It’s been a wild ride finding and taming (or harvesting on a massive scale) all five new dinos released in ARK: Survival Evolved’s 253 update, with all but one of those introducing unique new gameplay elements.
Today that journey of dino taming comes to an end as we wrap up with the fifth and final new creature: therizinosaurus, an aggressive herbivore excellent at gathering materials for you.
If you missed them, we previously covered how to tame the thieving pegomastax, aquatic cnidaria jellyfish and its giant squid counterpart tusoteuthis, as well as the elusive troodon.
Fluffy… but dangerous!
Therizinosaurus Taming Strategy
While the pegomastax has to steal food from you, the troodon has to kill and eat your tamed mounts, and the tusoteuthis requires teams to enact a distract-and-feed strategy, the therizinosaurus finally brings us back into standard dino taming territory.
If you’ve been baffled by the unclear methods on how to tame the other patch 253 creatures, this will be a welcome return to form. As with most dinos, you need to first knock one of these guys out with a torpor-causing weapon such as tranquilizer darts and then feed it a preferred food.
As with most dino taming, the biggest risk here is in getting mauled to death. While they are herbivores, a therizinosaurus immediately becomes aggressive when you walk anywhere near it, so its best to take one down from range while on a mount. Even an armored player can expect to get quickly destroyed by those razor sharp claw attacks.
Be aware that there was a mistake floating around some sites listing that fertilized megalosaurus eggs are required – this was actually a bug that has since been repaired. Therizinosaurus now prefer to eat megalosarus egg kibble as the quickest method of taming.
Feeding Megalosaurus Kibble
They will also accept vegetables or citronal in place of megalosaurus kibble, but expect a drastic increase to an already lengthy taming time. Even if you are properly using megalosaurus kibble the tame timer is quite high, so have some narcotics on hand (or some other way of keeping the creature docile or knocked out for an extended period).
For a low to mid level therizinosaurus you can expect around an hour or more for taming, while for high level dinos prepare to devote more than two hours to the whole process.
Therizinosaurus Uses
So why do you want this dino as opposed to any of the huge roster of existing creatures in ARK? Aside from a pretty devastating claw attack that can take down even much bigger creatures, therizinosaurus has one huge advantage over the competition: they are amazing at gathering resources.
Despite being a herbivore, they have excellent meat gathering speed, but the real draw here is the ability to harvest gigantic quantities of wood, fiber, berries, and mushrooms in very short times — even while on the move!
Even with the inherent dangers of knocking one out without getting killed and the time required to make all that megalosaurus kibble (and then feed it to a therizinosaurus…), the harvesting abilities offered to your tribe are well worth the effort.
Plus, how cool is this?
Dive Deeper Into ARK!
Did you manage to nab all five new dinos in patch 253? Let us know what level and colorations you got in the comments below! If the therizinosaurus is still a bit beyond your prowess however, be sure to check out all our beginner guides on every other aspect of the game:
- How to survive the first few hours of ARK
- Best ARK weapons for beginners
- Best mounts in ARK: Survival Evolved
- Why you should try ARK with an Extinction server
- Most terrifying ARK dinos
- How to build new tribes
- Stealing and hatching wyvern eggs
- Mods to spice up your ARK experience
