Studio Wildcard's ARK: Survival Evolved is a really popular game. It's filled with dinosaurs, guns, vehicles, PvP and all sorts of wild exploration. One feature in the game that has baffled some people is the pooping feature. Why's it in the game? Well, it turns out it's there for you to eat.
Kotaku did a brief write-up on why player-characters and dinosaurs in the game take a dump every so often. It's not controllable and you can't stop; it just happens. Well, it actually serves a function in ARK according to Studio Wildcard's co-founder Susan Stieglitz.
According to Stieglitz it's a replacement for a suicide key, mentioning during a GDC talk...
[…] it’s the only conceivable biological function you could kill yourself with. Originally, we were debating putting in a suicide key to escape situations like that.Pooping is obviously pretty funny, and it had some marketing value, but it actually emerged as a solution to the idea of a suicide hot key—of instant death that would just feel cheap.
So you eat poop and eventually die.
This led to a lot of questions in the comment section on the article. One person asked if this makes 2girls1cup fake given that they obviously didn't die when that happened, while another person asked how exactly can poop-eating in ARK work as a suicide function if you get stuck on a high place where the poop falls before you can eat it?
All of those very intelligent questions regarding fecal digestion were adequately answered by the community. In one case they mentioned that it's a death-over-time mechanic and not directly instant. Another individual also stated that pooping in ARK: Survival Evolved drains your hunger meter, and therefore if you get stuck on a high place and you are unable to acquire your own poop for the purpose of consumption, then you can stay stuck and keep pooping until you die of starvation.
Interestingly enough, this mechanic can actually be modified so that if you're in the kind of situation where you're stuck and can't suicide by poop, Studio Wildcard implemented a console command into ARK that allows players to adjust how often and how much they poop. Twitter user ruukutia found out the hard way what happens when you mess with the intervals.
Well, you certainly don't want to set the interval to 0... otherwise you could suffer the fate of suffocating in rolling Cocoa Puffs.
It's not all toxic when it comes to taking a dump, though.
It's mentioned that ARK: Survival Evolved also utilizes feces as compost as well. You can use it to help grow plants, extract nutrients and farm. A lot of players have rather complex compounds with their own vegetation gardens in order to feed their animals/dinosaurs, so it comes in handy for activities like that.
You didn't honestly think that the only function of pooping in ARK: Survival Evolved was to eat it and die, did you?
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