Terms of use
Short, plain-English. If something here doesn't match reality, reality wins - tell me and I'll fix the terms.
1. The download
You may download, run, redistribute, and modify Ark Manager under the open-source licence shipped in the zip (MIT). You may run as many copies as you want. You may bundle it in your own tooling. You do not owe me money or credit; a link is nice.
The Flex AI brain, if bundled in your release, stays closed-source and is covered by its own licence file. You may use it in the way the app exposes it; you may not disassemble it or reverse-engineer the model weights. The rest of Ark Manager (the UI, the agent, the add-on templates) is yours to hack on.
2. No warranty
Ark Manager is provided as-is. It drives dedicated game servers; those servers in turn hold hours of other people's play time. Back up your save folders. Test big changes on a secondary server first. Nothing here comes with a guarantee that your base won't disappear.
I will not be liable for lost saves, lost players, lost tribes, lost money, or anything else that comes out of running game-server software. If a specific bug cost you something concrete, open an issue and I'll help you dig in, but legally this is zero-warranty.
3. Community add-ons
If you upload an add-on (plugin, preset, ini-pack) via the Add-ons tab's Share this add-on button, you confirm:
- You wrote it, or you have the author's permission to publish it.
- You own the copyright, or it is licensed under something that lets you redistribute it.
- It doesn't contain malware, credential stealers, backdoors, or anything that would be a dick move to run on someone else's server.
- It doesn't contain your admin passwords, Steam IDs, Discord webhooks, or any secret you wouldn't want pinned to a public bulletin board.
Uploads land in a moderation queue. I review each one by hand before
it shows up in the public /addons/ listing. Expect a few
days turnaround. If I reject it, you'll get a short reason.
If an add-on turns out to be malicious or breaking copyright, I'll take it down from the listing, add its hash to a block list that Ark Manager honours on install, and (if the uploader is a repeat offender) revoke their install ID so they can't resubmit without rotating.
4. Acceptable use of this site
Don't do any of these:
- Scraping
/latest.zipor/learn/*at rates designed to cost me bandwidth. The nginx layer rate-limits publicly, but please just... don't. - Submitting fake lesson reports to
/learn/report(install ID or payload). The receiver drops them and rate-limits the IP; repeat offenders get IP-banned. - Trying to upload to
/publish/mainwithout my signing key. Signature-verify will reject you, but every attempt gets logged.
5. Not affiliated with Wildcard
Ark Manager is a third-party tool. It is not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with Studio Wildcard, Snail Games, or any ARK publisher. "ARK", "ARK: Survival Evolved", and "ARK: Survival Ascended" are trademarks of their respective owners. This project just drives their dedicated-server binaries from a friendlier UI.
6. Changes
These terms are versioned in the public repo and dated. If I change them, the new version becomes effective when it goes up here. Nothing in the privacy policy changes retroactively - previously-uploaded lessons stay governed by the policy that was in effect at upload time.