You’re standing on a beach. You’ve got a dodo staring at you blankly, your stomach is growling, and you realize that if you want to move past the "huddled in a thatch hut" phase of the game, you need stone. Lots of it. ARK Survival Evolved how to get stone sounds like the simplest task in the world until you’re staring down the requirement for a full stone behemoth gate or a massive fortress.
Then it becomes a nightmare.
Most new players spend hours spamming the 'E' key on the ground or swinging a primitive stone pick at a boulder until their stamina bar hits zero. It’s slow. It’s painful. Honestly, it’s the fastest way to burn out before you even see a Rex.
The Early Game Scramble: Stop Picking Up Pebbles
Look, we've all been there. You walk along the shoreline of The Island or Ragnarok, mash the interact button, and slowly accumulate a stack of stone. It works for a campfire. It works for your first hatchet. But the second you need to build a mortar and pestle or a forge, you have to change tactics.
Basically, you need tools. Immediately.
The Stone Pick is your first real upgrade, but here is the nuance most people miss: tools in ARK have specific "weighting" for resources. If you hit a rock with a Pick, you get more Flint. If you hit it with a Stone Hatchet, you get more Stone. It’s counter-intuitive if you've played other survival games where picks are the universal "rock tool." Use the hatchet for stone. It’s that simple.
Even with a Metal Hatchet, you're still doing the work yourself. That’s "manual labor," and in ARK, manual labor is for suckers. You are a survivor; you should be a manager.
The Doedicurus: Your Absolute Best Friend
If you aren't using a Doedicurus, you aren't actually farming stone. You're just playing around.
This oversized armadillo with a mace for a tail is the undisputed king of stone collection. Why? Because the Doedicurus has a passive weight reduction. It carries stone at 25% of its actual weight. That means 100 units of stone, which would normally weigh 50 units in your inventory, only weighs 12.5 units in the Doed’s inventory.
You can find these guys in the mountains or the Redwoods. They aren't particularly fast, and they aren't aggressive unless you poke them, but they are tanky. When their health gets low, they curl into a ball and take almost no damage.
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Expert Tip: Don't just ride the Doedicurus and swing. If you set it to "Enable Wandering" or simply park it near a cluster of rocks while it's on neutral, it will automatically swing at rocks until it reaches about 50% of its weight capacity.
The Quetzal-Doed Combo
This is the "old school" power move that still works perfectly in 2026. You get a Quetzal with a platform saddle or just use its massive talons to pick up the Doedicurus. While you fly, your buddy sits in the Doed's seat (or the Doed just hangs there if it's on "Auto-harvest"). You fly low over rock formations, and the Doed mows them down like a vacuum cleaner.
You never have to land. You never have to worry about weight until the Quetzal itself gets bogged down. It turns a three-hour grind into a ten-minute flight.
Understanding Node Types
Not all rocks are created equal. This is a huge point of confusion for people looking into ARK Survival Evolved how to get stone.
- River Rocks: Those smooth, rounded stones in the water? They give a decent balance of stone and metal, but they are "harder" nodes.
- Mountain Boulders: These are your bread and butter. High stone yield, low secondary resources.
- Obsidian Nodes: Don't waste your time here if you just want stone. You’ll get it, but the "health" of the node is wasted on the obsidian.
- Salt Deposits: On maps like Scorched Earth or Lost Island, these look like white crystalline pillars. Great for stone if you're in a pinch in the desert.
The Industrial Grinder: The Late-Game Secret
Let’s say you’ve moved past the Doedicurus phase. You have a vault full of flint, wood, or even unwanted stone structures from a raid or a base move.
The Industrial Grinder is a beast.
It’s expensive to craft—you’ll need 2,000 Metal Ingots and a bunch of Crystal and Oil—but it changes the economy of your base. You can throw wood or flint into the grinder, and it converts them into Thatch and Flint, respectively. But more importantly, you can grind down complex items. If you found a bunch of "Ascendant" saddles in a loot drop that you'll never use, grind them. You get a portion of the crafting materials back, often resulting in thousands of stones instantly appearing in the grinder's inventory.
It’s loud. It requires gasoline. But it’s the closest thing to an "infinite stone" button in the game.
Environmental Factors and Map Selection
Where you play matters just as much as what you use. On The Island, the "Southern Islets" are stone-rich but spread out. If you're on Ragnarok, the area near the "Viking Bay" has massive rock pillars that provide insane yields.
On Genesis Part 2, stone is practically a byproduct of just breathing. The asteroid belt in the middle of the ship rotates resources every day. When the white or light-grey beacons are up, the asteroids are loaded with ambergris and stone. You can fill a Tek Dedicated Storage box in minutes using a Mining Drill.
The Mining Drill: The Tek Tier Solution
The Mining Drill (introduced in Genesis Part 1) is a game-changer for players who prefer to stay on foot. It’s a power tool that functions like a mix between a hatchet and a pick, but with much higher efficiency.
One thing people overlook: the Mining Drill also provides weight reduction for the resources you are currently carrying while you have the drill equipped. It’s not as efficient as a Doedicurus for pure volume, but for precision farming or hitting nodes in tight caves where an armadillo won't fit, it’s unbeatable.
Myths About Stone Farming
I see people claim that "Melee Damage" stats on your character increase stone yield. Sorta. It increases the damage you do to the node, which means you get the resources faster, but it doesn't necessarily mean you get more total stone from a single rock. The node has a fixed amount of "health" or "durability."
However, on a Doedicurus, pumping points into Melee Damage actually does increase the yield per swing, allowing you to hit the "cap" of that node more effectively. If you want more stone, ignore Health and Oxygen on your Doed. Put everything into Melee and Weight.
Making Use of the Gacha
If you're lucky enough to be on Extinction or have a Gacha in your base, you can literally grow stone.
By feeding a Gacha "Stone Owls" (Snow Owl pellets) and random junk like fiber or seeds, you can set its production to Stone. It will poop out crystals that contain 100-200 stone each. It's not the fastest method for building a mega-base, but for passive income while you're sorting your inventory or breeding dinos, it’s a nice "set it and forget it" system.
Actionable Steps for Maximum Yield
If you want to stop struggling with stone today, follow this exact progression:
- Craft a Metal Hatchet as soon as you hit level 20. Skip the stone tools as fast as possible.
- Tame a low-level Doedicurus. Even a level 20 Doed is better than the best Metal Hatchet. Use regular kibble or even just Mejoberries; it’s a quick tame.
- Build a Smithy on a Platform Saddle. If you have a Paracer or a Bronto, put a Smithy on its back. This allows you to craft stone walls or foundations on the go, which weigh significantly less than the raw stone itself. This "condenses" your weight.
- Use an Argentavis. The Argentavis can carry a Doedicurus in its claws (on most server settings). Fly the Doed to a mountain, drop it, let it clear a field, pick it up, and head home.
Stop mashing 'E' on the beach. Get a dinosaur to do it for you. That's the entire point of the game. Once you have a dedicated stone-runner, you'll realize that the bottleneck isn't the stone itself—it's having enough wood and thatch to turn all that stone into actual buildings. But that's a problem for another day.
Focus on the Doedicurus first. Everything else in your ARK career becomes easier once you have a stone fortress protecting your tames while you sleep. High-yield stone farming is the dividing line between being a "beach bob" and a real survivor.
Next Steps for Your Base: Look into taming a Castoroides (Beaver) or a Thorny Dragon to handle the wood requirements that inevitably follow a massive stone harvest. You'll need the wood to craft the Stone Foundations and Walls you're now dreaming of. Also, ensure you have a Mammoth if you're playing on a map with heavy timber—it has a similar weight reduction for wood as the Doed does for stone. Once your resource pipeline is automated, you can finally focus on the fun stuff: taming the apex predators.