How to Tame a Sabertooth in ARK

 

    The Sabertooth — Smilodon brutalis, "Double-Edged Tooth" — is a carnivorous, aggressive mountain cat, and ark.wiki.gg confirms it's a knockout (KO) tame: tranquilize it, don't hand-feed it while conscious. This guide covers what the wiki documents for taming one — preferred kibble and food, the Level 1 food/time table, torpidity depletion across levels, the saddle requirement, and base stats — and says so explicitly wherever the source doesn't give a clean number, instead of guessing.

 

The Knockout (KO) Taming Method

 

    The page's Domestication data lists Taming Method: Knockout and Torpor Immune: No — the standard approach: knock it out, then load its inventory. Preferred Kibble is listed as "Regular Kibble" and separately "Kibble (Bronto Egg)"; Preferred Food is "Raw Mutton" and "Raw Prime Meat."

 

    Pack behavior matters for planning a tame. Behavior says Sabertooths "mostly walk in pairs but can in rare cases be found in groups of up to six," while Dangers separately warns you're "likely to encounter its 2-5 friends as well." Adding those together — the one you see plus 2–5 friends — gives packs of 3–6, consistent with the "up to six" ceiling.

 

    Habitat spans: The Island, The Center, Scorched Earth, Ragnarok, Extinction, Valguero, Crystal Isles, Genesis: Part 2, Lost Island, Fjordur (with sub-regions Midgard, Asgard, Jotunheim), and Genesis: Part 1. The page had Common/Rare/Untameable/Cave columns beside this list, but those labels didn't survive extraction, so per-map rarity is undocumented here.

 

    Worth flagging rather than resolving: the infobox lists basexp = 5, while the Data section separately states "XP for kill: 20 XP." The source never reconciles the two, so both are reported as-is.

 

Level 1 Taming: Food, Kibble, and Time

 

 

    For a Level 1 Sabertooth, the wiki's table lists quantity and total feeding time: Regular Kibble — 1, 0:02:00; Raw Mutton — 2, 0:03:45; Cooked Lamb Chop — 4, 0:07:30; Raw Prime Meat — 3, 0:05:38; Cooked Prime Meat — 5, 0:09:22; Raw Prime Fish Meat — 6, 0:05:38; Raw Meat — 7, 0:13:08; Cooked Prime Fish Meat — 11, 0:10:36; Cooked Meat — 13, 0:12:12; Raw Fish Meat — 16, 0:15:00; Cooked Fish Meat — 32, 0:15:00. The cleanest arithmetic check: Cooked Lamb Chop needs exactly double the Raw Mutton quantity (4 vs. 2) for exactly double the time (0:07:30 vs. 0:03:45) — a consistent 2:1 ratio.

 

    The table also carries three extra numeric columns per food (zero at Level 1, nonzero at higher levels in the source), but no header naming them survived extraction, so this guide doesn't name what they are. The page also lists six KO multiplier values per level (Level 1: ×50, ×21, ×6, ×4, ×3, ×2) — presumably one per tranq weapon, but which weapon maps to which number isn't preserved either, so that mapping is undocumented too.

 

Torpidity Depletion by Level

 

 

    Depletion rate and time-until-fully-depleted, by level: Level 1 — 0.3/s, 00:27:46; Level 30 — 0.5/s, 00:45:49; Level 60 — 0.66/s, 00:58:11; Level 90 — 0.79/s, 01:07:09; Level 120 — 0.92/s, 01:14:12; Level 150 — 1.04/s, 01:20:01.

 

    The rate climbs from 0.3/s to 1.04/s (Level 1 to 150) — a rise of 0.74/s, or roughly 3.5× (1.04 ÷ 0.3 ≈ 3.47). Yet total time before torpidity fully depletes gets longer, not shorter, at higher levels. That checks out: wild Torpidity is base 500, +30/level, so a Level 150 wild Sabertooth (149 levels up) carries roughly 500 + 30 × 149 = 4,970 Torpidity. Divided by the 1.04/s Level 150 rate: 4,970 ÷ 1.04 ≈ 4,779s ≈ 79.65 min ≈ 1:19:39 — close to the wiki's stated 01:20:01, so the figures are internally consistent.

 

Saddle, Base Stats, and Roles

 

 

    Equipment is listed as "Sabertooth Saddle (Level 37)." Base stats with confirmed wild per-level increases: Health 250 (+50/lvl), Stamina 200 (+20/lvl), Oxygen 150 (+15/lvl), Food 1200 (+120/lvl), Weight 200 (+4/lvl), Melee Damage 29 (+1.45/lvl), Movement Speed 100% (wild increase listed N/A), Torpidity 500 (+30/lvl). The same table lists taming-bonus additive/multiplicative percentages per stat too (Melee Damage's row alone carries three more figures: +1.7%, 5.6%, 15.4%), but which number is which bonus column isn't reliably recoverable row-by-row, so those aren't assigned to specific stats here.

 

    Other Data figures: Drag Weight 120, Feces Size Small, Special Loot Chance 30%, Radiation Immune No. Drops: Hide, Keratin, Raw Meat. Utility roles named in the source: "Early Game Jack Of All Trades," "Scout," "Battle Mount," "Hunter," "Travel," and "Cave Mount."

 

    Reproduction timers: Gestation 4h 10m 37.593s, Baby Time 4h 52m 23.859s, Juvenile Time 19h 29m 35.438s, Adolescent Time 1d 21m 59.297s, Total Maturation 2d 43m 58.594s, Breeding Interval 18h – 2d.

 

Get it stuck before you shoot it. Five listed ways to immobilize a Sabertooth: Bola, Bear Trap, Large Bear Trap, Plant Species Y Trap, Net Projectile. Damage Multipliers list Head at ×3 — and on ARK: Survival Ascended, "body multipliers also apply for player's melee attacks" too. It Can Damage Thatch and Greenhouse structures, so don't trust either as a wall. To pull one from its pack, 17 creatures are listed under Carryable By, including Argentavis, Quetzal, Tek Quetzal, Mammoth, Megalosaurus, Karkinos, Tusoteuthis, and several Wyvern variants.

 

Running your own ARK server

 

    Trapping a Sabertooth, timing tranq shots against its torpidity depletion, and keeping a Raw Mutton or Regular Kibble stockpile ready is far easier on a persistent world than on a public server where your trap can be griefed mid-tame. A private ARK server keeps your bear traps standing, your tribe's meat in the fridge, and your half-tamed Saber exactly where you left it between sessions.

 

    Ready to tame your own Sabertooth without losing progress to someone else's server? Spin up your own ARK server and get taming. Use promo code WELCOME for your first month free.

 

Conclusion

 

    Taming a Sabertooth comes down to what the wiki confirms: it's a knockout tame, it prefers Regular Kibble or Raw Mutton, a Level 1 Sabertooth needs the food quantities and times above, torpidity depletion scales from 0.3/s at Level 1 to 1.04/s at Level 150 (with time-to-deplete growing, not shrinking, alongside the stat's own level scaling), and its saddle unlocks at Level 37. Not in the source and not guessed here: which tranq weapon each KO multiplier belongs to, what the three unlabeled extra food-table columns represent, which taming-bonus percentage maps to which stat beyond Melee Damage's three figures, and per-map spawn rarity.