How ARK Resource Calculator Came to Be
I used to play ARK: Survival Evolved with my friends religiously in 2016. Planning out what we needed to craft was a pain, and there weren't many tools available to calculate resources, so I built one myself, but mostly to learn software development, since I was just starting my career as a software engineer at the time.
What started as a simple idea for a tool became a project that I've often gone back to to help sharpen my skills.
2016 April
Built with AngularJS for learning purposes. Manually entered data for 400-500 items from the wiki.
2019 August
Rebuilt with ReactJS to strengthen my understanding of React and to fix some issues with the previous version and added a web scraper, but it started failing in 2022, so I stopped updating it.
2025 November
Rebuilt with NextJS. This time, I wanted to learn how to "vibe code". It took about a couple of weeks, which is fast, but the code quality isn't as good as I would like it to be. I still have a lot more to learn when it comes to coding with AI.
To those who've been reaching out about the calculator, sorry it's taken me years to finally get back to it. It's kind of amazing to know people still care enough to ask. I'm grateful you've stuck with it, and I hope you're still enjoying ARK as much as ever.