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11 Arat is the alien world that hosts ARK 2's campaign. It sits in a far-off solar system, outside the simulated ARK rings of the first game, and is sometimes referenced as the Alien Moon Arat. The planet is the direct narrative continuation of Genesis: Part 2, picking up after the destruction of the Genesis Colony Ship and dropping the survivors onto a surface that already has its own ecology and native sentient population. For the high-level primer see the Overview page.
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33 Where and What
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55 Arat is an alien planet rather than a return to Earth or a simulated ring. Official references use both planet and moon framings interchangeably. What matters for the campaign is that Arat is a real, physical world with terrain and life of its own, not a Genesis simulation and not a layer of the original ARK ring system.
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88 Arat Prime in Lore
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1010 The name Arat Prime predates ARK 2. It first surfaced through the older ARK Extinction storyline as a mysterious counterpart to Sanctuary City, and the saga's deeper fiction treats it as a superlight-speed bridge location that links the Genesis Colony Ship's Simulation back to Earth. Arat Prime is the connective tissue between the simulated training environments of the first game's expansions and the real, physical worlds the surviving humans are meant to seed.
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1212 That role makes Arat Prime central to the ARKs' Reseed Protocol worldbuilding. The protocol's metaphor is agricultural: Arat Prime is the plow that breaks the ground, and the ARKs themselves are the seeds. The simulated rings the original survivors trained inside were preparation for arriving on a real planet and rebuilding human and animal life there.
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1414 Necrocene Cosmology
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1616 The cosmology around Arat was expanded in late 2025 through ARK: Lost Colony, which introduced the Necrocene era. In that framing, post-Cataclysm Earth's southern pole has been plunged into permanent night. The metropolises that survive there shelter under defensive shields, and those shields are powered by radioactive Red Element. The Necrocene era is not Arat itself, but it sets the broader cosmology that the Santiago clone wakes into when his pod lands.
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1818 Arrival of Survivors
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2020 The campaign opens with survivor escape pods firing down to Arat from the Eden ring of the Genesis Colony Ship after Rockwell's defeat in Genesis: Part 2. Among those pods is the one carrying the clone of Santiago da Costa, and his daughter Meeka (sometimes written Mika in fan sources) accompanies him. Other survivors arrive in the same wave and seed the small tribes the player meets early in the campaign. This is also the in-universe reason the survivor begins with primitive tools despite carrying the lineage of a 24th-century Mek pilot: the pods do not deliver Tek-tier equipment.
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2323 Biosphere
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2525 LayerWhat Lives ThereEarth DinosaursStegosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Carnotaurus, Sabertooth, and Araneo have been shown in ARK 2 concept art as returning species, redesigned for ARK 2's grittier art direction and Souls-like combat scale. Brachiosaurus has also been revealed for ARK 2, and Studio Wildcard has noted it as the first creature in the game that did not already exist in the first ARK, making it a new addition rather than a returning species.Native Alien FaunaArat's ecosystem also includes its own native alien creatures alongside the dinosaurs. The mixed biosphere suggests cross-pollination between the saga's seed creatures and Arat's pre-existing life.Native Sentient PopulationThe Aratai are the planet's native sentient species and the campaign's primary antagonist faction. They tame their own dinosaurs and treat the new arrivals as invaders.
2626 A returning species name does not mean a returning model or behavior. The bestiary's silhouettes and combat patterns have been reworked to read inside the new locked third-person camera and the new sense-driven AI.
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2828 Unconfirmed Details
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3030 Much of Arat's worldbuilding has been alluded to but not detailed publicly. The catalog of regions and biomes on the planet has not been published, and no specific named landmarks or named cities have been confirmed. The day and night cycle, weather systems, and the planet's stated distance from Earth are unconfirmed. The cultural specifics of the Aratai, including their internal hierarchy, language, and named leaders, also remain unconfirmed at this stage. This page will be updated as the studio publishes more details.