How to tame a Boaratos (“Boratos”) and farm charcoal with it

What you are taming, and why a normal trap is the wrong tool

The Boaratos is a fire-breathing boar added to ARK: Survival Ascended with the Astraeos DLC (patch 93.0, 27 August 2026). The ARK wiki spells it Boaratos; Raconin's video title writes "Boratos", so search for either. It is tamed by knockout, it is rideable and breedable, and its preferred food is Extraordinary Kibble, with raw meat also accepted.

Two facts make it awkward. First, its torpor drains extremely fast once it is unconscious, so a tame that would be relaxed with most creatures turns into a narcotics race. Second, it breaks buildings. The wiki lists Fiery Slam (150 damage) and Kaboom (500 damage) as attacks that can hurt any structure type, and says a burning Boaratos can destroy stone and even Tek. A cage that holds a Rex all night can fail on a Boaratos, which is exactly why Raconin skips the trap and uses a living one instead.

The method in the video: a tamed Karkinos grabs the wild Boaratos, holds it in its claws, and you knock it out while it cannot run, aggro or burn anything down. Everything below follows that order.

What you need before you start

The tame, step by step

1. Set the Karkinos to passive. Do this before you get close. A Karkinos that attacks its own captive can kill the Boaratos before it is ever knocked out, and you lose the tame. Passive is the ordinary stance setting on any tamed creature, not a Karkinos-only option.
2. Let the Karkinos pick up the Boaratos. Ride the Karkinos up and use its grab. Per the wiki the grab costs 5 stamina, and the Karkinos will not release a held creature on its own; only holding the grab button again, a heavy health loss or certain items open the claws. For this tame that stubbornness is the feature. Do not tap the grab button again by accident.
3. Dismount and shoot. Step off the Karkinos and fire the Long Neck at the held Boaratos. Because it is suspended, it cannot run, charge or breathe fire at your foundations, which makes the knockout a plain aiming job.
4. Watch the torpor bar, not the health bar. Keep firing until it drops. The Boaratos is not torpor immune, but its pool scales with level (the wiki lists a base of 5,000 plus 300 per level), so a high-level one takes a lot of darts.
5. Put the food in its inventory immediately. Once it is unconscious, open its inventory and add raw mutton or Extraordinary Kibble. The taming bar only starts once it has something to eat.
6. Feed narcotics on a rhythm. Open the inventory, check the torpor value, add narcotics before it gets low. The video's advice is blunt: it loses torpor very fast, so you will be topping up regularly. Keep the narcotics on a hotbar slot or at the top of your inventory so you are not searching for them.
7. Wait until the taming bar is full. Stay close and keep other creatures away. When the bar fills, you own a Boaratos. Tell the Karkinos to let go if it is still holding the tame, then reset its stance.

Planning your narcotics

Raconin does not give a number in the video, and the number really does change. Three things set it: the Boaratos's level (a bigger torpor pool and a faster drain), your server's taming-speed rate (a high rate shortens the whole process, so you need fewer narcotics), and how fast you react. As a planning rule, bring more than feels necessary on a first attempt and note how many you used so the next tame is cheaper. If narcotics are the limit on your server, the wiki also lists Bio Toxin as a valid substitute, so check whether you have an easier supply of one than the other.

Craft your narcotics before you leave. Standing next to an unconscious Boaratos is the wrong moment to discover you are short.

Pre-flight checklist

Run through this at the base, not in the field. It takes a minute and saves the tame.

• Karkinos: tamed, healthy, saddled if you ride it, stance set to passive, stamina bar full.
• Rifle: Long Neck Rifle equipped with plenty of tranq or shocking tranq darts, and a spare weapon in case you run dry.
• Hotbar: the food on one slot and narcotics on another, so you never open the full inventory mid-tame.
• Armour and healing: anything that lets you survive a stray flame if the Boaratos is not fully pinned. Raconin does not stress this, but a creature that breathes fire is not one to meet unprepared.
• A plan for the area: know where you will stand and where other wild creatures roam.

If it goes wrong

• The grab does not connect. The wiki gives the Karkinos grab a 1.5-second cooldown and a 5-stamina cost, so a missed grab is cheap. Reposition and try again rather than chasing.
• Torpor hits zero. As with any ARK knockout tame, the creature wakes up and the progress is lost. You are back at the shooting stage, with a Boaratos that is awake and unhappy, so stay on the Karkinos and keep it held.
• You run out of narcotics. Do not wait for the bar to empty. Leave early enough to restock and let the tame fail on your terms.
• The Karkinos lets go. The wiki says it does not release a held creature on its own; heavy damage to the Karkinos or releasing the grab button breaks the hold. Keep it out of trouble while it is holding the Boaratos.

With a partner, split the jobs. One person handles the rifle and the other looks after the inventory (food and narcotics). If you are alone, practise opening the Boaratos inventory quickly with the hotkeys before you try it for real.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Building a cage anyway. A wooden or stone cage looks safe and is not. The creature's fire attacks are the thing that destroys it, and a half-collapsed cage with a half-tamed Boaratos inside is the worst case.
• Forgetting passive mode. This single setting decides whether the plan works. Check it on the tame list before the grab.
• Starting the food late. Torpor keeps draining while you are fumbling for kibble. Have the food on the hotbar before the first dart.
• Shooting the Karkinos's captive from a mount. Dismount first. Being on the Karkinos while you shoot puts you in the middle of the fight.
• Leaving it alone mid-tame. Other wild creatures wandering in will attack an unconscious target. Raconin warns in his Rex tame that damage while taming costs taming effectiveness, so guard the area for this one too.

What you get for the effort

A tamed Boaratos is a utility animal, not just a trophy. The same video goes on to show what it does: chopping trees for charcoal, applying bleeding on bites, and switching on a fire mode for extra damage that also hits structures. We split that into its own page so this guide stays about the tame: Boaratos charcoal farming and combat uses.

Why charcoal, and why a boar

Charcoal is the unglamorous ingredient behind every firearm. The wiki lists it as an input for Gunpowder, and Gunpowder is needed for every bullet type, grenades, cannon balls, rocket-propelled grenades and C4. A single Mortar and Pestle batch of Gunpowder consumes one Charcoal and yields six pieces, so charcoal matters most when you are making ammunition in bulk for a tribe.

The usual way to get it is to burn wood. The wiki says burning wood in an Industrial Forge produces one charcoal per second, which is steady but needs fuel, electricity and a base to put it in. The Boaratos offers a different shape of farming: you ride out to a forest, swing at trees and come home with a full inventory. Raconin picks this out in the video as one of its most interesting abilities. If you have not tamed one yet, the process is in our Boaratos taming guide.

How the Boaratos harvests charcoal

According to the wiki, both the Bite and Tusk Gore attacks “harvest Charcoal from trees”, and each costs only 5 stamina. In the video Raconin simply attacks trees with the Boaratos and picks up a good amount of charcoal.

Which stats to level

The wiki's “Charcoal Harvester” role advice is to put points into Weight and Melee Damage. Weight is the one you feel: charcoal weighs 0.25 per piece and stacks to 100, so a decent haul is not heavy, but wood and other pickups add up. Damage helps you clear trees faster. Bite and Tusk Gore cost only 5 stamina each, so harvesting does not drain you.

A simple farming routine

1. Pick a forest with lots of trees close together. The less you ride between swings, the more you collect per trip.
2. Mount, bite or gore the trunks. Work trunk to trunk without stopping. Watch the inventory weight bar rather than the clock.
3. Check your yield after a minute. Compare charcoal per trunk with and without Hog's Wrath, per the note above. Keep whichever is better.
4. Deposit before you hit the cap. Dump charcoal into a vault and ride out again. A Boaratos at full weight slows down.
5. Turn charcoal into gunpowder in batches. Per the wiki, Gunpowder also needs Sparkpowder, Stone, Flint and Wood; stock those so charcoal never sits idle.

Three ways to get charcoal, compared

The wiki lists several ways to make or collect charcoal, which puts the Boaratos in context.

That table also shows the honest limit of the Boaratos: it is a convenient tool, not the highest-output option. It wins when you want charcoal wherever you happen to be.

From charcoal to ammunition

Charcoal on its own does nothing. The wiki's Mortar and Pestle recipe for Gunpowder is 1 Sparkpowder, 1 Stone, 1 Flint, 1 Charcoal and 1 Wood, giving six pieces. The Chemistry Bench version takes 4 Sparkpowder, 2 Stone, 4 Flint, 4 Charcoal and 4 Wood; the wiki does not state its yield, so check it in-game before planning bulk batches around it. The wiki lists the ammunition that needs Gunpowder: Simple and Advanced bullets, rifle and shotgun ammo, grapeshot, plus grenades, rockets, C4 and cannon balls.

Plan your farm around the bottleneck. If you are always short of Sparkpowder or Flint rather than charcoal, a second charcoal farmer will not help. Count what runs out first before you invest.

If no charcoal appears

• Switch Hog's Wrath on and compare, as described above. One of the two will be right for your server version.
• Make sure you are hitting trees, not rocks or bushes. The wiki specifies charcoal from trees.
• Check your inventory weight. A full inventory can stop pickups, so empty it and retry before assuming the harvest failed.
• Remember that fire mode ends when the creature enters water, so a river crossing mid-farm will switch it off.

The combat side of the Boaratos

Raconin shows three things in the video: bleeding on its bite, a fire bonus, and structure damage. The wiki gives numbers for each.

Bleeding is the quiet effect. On a long fight it chips away at a target for ten seconds after every goring, which is why the video calls it extra damage over time. The fire bonus stacks on top of that, and Enflamed on every attack gives you steady damage on anything that burns.

Stat numbers to plan with

The wiki gives the Boaratos 1,050 base health (+210 per level), 60 base melee damage (+3 per level) and 400 base stamina (+40 per level). Its listed sprint speed is 754.76 game units per second before taming bonus, against a walking speed of 141.51, so it covers ground quickly but only in short bursts, since sprinting uses stamina. For a pure charcoal farmer, that favours Weight and Melee Damage as the wiki's role advice says, with a few points in Stamina if you notice yourself running out on long trips between forests.

Using it against bases, and defending against it

The wiki labels the Boaratos a Structure Demolisher, and states that a burning one can break every structure type including stone and Tek. That makes it interesting for PvP, as Raconin says, but the numbers also show its limits. It has 1,050 base health plus 210 per level, so it has a modest health pool for a creature that is meant to break walls. Its fire mode ends on contact with water and has a 60-second cooldown, so a defender who can push or lure it through water takes the damage bonus away.

For defenders, the practical lesson is simple: stone is not enough against a leveled Boaratos, and its approach is loud. A turret line that kills the rider or the creature before Kaboom lands matters more than wall thickness.

Is it worth the tame?

If you only need charcoal occasionally, burning wood is cheaper. If you run a gunpowder-hungry tribe, enjoy forest runs, or want a creature that can also break a stone wall, a leveled Boaratos is a defensible investment. We have not run these numbers in-game ourselves; the figures above come from the wiki and Raconin's demonstration, so treat them as a starting point and measure on your own server.

Frequently asked questions