ARK: Survival Ascended — Docker server for Unraid

A SteamCMD-based ASA dedicated server container, laid out the way ich777's game server images are, so it should feel familiar if you were running his: the same /serverdata/steamcmd + /serverdata/serverfiles split, the same UID/GID/ VALIDATE/USERNAME environment variables, the same "download everything on first boot so the image stays small" approach.

The one structural difference is Proton. Wildcard still ships no native Linux server binary for ASA, so this installs the Windows depot (SteamCMD is told +@sSteamCmdForcePlatformType windows) and runs ArkAscendedServer.exe under GE-Proton.

What this one does differently

The download is the easy part. Almost everything that goes wrong with a dedicated ASA server happens afterwards, and this container is built around four of those failures in particular.

You can actually edit the config files. Getting an ini file editable over SMB from a Windows box needs three things to line up at once: the files have to be owned by the right uid, they have to carry permissive modes, and every directory above them has to be traversable. Permissive files behind a locked parent are still unreachable, which is why the top-level mode defaults to 775 rather than the tighter 770 you might expect. The permission pass runs on every start and again on shutdown, so it repairs a migrated install or files wine created with its own tight modes, not just the ones created from here on. CONFIG_UMASK translates a plain umask into the two modes it implies, applying them to files and directories separately so directories keep the execute bit that makes them possible to enter. Full detail in Editing the configs over SMB.

Stopping the container saves the world. ARK writes its save on exit, so a hard kill is how people lose hours. On docker stop this sends SaveWorld over RCON, waits, sends DoExit, and only kills the wine prefix if the server is still up after STOP_TIMEOUT. That is also why the entrypoint deliberately does not use process-group signalling — it would deliver SIGTERM straight to the wine processes and skip the save entirely.

The container never overwrites your edits. GameUserSettings.ini is seeded once, with RCON enabled, and then left alone permanently — there is no code path here that rewrites a config file you may have changed. ARK itself is a different matter: it rewrites that file when it shuts down, so stop the container before editing rather than while it runs.

The install is located, not assumed. The server binary is found by searching for it rather than by hardcoding ShooterGame/Binaries/Win64. That layout has shifted before, and it means an existing install laid out by some other setup is found rather than ignored.

Two smaller things. GE-Proton splits its releases by architecture, and the ARM build sorts first in the release listing, so the x86_64 tarball is selected explicitly rather than by taking whichever tarball appears first; pinning accepts either the release tag or the full asset name. And if GitHub is unreachable or rate-limiting you, the container falls back to whatever Proton build is already on disk instead of refusing to boot. The RCON client is a short Python script using nothing outside the standard library, so there is no extra package to install or keep current just to send SaveWorld.

Before you start

• Disk: about 15GB installed, growing with saves and mods. Put it on a cache pool or SSD share rather than the array — not for the space, but because ARK is heavy on random I/O and spinning disks make startup and world saves noticeably slower.
• RAM: 16GB is a sensible floor for a vanilla map. Mods and players push it well past that. ASA is considerably hungrier than ASE.
• First boot is slow and quiet. A ~13GB download, then Proton builds its prefix, then the server does its own startup — around 45 seconds once the files are in place. Watch the logs rather than assuming it has hung.

Get the image

docker pull ferment9348/ark-survival-ascended:latest

Tagged releases are published as :1.2.3 and :1.2, and :latest always points at the most recent release rather than at the tip of main.

Or build it yourself — on Unraid you can do this on the server itself:

git clone https://github.com/blckassassin/ArkSA.git
cd ArkSA
docker build -t ferment9348/ark-survival-ascended:latest .

If you build under a different name, change <Repository> in templates/ark-survival-ascended.xml to match.

Install on Unraid

1. Copy templates/ark-survival-ascended.xml to /boot/config/plugins/dockerMan/templates-user/.
2. Docker tab → Add Container → pick ARK-Survival-Ascended from the template dropdown.
3. Set your paths, server name and admin password, then apply.

Ports

Server discovery in ASA runs through Epic Online Services, not Steam's A2S query protocol, so you do not need to forward 27015 for your server to appear in the Unofficial list. It is mapped only because some third-party tooling still expects it to exist.

Configuration

Environment variables of note:

The launch-argument traps

ASA moved several settings off the ?-string and onto dash flags, and the old forms are silently ignored rather than erroring:

• -WinLiveMaxPlayers=N sets the player cap. ?MaxPlayers= does nothing.
• -port=N sets the game port. ?Port= does nothing.
• ServerAdminPassword must be the last ? argument — anything after it gets swallowed into the password value. The script already handles this, but keep it in mind if you add your own QUERY_PARAMS_EXTRA.
• Mods are CurseForge project IDs, not Steam Workshop IDs. A Workshop-only mod is not an ASA mod.

INI files

GameUserSettings.ini and Game.ini live in:

<serverfiles>/ShooterGame/Saved/Config/WindowsServer/

That path says WindowsServer even though you are on Linux — you are running the Windows binary, and ASA has no LinuxServer variant.

For convenience a config symlink is created at the top of the game files folder, so you can also reach them at <serverfiles>/config/. If your Samba setup has follow symlinks disabled the shortcut will not show up over the network — use the full path in that case.

The container seeds GameUserSettings.ini with RCON enabled on first run and then never touches it again, so your edits are safe.

Stop the container before editing. ARK rewrites GameUserSettings.ini when it shuts down, so changes you make while it is running get overwritten.

Editing the configs over SMB from Windows

This is set up to work out of the box. Three things have to line up, and the container handles all of them:

1. Ownership. Everything is chowned to your UID/GID, which on Unraid defaults to 99:100 (nobody:users) — the ids Unraid's SMB stack expects.
2. File modes. UMASK=000 means files the server creates land as 666 and directories as 777. On top of that, FIX_PERMS=true re-applies those modes across the Saved tree on every start and again on shutdown, which repairs anything that already exists with a tight mode — a migrated install, or files wine created itself.
3. Traversal. Permissive files are useless if a parent directory blocks the way in, so the chain down to Saved is opened up too. This is why DATA_PERM defaults to 775 and not ich777's 770: with 770, an SMB user who is neither the owner nor a member of group 100 cannot get in at all.

Tightening it: CONFIG_UMASK

CONFIG_UMASK is a plain umask, and it means what you would expect — files start from 666, directories from 777, and the umask bits come off. Leave it blank and it just follows the container-wide UMASK, so by default there is a single number governing everything.

007 is the sensible choice if 000 feels too open: Unraid accounts belong to the users group (gid 100), so SMB editing keeps working while everything else is shut out. Note that 022 and 077 will make the files read-only or invisible from Windows — that is the intended meaning, but it is the opposite of what you asked for, so pick them deliberately.

An invalid value falls back to 000 with a warning in the log rather than failing the boot.

CONFIG_UMASK sets what the modes become; FIX_PERMS decides whether the pass runs at all. Set FIX_PERMS=false to skip it entirely and manage permissions yourself — there is no umask value that means "leave these alone".

Two things on the Unraid side that this container cannot do for you:

• The appdata share must be exported over SMB. It often is not by default. Shares → appdata → SMB Security Settings.
• If permissions are already tangled from a previous container, run Tools → Docker Safe New Permissions once with the containers stopped, or start this one with FORCE_CHOWN=true for a single boot.

Use an editor that respects existing line endings — Notepad++ or VS Code rather than stock Notepad — for the larger ini files.

Watching the server

The engine log is streamed into the container log, so ARK's own output appears under Logs on the Unraid Docker tab, or via docker logs, alongside this container's ---...--- messages. You do not need shell access to see what the server is doing.

The file itself is still at ShooterGame/Saved/Logs/ShooterGame.log if you want to search back through it.

Passwords end up in the engine log

This container prints <query string hidden> instead of the launch arguments, but ARK itself writes the whole command line — ServerPassword and ServerAdminPassword in clear text — into ShooterGame/Saved/Logs/ShooterGame.log. Nothing here can prevent that.

Worth knowing before you paste a log into a forum or an issue, and a reason to treat that file as sensitive. ServerAdminPassword is also the RCON password.

Stopping safely

ARK writes its world on exit, so a hard kill is how people lose hours of progress. On docker stop the container sends SaveWorld, then DoExit over RCON, waits up to STOP_TIMEOUT seconds, and only then kills the wine prefix.

This depends on RCON being enabled in GameUserSettings.ini. If you disable it, you lose the safe shutdown.

On Unraid, raise the container stop timeout (Settings → Docker → Default shutdown time-out) to something above your STOP_TIMEOUT. Unraid's default is far shorter than a graceful ARK shutdown takes, so it will SIGKILL the container partway through.

You can tell this has happened: the log reaches ---Sending DoExit--- and then just stops, without ---Server stopped---. The save itself completes before that point — World Saved comes back from RCON first — so it is not data loss, but the server never gets to shut down cleanly.

RCON from the command line

docker exec ARK-Survival-Ascended /opt/scripts/rcon-cli.sh SaveWorld
docker exec ARK-Survival-Ascended /opt/scripts/rcon-cli.sh ListPlayers
docker exec ARK-Survival-Ascended /opt/scripts/rcon-cli.sh "Broadcast Restart in 5 minutes"

Worth knowing: ASA moderation commands take a player's EOS ID, not a Steam64 ID.

Clusters

Set the same CLUSTER_ID on each container and point every one of them at a shared CLUSTER_DIR (map the same host path into each container). Give each server its own GAME_PORT and its own serverfiles path. Proton lives inside that folder, so each server automatically gets its own wine prefix — two servers cannot end up sharing one. The SteamCMD folder is the exception: it is only a downloader, so pointing every container at the same one is fine.

Troubleshooting

Server never appears in the list. Check 7777/udp is forwarded to the Unraid host. If only Epic players cannot see it, set CROSSPLAY=true.

Crashes on startup, or wine errors about file descriptors. The container raises its own limit, but the Docker-level ceiling matters too — the template passes --ulimit nofile=1048576:1048576 in Extra Parameters. Make sure that survived any edits you made.

Cannot open or save the ini files from Windows. Check the appdata share is actually exported over SMB, then confirm FIX_PERMS is true and restart the container — the recursive fix runs on start. If it is still wrong, the files are probably owned by the wrong uid; start once with FORCE_CHOWN=true.

Out-of-memory or mmap errors under load. Unreal engine servers can exhaust the default vm.max_map_count. On the Unraid host:

sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144

Add it to your go file to make it stick across reboots.

Server exits a second after startup, engine log stops after Sentry. That is Proton's lsteamclient failing to find the native steamclient.so and aborting the process. It looks for ~/.steam/sdk64/steamclient.so, which the container links from SteamCMD automatically. If you see unable to load native steamclient library in a DEBUG=true log, check that SteamCMD actually finished its first run — the libraries only appear after it has downloaded its own payload.

A Proton update broke something. PROTON_VERSION is pinned to GE-Proton10-34 rather than tracking latest, so an upstream release cannot change what runs here without you choosing it. That is the whole reason for the pin: reproducibility, not a belief that newer builds are broken.

Do not set latest. GE-Proton 11 hangs ArkAscendedServer.exe before the engine writes anything at all — no crash, no exception, no log, the container simply never comes up. Verified directly with this image on 2026-08-20: GE-Proton11-5 hung indefinitely while GE-Proton10-34 reached "advertising for join" in 44 seconds, on the same machine with the same game files and only the Proton build changed. The maintainer of another Linux ASA launcher reported the same behaviour against GE-Proton11-1 in July 2026, so it spans the series rather than one build.

This failure is silent by nature, so the container also warns if no engine output has appeared several minutes after launch.

The container warns in its log whenever the Proton build in use is not the one the image was tested against, so a container still carrying an older PROTON_VERSION setting says so on every start rather than failing silently.

Changing PROTON_VERSION is enough on its own. A wine prefix belongs to the build that created it, so the container records which one that was and discards the prefix when it changes, letting Proton rebuild. You do not have to delete anything by hand, and your saves and configs are never involved — they live under ShooterGame/Saved, not in the prefix. Deleting <serverfiles>/proton forces a clean prefix rebuild, which is worth trying before anything drastic — that folder holds only the Proton build and the wine prefix, both of which are rebuilt automatically. Your saves and configs are under ShooterGame/, untouched.

SteamCMD keeps failing partway. Steam's CDN deprioritises anonymous logins under load. Set VALIDATE=true and restart; it resumes rather than starting over.

Credit

The structure, environment variable naming and general Unraid ergonomics here are lifted from ich777's game server containers, which were the standard for this on Unraid for years.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.