How to Tame a Castoroides in ARK

 

    The Castoroides — "cass-tor-oy-dees," often called the Giant Beaver, or just Beaver — is one of the best creatures for gathering Wood, and its saddle doubles as a mobile Smithy. The wiki's own description calls it "a small, herbivorous mammal, utilized by survivors for being one of the best creatures for gathering Wood," first added to ARK: Survival Evolved on 24 February 2016 (build 236.0). Taming one is a knockout job: everything below comes straight from ark.wiki.gg's Castoroides page. Anywhere that page doesn't give a clean figure, this guide says so instead of guessing.

 

Castoroides Is a Knockout Tame

 

    The wiki lists the Castoroides' Taming Method as Knockout: you drop its Torpidity with tranquilizers or a trap, then feed it while it's out — you don't hand-feed it awake like a grazer. The wiki's KO Strategy section is blunt about the pace: "The Beavers are not hard to down, as it only takes around 9 tranquilizer darts to down a lvl 75, so just using darts while it's chasing you should work fine. You may also put it in a small taming pen or use Bolas on it." It also warns that "Torpor drops very rapidly so it is very important to fire tranquilizers in rapid succession and have a lot of Narcotics on hand, as the tame is long and slow" — fast-draining torpor plus a slow feed cycle means the real risk is it waking up mid-tame, not the knockout itself.

 

    Base Torpidity is listed as 350, +21 per level. For Level 1 specifically, the taming-food table gives a torpidity depletion rate of 1.5 per second, with 00:03:53 until it's fully depleted once knocked out — under four minutes to get food loaded before a freshly-downed Level 1 Beaver wakes back up. The page doesn't give a depletion rate for a Level 75 (the level used in the 9-dart example above), so this guide doesn't extrapolate one — treat the two figures as separate data points, not a matched pair.

 

Best Food and Kibble for Taming

 

 

    The wiki's dedicated Preferred Food list for the Castoroides names three items: Superior Kibble, Crops, and Mejoberries, in that order. Confusingly, the page's Domestication summary block earlier on the same page lists "Preferred Kibble" twice with different values (Superior Kibble, then separately Kibble (Gallimimus Egg)) and "Preferred Food" twice as well (Crops, then separately Fresh Sugar Plant), with no note explaining why each label repeats or which game version each applies to. Rather than pick one and drop the other, this guide reports all five items the page names, and treats the dedicated three-item list as the clearer, primary source of the two.

 

Level 1–150 Taming Time and Food Quantity

 

 

    The wiki gives a full taming-food table across six levels (1, 30, 60, 90, 120, 150). Reading just the Superior Kibble row and the table's Time column for each — the two values that are unambiguously labeled — gives this progression: Level 1 needs 2 Superior Kibble, total time 0:04:48; Level 30 needs 4, time 0:09:36; Level 60 needs 5, time 0:12:00; Level 90 needs 7, time 0:16:47; Level 120 needs 9, time 0:21:35; Level 150 needs 11, time 0:26:23. The table lists three further unlabeled numeric columns per row — the source doesn't caption what those measure, so this guide doesn't guess at them.

 

    The scaling here is clean: from Level 1 to Level 150, both the kibble quantity (2 → 11) and the total time (4:48 → 26:23, i.e. 4.8 → 26.38 minutes) grow by almost exactly the same factor — 11 ÷ 2 = 5.5, and 26.38 ÷ 4.8 ≈ 5.5. Taming time scales in lockstep with kibble quantity across this range, not independently.

 

Saddle Level, Base Stats, and Where to Find One

 

 

    The Castoroides Saddle is listed at Level 61. Base stats at Level 1, per the wiki's stat table: Health 450 (+90/level), Stamina 180 (+18/level), Weight 300 (+6/level), Melee Damage 28 (+1.12/level), Torpidity 350 (+21/level). Drag Weight is 120, Feces Size is Medium, and it grants 16 XP on kill (base taming XP is listed as 4 in the infobox). It's listed as not Torpor Immune and not Radiation Immune. For anyone breeding rather than wild-taming, Total Maturation Time is 2d 13h 43m 42.219s, with a Breeding Interval of 18h – 1d 15h 40m.

 

    On finding one in the wild: the page notes wild Castoroides "build dams containing large quantities of Wood, Cementing Paste, Rare Flower, Rare Mushroom, and Silica Pearls," and that "per dam, it is possible to find one to three beavers." The Habitat section lists it across twelve maps — The Island, The Center, Ragnarok, Extinction, Valguero, Genesis: Part 1, Crystal Isles, Genesis: Part 2, Lost Island, Fjordur, Midgard, and Asgard — but the page's Common/Rare/Untameable/Cave rarity markers didn't carry over into extractable text, so this guide can't say which maps have common versus rare spawns.

 

Bolas and a small taming pen both work per the wiki's own KO Strategy advice. It's immobilized by Bola, Large Bear Trap, Plant Species Y Trap, or Net Projectile, so any of those will hold one still for tranquilizing. Don't loot an active dam before you've decided to fight or tame what's guarding it: taking items out draws an attack, and if you strike one Beaver, "the entire Giant Beaver population in the immediate area will attack." Stock Narcotics heavily before you start — torpor "drops very rapidly," and a thin narcotic supply can leave you unable to keep it under before the feed finishes.

 

Running your own ARK server

 

    Trapping a Castoroides, feeding it through a multi-minute knockout window, and then waiting out days of maturation timers if you're breeding one afterward all go a lot smoother on a dedicated, always-on world instead of a host's limited play session. A private ARK server keeps your taming pen standing and your Narcotics stockpile exactly where you left it, with no risk of a random server wipe mid-tame or a stranger looting the dam you were about to clear. Use promo code WELCOME for your first month free when you spin one up.

 

Conclusion

 

    Taming a Castoroides in ARK comes down to what ark.wiki.gg actually documents: it's a knockout tame with fast-draining torpor, its clearest preferred foods are Superior Kibble, Crops, and Mejoberries, a Level 1 tame needs 2 Superior Kibble and about 4 minutes 48 seconds, and its saddle unlocks at Level 61. Higher levels scale predictably — Level 150 needs 11 kibble and roughly 26 minutes 23 seconds, a 5.5x jump that matches the kibble-quantity jump exactly. What isn't in the source — the unlabeled taming-table columns, per-map spawn rarity, and the exact Torpidity depletion rate above Level 1 — isn't guessed here either.

 

    Ready to tame your own Giant Beaver without losing your trap to a server restart? Spin up your own ARK server and start taming today.