How to tame a Helicoprion and turn found items into blueprints

A taming method with no knockout and no kibble

The Helicoprion is one of the odd tames in ARK: Survival Ascended. You do not shoot it, trap it or leave it unconscious next to a bowl of food. Instead, you feed it gear, ride it through a button-prompt minigame, and repeat until the taming bar fills. The wiki classes the method as passive, with Little Ratfish Treats as the preferred food, and notes that the creature is tameable, rideable and breedable and is not torpor immune.

That makes it easy on paper and unforgiving in practice, because a mistake on the minigame turns a friendly shark hostile. Raconin's video walks through the whole loop; this page adds the rules the video moves past quickly.

What you need

The taming loop, as shown in the video

1. Find a Helicoprion and stay close. Use the scanner to home in on one. Do not attack it; the method relies on it staying calm.
2. Select the treats and throw a found item right in front of it. Drop it directly in front of the creature, not at a distance. Wait a moment.
3. Let it swim over and shred the item. It picks the item up and tears it apart. While that is happening you get the prompt to mount it.
4. Ride it and watch the bottom of the screen. The Helicoprion swims around and tries to throw you off. A button prompt keeps appearing; press the matching key or button quickly.
5. Keep going until the feed prompt appears. The wiki says you need 10 prompts before it tires, and the last one is the dismount button, which feeds it the treats. The video describes the same thing: press the shown button to feed it, which raises the taming progress and throws you off.
6. Wait, then repeat. The wiki says to wait about 20 seconds, then drop another found item, mount, play the minigame and feed. Keep repeating until the bar is full.

Winning the minigame

The wiki calls the timing “fairly lenient”, which is encouraging, but the penalty for a miss is steep. If you press the wrong button or none at all, you are dismounted and the Helicoprion turns hostile. Its tail swipe deals 70 damage and applies torpor equal to three times that damage, so a careless player can end up knocked out in deep water next to an angry shark, which the wiki flags as a common route to death.

• Look at the prompt, not the shark. Treat it like a rhythm game: the correct key is shown, you just have to match it.
• Know your controls. Console players should check which face button the prompts use before starting; PC players should keep their hand on the keys, not the mouse.
• Do not panic if you are thrown off between cycles. That is normal and part of the loop. It is only a failure if the creature turns hostile.
• Keep your own health up. If it does go wrong, you want enough health to survive one tail strike and get out.

Preparing the area

Because every cycle consumes an item and takes a minute or two, the tame is easy to run in a calm area and annoying in a busy one. Check your surroundings for wild aquatic predators before you start, and move your own aquatic tames out of range; the Helicoprion's thrashing can damage anything nearby. Keep a spare stack of throwaway gear on your hotbar next to the treats so you are not rummaging through your inventory between cycles.

How long should you plan for?

Each round is ten prompts followed by the feed, then a wait of about twenty seconds before the next item (per the wiki). Raconin's video skips through the repeats, so he does not state how many rounds the whole bar takes. That number depends on your server's taming rate and on the creature's level, so treat your first Helicoprion as a calibration run and count the rounds so the next one is predictable.

Because each round consumes one found item, count your stock before you go. If you expect the tame to take a dozen rounds, a dozen cheap found items is the minimum.

Where to get the found items

The only requirement is that the item is looted, so anything you found as loot, rather than crafted, counts. The wiki also accepts equipment produced by a Gacha. Keep a dedicated vault for low-value found gear: damaged saddles, weak armour pieces and spare weapons. These are the ideal tame ingredients because you would otherwise dismantle or ignore them. Hold back anything that might be worth converting into a blueprint later.

Positioning and safety in the water

• Start near the surface. If the minigame goes wrong, you want a short swim to safety.
• Keep your aquatic tames away. The wiki warns that thrashing can hit nearby creatures for very high damage.
• Know your exit. The wiki's description of a wrong button, a dismount, a hostile Helicoprion and a tail strike that can leave you unconscious is the scenario to plan against.
• Do not rush the feed prompt. The last prompt is the dismount button, and it is the one that actually feeds the creature.

What to expect from the finished tame

For reference, the wiki lists a base food of 2,000 (plus 200 per level) and a base torpidity of 800 (plus 48 per level) for the Helicoprion. Its tail swipe deals 70 damage, applies torpor equal to three times that damage and stuns the target for ten seconds. These are the numbers behind the hostile-Helicoprion warning above: a single swipe is not lethal on its own, but the stun and the torpor are what let it finish a player.

After the tame

The wiki lists a base food of 2,000 and base torpidity of 800 for the Helicoprion, with the usual per-level growth. Taming effectiveness affects the stat bonuses the creature starts with. Its real value is not combat: it can turn certain found items into blueprints. Before you use it, read how the success rate, the 90% cap and the loss on failure work in the blueprint guide.

Turning loot into a blueprint

A tamed Helicoprion has a passive talent that no other creature offers in the same way: it converts certain items into blueprints. The wiki calls the ability the Blueprint Processor. You put a quality item in its inventory, wait, and it either produces a blueprint of that item or loses it. Raconin's video ends on this point, saying it is extremely useful when you find a great drop and want a chance of making it repeatable.

If you have not tamed one yet, begin with the Helicoprion taming guide. Everything below assumes you own one.

The rules that matter

Read the timing line as a ladder: roughly 10 seconds for a Primitive item, rising by 10 seconds per quality level to 60 seconds at Ascendant. If you are converting several items in one session, start with the lowest tier so you can see the processor working, and leave the slowest conversions for when you can safely stand guard over the creature for a minute or more.

Building a conversion-ready Helicoprion

The wiki's utility advice is blunt: put all level-ups into Crafting Skill. Every other stat is secondary for this role, because nothing it does in the conversion room depends on health, melee or weight. Raconin's video makes the same point: the higher the success rate, the better the odds, but the risk never disappears.

If you are breeding for it, imprint and mutation work in the usual way, but remember that the stat that matters for a blueprint machine is the least visible. Check the stat on the creature's stats screen before you trust it with a valuable item.

Deciding what is worth the gamble

A conversion is a coin flip with a cap, so the question is not “can I convert this?” but “what do I lose if it fails?”. A simple triage helps:

1. Ask whether you can use the item directly. A good saddle you already own is worth riding in. Convert it only if you want to craft more copies.
2. Ask whether the item is replaceable. A common-drop weapon you can find again is a low-risk test. A once-in-a-server ascendant drop is not.
3. Test on throwaways first. Convert a few cheap found items to see the processing time and your approximate success on your own server before you commit anything valuable.
4. Convert one at a time. If the first of a pair fails, you may decide the second is not worth the risk on your current stat level.
5. Match the wait to the tier. A primitive item is done in seconds; an ascendant one can take minutes, so do not leave the Helicoprion unprotected while it works.

Is it worth taming one for this?

The setup cost is real. Every taming round consumes a looted item and needs about twenty seconds of waiting, and the creature is only available on certain maps: the wiki lists The Island, The Center, Ragnarok, Valguero, Genesis: Part 1 and Astraeos, plus an ocean variant. In return you get a tool that is useful only for a specific moment, when you find an item that is good enough to want to craft again. If you rarely find such items, the Helicoprion will mostly sit in a pen. If you run a tribe that raids or farms bosses and regularly collects high-quality drops, it is a sensible investment.

Protecting the processor

A Helicoprion is a water creature, and a successful conversion lives in its inventory. Keep it where wild predators and other players cannot reach, and do not leave it in a place where an aggro-prone tame could set it off. The wiki also warns that its flailing can harm nearby creatures during the tame, so give it space. If you plan to run it in a base pool, keep your valuable aquatic tames in a separate holding area.

It is also worth knowing about patch 72.12, which the wiki says stopped blueprints made by the Helicoprion (and items crafted from them) from keeping the Club ARK reward tag, and applied that retroactively on server boot. If a blueprint you made earlier lost a tag, that is why.

Measuring your real success rate

Because no formula is published, the only reliable number is your own. Keep a simple log: item tier, Crafting Skill points at the time, and whether it succeeded. After a dozen cheap conversions you will have a feel for how the processor behaves on your server, and you can decide whether to risk something valuable. The cap means you should never expect certainty, but the log tells you whether you are well below it.

A worked example

Say you loot two items in the same session: a mid-tier saddle and an ascendant-quality weapon. The saddle is common on your map and you can find another, so it is a low-risk test of your Helicoprion. The weapon is rare and took a boss run to obtain. Convert the saddle first. If your processor succeeds a few times in a row on cheap items, you have more evidence it is working. If you still decide to try the weapon, remember that the wiki says extremely high-quality ascendant items can take two to three minutes, and a failure at the end destroys the item. A single bad roll costs more than a dozen good ones gain, so the decision is about how much you can afford to lose.

Common misunderstandings

• “Anything can be converted.” Only looted items. Crafted ones cannot.
• “Max stat means guaranteed.” The wiki says success is hard-capped at 90%.
• “A failed item comes back.” The video and the wiki agree it is lost.
• “It is instant.” It takes 10 to 60 seconds by quality, longer for extreme ascendant items.
• “It is a combat creature.” Its value is utility; the tame itself is the risky part.

What the video adds, and what it leaves out

The video gives you the key warning: items you crafted cannot be converted, and failure destroys the original. It does not show a conversion happening, and it gives no numbers for the success chance. The additional details on this page, the 90% cap, the timings by quality tier and the stat to level, come from the wiki. Because the wiki gives no formula, we advise that you assume any single conversion is a gamble and plan accordingly.

Frequently asked questions