You've finally reached the point where your primitive tools just aren't cutting it anymore. Maybe you just tamed an Argentavis and you're ready to start smelting at scale, or perhaps you've finally unlocked the Fabricator and realized it doesn't run on hopes and dreams. It runs on Gasoline. If you don't know how to make gas in Ark Survival Evolved, you are basically stuck in the Stone Age while everyone else is flying around with industrial grills and chemistry benches.
Gasoline is the lifeblood of the mid-to-late game. Honestly, without it, you aren't doing much more than picking berries and praying a Rex doesn't wander into your thatch hut.
The basic recipe for Gasoline
It’s simpler than you’d think, but the game doesn't exactly hold your hand. To make one batch of Gasoline—which gives you 5 units—you need to combine 6 Oil and 5 Hide inside a Refining Forge or an Industrial Forge.
Wait. Don't just throw them in there and stare at them.
You need a heat source. If you’re using the standard Refining Forge, you’ll need wood, thatch, or sparkpowder to keep the fire going. Once the fire is lit, the chemical reaction happens automatically. It takes about 30 seconds per batch in a standard forge. If you're lucky enough to have an Industrial Forge, the process is way faster—it actually crafts 100 units of Gasoline at a time if you have the materials stocked up.
Finding Oil without dying
This is usually where players get stuck. Hide is easy; just go kill a Parasaur or a Phiomia. But Oil? That requires a bit of a trek unless you’re spawned in a very specific spot.
If you are playing on The Island, you’ve basically got three choices. You can head to the snowy biome in the northwest. Look for those big, black, oily-looking rocks along the shoreline. Pickaxe them. You'll get plenty of oil, but you'll also likely be hunted by Wolves and Yutyrannus. It's cold. You'll need fur armor or a high fortitude stat.
Option two is diving. The ocean floor is littered with oil nodes that leak black plumes. It’s safer from predators if you have a Megalodon or a Basilosaurus, but you’ll need scuba gear or a very high oxygen stat to make it back up.
The third way? Oil pumps. If you’re on Scorched Earth, Ragnarok, or Extinction, you can find oil veins. Plop an Oil Pump on top, and it just generates oil over time. It's passive. It's easy. It's also a prime target for griefers if you’re playing on a PvP server.
Why your gas production might be failing
Sometimes you put the stuff in the forge and nothing happens. Usually, it's because you forgot the fuel for the forge itself. A Refining Forge won't "cook" the Hide and Oil if it isn't already burning something else.
Another common mistake is the ratio. If you put 100 Hide but only 5 Oil, you’re only getting one batch of gas. The math matters.
- 6 Oil + 5 Hide = 5 Gasoline
Keep that burned into your brain.
The Industrial Forge advantage
Once you hit level 80, everything changes. The Industrial Forge is a massive investment—it costs a literal mountain of metal ingots, cement paste, and oil—but it is the only way to play the endgame.
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It runs on Gasoline itself.
There's a bit of irony there. You need gas to run the machine that makes gas more efficiently. But once it's on, it processes materials at 20x the speed of a regular forge. It also has a massive inventory, meaning you can dump thousands of Oil and Hide inside and come back twenty minutes later to a stockpile that will last you a week.
Advanced tricks for the resource-hungry survivor
If you're tired of mining rocks, there are "biological" ways to get oil.
Have you met the Basilosaurus? These giant whales are passive tames. Once you tame one, they actually produce oil in their inventory over time. It’s a special kind of oil that works exactly like the stuff you mine from rocks.
Then there are Dung Beetles. Honestly, Dung Beetles are the unsung heroes of Ark. You find them in caves. Tame them with large animal feces. If you put poop in their inventory and set them to "wandering," they convert that waste into Fertilizer and—you guessed it—Oil.
If you have a farm of 5 or 6 Dung Beetles, you might never have to visit the ocean or the snow biome again. Just keep them locked in a small wooden cage so they don't wander off into a Titano's foot.
What actually uses Gasoline?
You aren't just making this stuff for fun. You need it for:
- The Fabricator: The most important mid-game craft station.
- The Electrical Generator: Powers your lights, refrigerators, and turrets.
- The Industrial Grill: Cooks meat in bulk so you don't starve.
- The Motorboat: Faster than a raft and much harder to sink.
- Chainsaws and Mining Drills: Only on certain DLC maps, but they make gathering a breeze.
Don't forget that a single unit of Gasoline lasts for 15 minutes in a Fabricator, but in an Electrical Generator, it lasts for 60 minutes on default settings. This is crucial for planning your base's power consumption. If you’re going offline for the night and your turrets are the only thing keeping you safe, make sure that generator is topped off.
Dealing with the "Oil Crisis" on PvP servers
If you are on a public PvP server, oil is a contested resource. People will camp the oil nodes in the snow. They will build pillars around oil veins in the desert.
My advice? Go underwater.
Most tribes focus on land dominance. If you can get a decent Tuso or even just a fast Ichthyosaurus, you can hit the deep-sea oil nodes and get out before anyone notices. Hide your Refining Forges in a 1x1 stone hut hidden in deep forest cover. Don't build a massive base until you have enough Gasoline to power the turrets that protect it.
Surprising facts about Gasoline production
Did you know you can also get oil from killing Hesperornis? Those annoying ducks that swim around the rivers. If you kill them and harvest them with a metal hatchet or a Direwolf, they drop Organic Oil.
Also, Tek creatures. If you hunt Tek Parasaurs or Tek Rexes, harvesting their bodies gives you Scrap Metal, Electronics, and Oil. In some maps like Extinction or Gen 2, hunting Tek dinos is actually the fastest way to get your initial gas production started.
Moving forward with your energy empire
Now that you know the mechanics, your next move is to scale up.
Stop hand-picking oil rocks. Tame an Ankylosaurus. An "Anky" has a massive weight reduction for metal, but it’s also the king of harvesting oil nodes. Carry your Anky with an Argentavis, fly to the snow, and you can fill a vault with oil in a single afternoon.
Once you have the oil, focus on the Dung Beetle strategy for a passive backup. It's about redundancy. You don't want your base to go dark because you ran out of gas while you were busy taming a Giganotosaurus.
Set up a dedicated Refining Forge just for gas. Don't mix your metal smelting with your gas production if you can help it; it keeps the inventory cleaner and ensures you always know exactly how much fuel you have in reserve.
Check your generator every time you log in. If it’s under 50 units, it’s time for a farm run. Stay fueled, stay powered, and you might actually survive the night.
Actionable Next Steps:
- Locate your nearest oil source: Check the wiki map for your specific DLC to find the closest nodes to your base.
- Tame a Dung Beetle: Go to the Lower South Cave on The Island with some Large Animal Feces to start your passive oil farm.
- Build an Industrial Forge: Start saving those 2,500 Metal Ingots now; the jump in Gasoline production speed is worth every second of the grind.