Case 009 Game Companion Tools

ARK Breeding Planner

Live — andrewwigman-001-site5.htempurl.com ↗

01 — Problem

ARK breeders chase top-stat, custom-coloured creatures through dozens of pairings, juggling spreadsheets to track which parent carries which stat and mutation. The game itself never shows the wild/mutation/domestic level breakdown that breeding decisions depend on — and a tribe of players needs to coordinate around one shared stock.

02 — Fix

A breeding companion and tribe platform for ARK: Survival Evolved and Ascended — extract the hidden level breakdown from a creature's stats, infer mutations from lineage, plan multi-generation breeding and colour outcomes, and track the whole tribe's collection in one shared, live-updating database.

Exhibit 009-A The genetics-console landing — species counts across Evolved and Ascended, and the extract → catalogue → breed workflow.

Exhibit 009-B The stat extractor: enter a creature's in-game stat values to recover the hidden wild/domestic level breakdown breeding depends on.

Exhibit 009-C The species browser — all 650 ARK creatures with base stats and colour-region counts, filterable across both games.

Exhibit 009-D A species' colour-region map: the per-region palettes that drive the colour-breeding predictions.

03 — Proof

Stat maths: verified against the ARK Smart Breeding source, incl. ASA's three-way wild/mutation/domestic split
Solver: constraint-propagation extraction pinned by torpor + level sums — regression-locked against real exports
Import: drop a DinoExport anywhere on the site — dedup by in-game ID, full 15-generation ancestry, auto-linked pedigrees
Breeding plans: staged, trackable project plans — “you just tamed 30, here's what to breed first”
Pokédex catalog: map-by-map completion tracking with painted creature art
Tribe platform: shared tames, bounty board, breeding projects, taming guides, servers and rate events
Live ops: Discord webhooks + a watch-folder companion that auto-uploads exports as you play
Tests: 217 automated tests passing

04 — Method

Blazor Server (.NET 10) with raw ADO.NET SQL Server, hand-rolled auth, and Canvas2D region-mask compositing for coloured creature art. Built and hardened across dozens of deploys with parallel agents and a headless-Chrome verification loop — every feature screenshot-verified against the live UI, with the ASA mutation mechanics reverse-engineered from a real in-game creature.