This set of scripts can convert Ark save files (from July 2020) to json and then extract certain game object lists from that into a tab-delimited text file (basically csv).
Right now, it's focused on inventories (things that can contain items, and the items within them). This helps server admins locate special items and generally keep track of what's up.
A future addition will list hungry dinos (list of tame dinos on the map and their food status), which can help identify tames that have wandered away from their feeding trough or otherwise are missing out on food.
The conversion from a binary MapName.ark file to json relies on a C# executable for Windows. This is a self-contained binary with no installer and no DLLs. The python script will call it automatically provided it's in the same directory as the python script.
To use the python script, you need to install its dependencies. For now, it only has one external dependency: naya. You can get this with "pip install naya", although if you want to use conda or virtualenv first to isolate your install, that should be fine.
pip install naya
mkdir ark
copy ArkBinaryToJsonConvertor.exe ark
copy ConvertAndAnalyzeArkSave.py ark
copy MyMap.ark ark
cd ark
To run:
python ConvertAndAnalyzeArkSave.py MyMap.ark
You should see output like this:
$ python ConvertAndAnalyzeArkSave.py TheIsland.ark
1/4 Converting TheIsland.ark from binary to json; this takes a minute...
Starting conversion from Ark binary to json. First argument is Ark save file path; second is json file path.
Finished reading save file and writing json. Got 188237 objects total.
1/4 Wrote TheIsland.json
2/4 Simplifying json so we can read the game objects...
2/4 Wrote TheIsland_game_objects.json
3/4 Processing game objects. This takes the longest time; several minutes...
4/4 Reporting inventories...
4/4 Wrote TheIsland_inventory.txt
Complete.
This will produce the files:
MyMap.json
MyMap_game_objects.json
MyMap_inventory.txt
You probably want to read the inventory txt file with Excel or somesuch. It can be treated as tab-delimited csv (rename it to .tab if you want Excel to just magically understand it). It's a very wide file, so although you can read it in any plain text viewer, do make your window wide so it doesn't line wrap.
Yeah, there are probably bugs. I didn't write the binary to json conversion library; I just hooked it up into a statically linked exe for ease of use. I actually don't really know C# and can't do much with it if it breaks. You can take a look and submit a pull request though.
The python script is stuff I wrote and can reasonably fix. That said, this isn't a huge priority for me. You'll probably get farther by submitting a pull request with a fix than if you ask me. It was mostly created as a one-off for a friend's need, and I'm publishing it up to github in case anyone finds it helpful.
I am unlikely to keep up with updates to the Ark server file format over time. Don't rely on this.
The C# format conversion exe used copy-paste code examples from http://github.com/cadon/ARKStatsExtractor/blob/dev/ARKBreedingStats/ARKBreedingStats.csproj to handle read from binary and write to json (with some adjustments to make the code actually handle everything, not just dino stats). My source code is at https://github.com/jennybrown8/ArkGameConvertBinaryToJson if you wanted to build it yourself.
The C# code uses a library called ARKSaveGameToolkit, to do all of the heavy lifting. The Java version is out of date and unlikely to be updated; the C# version is a rewrite and seems to be up to date as of July 2020 (it's working great). I downloaded their source and built the DLLs for my use from that. https://github.com/Flachdachs/ArkSavegameToolkit
The python code is entirely from scratch. It uses naya for streaming json processing of the game objects array; that knows nothing of Ark, and just knows how to handle json.
The processing in my python code is definitely sensitive to the exact json format (both whitespace and certain json object names), so it'll break if the format changes.