Running a fairly new server to fully customize mods / ini’s … currently having a 30man hosted on Ragnarok map. I’m successfully running 25 mods and its stable… just now customizing them all out and trying to customize dino loot / beacon drops. If anyone is very comfortable with the beacon app, please contact me.
Over the next couple months will be using this info to finish a server i will host myself that will be a 6 map cluster server. At that time it will be open to all OTG and a couple other guilds… but will be a very large cluster server to support 100+.
Looking forward to meeting some ARK experts!@ 
In a previous life I did manually modify loot code, it was a lot of work. There is a way to still do it manually, without an app. You might still be able to find it all raw on pastebin ( https://pastebin.com/7kQF3hWw )
Looking at the app, I would just modify or use someone elses work if it works for your planned cluster https://beaconapp.cc/browse/
I’ve done a little manual coding myself as well the last couple months… including creating custom player levels to 200. The beacon app seems to work well for beacons… and i saw some community code. However, I don’t mind sitting there and heavily customizing the beacon drops (I have figured out how to start that). It is just i didn’t see an easy way to add dino drop modification … as an example… add +15 element to every alpha dino loot drop… etc…
Hmm, I know that you can modify both beacons and crates and that you need to do so separately, but I am not aware of a way to modify dino drops specifically. I had trouble even getting the dino spawners to work, much less trying to edit their drops, lol.
I had setup to add element to beacons and crates, random amounts in relation to the container level. When I did have some problems with my code, Splutty was able to help me get the syntax fixed. Maybe he knows more on this…
ASM (Ark Server Manager) has a beacon and dino drop editor. It’s not ideal, but it works.
Continuing the discussion from Would like to get some expert beacon app help on server customization:
yeah… i looked into ASM… and we are running Structure+ among other mods. Seems the ASM with some of those updates did partial updates and corrupted many servers for folks and their backup files to lose built items. so at the moment I’m staying away from it. I’ll play some more round with it this week and get it done. As soon as i get the cluster tested… I’ll list full specs / maps / rules / mods etc and all will be invited for sure!
I have no idea what you’re talking about. ASM can’t corrupt anything, it’s just a shell to starting/stopping/configuring an ARK server.
I run 5 servers from it, and never had any issues with ASM. With ARK mods and maps, sure. It’s after all still an alpha! (Oh wait…
I think what those people had problems with was something all of us server owners run into, namely that SteamCMD is sometimes utterly screwed up, and will download partial mods, or nothing at all. That will then make the mod fail in game, which means everything built from that mod will disappear.
Restoring a previous save file fixes that just fine, though. And even in that, ASM is a big help, since you can configure it to make backups of your saves at certain intervals.
yeah … it seemed some automated updates were not fully installed. Then the server would start up thinking they were. From reading I just didn’t get clarification if they had been instigated by the ASM shell or just their service provider. I’ll have to see. Regardless though I am figuring out how to the use the beacon app… which runs independent. It is just tedious to find and assign all the custom loot sources… I wish they had alpha dinos … etc already in there. At least the code generation seems to work fine on it tho. Right now I’m running with bluefang / … which is just a temporary host. I am working on my own private box that will host off the fiber in the next few months to make the cluster (along with a fallout server most likely). Thank you for all the advice. I will definitely look into ASM again.
Agreed. Making it all work nicely is a LOT of tedious work. On our cluster, we use a slightly customized version of a drop list we found elsewhere. It works pretty well, but it does increase the size of the config file to 1.5 MB 
300-Cluster-Config.zip.doc (84.6 KB)
That’s the config, just remove the .doc, since Discourse doesn’t allow zip uploads.