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🏆 Tribescore

Tribescore is a competitive tribe scoring system for ARK: Survival Evolved. Tribes earn tribescore by destroying enemy structures, dinos, and players in PvP. Scores are persisted in MySQL and surfaced through a leaderboard and ranking system, while floating "hologram" numbers pop up in-world every time points are gained or lost.

Point awards run through a configurable, multiplicative modifier pipeline so you can keep the competition fair: offline protection, score-difference balancing between strong and weak tribes, permission-based boosts, and admin-granted timed boosts.

Features

  • PvP scoring: Award points for destroying enemy structures, killing tamed dinos, and killing enemy players. Every source is individually configurable and can be toggled off.
  • Per-tier & per-blueprint values: Structures are scored by build tier (Thatch → Tek) with per-blueprint overrides; dinos are scored per species with fine-grained flags (babies, unsaddled, wild, …).
  • Modifier pipeline: Balance the game with offline protection, a strong-vs-weak score-difference ratio, permission modifiers, and timed boosts.
  • Leaderboard & ranks: In-game /leaderboard and /triberank chat commands, backed by a persistent MySQL leaderboard.
  • In-world holograms: Configurable floating +points / -points text that players can toggle on or off for themselves.
  • Admin tooling: Give/take score, grant timed boosts, audit a tribe's transaction history, and estimate a base's worth — all from the console/RCON.
  • Companion Discord bot: A bundled bot posts a live leaderboard to Discord, adds tribe-lookup slash commands, and flags suspicious scoring. See Discord Bot.

How scoring works

When an enemy structure, dino, or player is destroyed, the base point value comes from the scoring tables (structures.json, dinos.json, or the flat player value in config.json). That base value is then multiplied through the modifier pipeline:

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final score = base points
            × OfflineProtection(defender)
            × ScoreDifferenceRatio(attacker, defender)
            × PermissionModifier(attacker)
            × TimedBoost(attacker, type)

The attacking tribe gains the result; the defending tribe loses a (separately configurable) amount. See the Configuration page for every knob.

Installation

  1. Ensure you have a supported version of ArkApi installed on your server (Tribescore requires ArkApi 3.51 or newer).
  2. Set up a MySQL/MariaDB database — see Common Configuration.
  3. Download the Tribescore.zip from your Bytemart Dashboard.
  4. Stop the server (run saveworld first), or unload any previous version with plugins.unload Tribescore.
  5. Extract the archive into a Tribescore folder inside ShooterGame/Binaries/Win64/ArkApi/Plugins/.
  6. Open config.json and fill in your LicenseKey and Database credentials (see Configuration).
  7. Start the server and confirm there are no errors during startup.

Updating

  • Manual: plugins.unload Tribescore, replace the files, then plugins.load Tribescore.
  • Automatic (hot-reload): rename the new Tribescore.dll to Tribescore.dll.arkapi and drop it into the plugin folder — ArkApi loads the new version and unloads the old one automatically.

Always check the changelog for config changes when updating; a tool like Diffchecker helps spot new or renamed keys.

Next steps:

  • Configuration — the full config.json, plus structures.json and dinos.json.
  • Commands — console/RCON admin commands and in-game chat commands.
  • Discord Bot — the companion bot: live leaderboard, slash commands, and abuse detection.
  • Common Configuration — the shared LicenseKey, Database, LogToFile, and Verbose keys.