 = current default cooldown
  • 50 = half the current cooldown
  • 1 = 1% of the current cooldown

For bootstrap, the first step was ModDataAsset -> Additional Default Buffs, but that only covered players when they spawned or respawned. Existing living survivors could still miss the detector buff, so the final version added a server singleton through ModDataAsset -> ServerExtraWorldSingletonActorClasses that applies the detector to logged-in players if they do not already have it.

Key Decisions

  • No remap and no replacement. That was the main constraint.
  • No timers as the base solution. The final route was event-driven.
  • Simple external config. Values come from GameUserSettings.ini as integer percentages.
  • Bootstrap had to work on already-living survivors. That is why the final build uses both the default buff route and a server singleton actor.

Important: the config category was renamed from [DrakelingTamedXPMultiplier] to [DrakelingTweaks]. Existing settings must be moved to the new section.

[DrakelingTweaks]
NonWildKillXPPercent=100
BreathCooldownPercent=100
BiomeBoostCooldownPercent=100
GiftOfFortuneCooldownPercent=100
ShowBuffInfo=False

Those values are then converted into internal percentages:

  • NonWildKillXPPercent
  • BreathCooldownPercent
  • BiomeBoostCooldownPercent
  • GiftOfFortuneCooldownPercent

For XP restore:

  • 0 = current official behavior
  • 100 = full restoration for the excluded non-wild kill XP categories

For cooldowns:

  • 100 = current default cooldown
  • 1 = 1% of the current cooldown

Result

From a portfolio point of view, this project matters to me because it combines:

  • a very specific gameplay problem
  • a compatibility-first runtime solution
  • a small technical hook that became the foundation for a broader Drakeling tweak mod

Follow The Project

If you want the public page for the mod, use the CurseForge link above.