The Island

Marked Locations & Coordinates

Every location we have marked on The Island with its in-game coordinates — 14 in total, across 4 categories. Same data as the interactive artifact map, laid out so you can read it without clicking around. Each category says whether it is the full set or a selection — resource nodes in particular are the big ones worth a trip, not every node on the map.

These coordinates come from the same file that powers the interactive map, so the two can never drift apart. If a location is missing here it is missing there too — and it will be added to both at once. A category only reads “all of them” when something backs that up; everything else is a selection, so treat a missing node as unmarked rather than absent from the game.

Where to build

The Island is the original map and it still reads like the tutorial the whole game was built around: the danger is arranged in bands you can learn, and the good spots are the ones that cut you off from a band you are not ready for.

• Herbivore Island, in the south-east corner, has no aggressive land dinosaurs at all. A natural lagoon and metal on the hills make it the safest first base on the map by a distance.
• Hidden Lake, north-east, is walled in by dense forest and reached through narrow passages — terrain doing the work a stone wall would otherwise have to.
• The eastern waterfall mesa, around 43.9 / 68.8, is the long-term pick: resources, travel routes and defensible ground in the same place.
• The Blue Obelisk highlands sit on good metal and give you height, which on this map is most of a defence.

Caves, artifacts and the three bosses

Sources disagree on exactly how many caves are on The Island — the game's own wiki names 11 major ones, while some player counts run past 20 once minor resource dens are included — but on land and underwater, between them they hold the original artifact set — the one every later map's tribute system was modelled on. The artifacts are not collectibles: they are the tributes that summon the map's three bosses, the Broodmother, the Megapithecus and the Dragon.

• Lower South Cave is the entry-level one and the right place to learn what a cave run costs you. It holds the Artifact of the Hunter.
• Central Cave holds the Artifact of the Clever, and Lava Cave the Artifact of the Massive.
• Those three are the Broodmother's tribute, which is why the usual first-boss route runs south cave, central, lava — in that order of difficulty rather than of map position.

Cross-checked on 5 September 2026 against the ARK wiki's own Island page and two independent cave-location guides — which confirm the cave-to-artifact pairing above (Lower South Cave/Hunter, Central Cave/Clever, Lava Cave/Massive are exactly the three the Broodmother demands) but disagree sharply on the total cave count, which this page now reflects above instead of repeating a single unverified figure. The coordinates in the table above are generated from the site's own map data; the base-spot recommendations remain editorial opinion, not something a wiki can confirm or deny. Written from public sources, not from a playthrough: what is still unverified is the only thing reading cannot settle — nobody here has played it.