When Studio Wildcard ships a new ARK: Survival Ascended server build, every server has to update before it can accept the matching game clients. AASM v0.8.3 can do this for you - poll SteamCMD for a new manifest build ID, broadcast a countdown to players, gracefully stop the server, run the update, then restart.
v0.8.2/v0.8.3 added several reliability improvements around this flow (stuck update flag recovery, manifest build ID surfacing, scheduled fast-retry on transient Steam fetch failures).
Prerequisites:
Same path as restart scheduling - server tab → Maintenance → Maintenance & Management.
In the Quick Settings card, flip 📥 Update on Restart on. With this toggle on, every scheduled restart first checks Steam for a new manifest build ID. If there's an update, the restart becomes an update-and-restart cycle.
This pairs naturally with daily restarts or multi-daily restarts. Without a restart schedule, this toggle does nothing - it's the restart that drives the update check.
Right below Update on Restart you'll find ⚡ Immediate Updates. When on, AASM polls Steam every 30 minutes (the minimum interval Cryptek will honour - he intentionally rejected lower values to avoid hammering Steam). When a new build appears, the server triggers an out-of-cycle update with a countdown to players.
Immediate Updates can interrupt prime-time gameplay. Many admins prefer to leave it OFF and rely solely on the next scheduled restart - players are less surprised by a 4 AM patch than a 7 PM one. Pick based on your community.
👥 Player Notifications in the same Quick Settings card controls whether AASM broadcasts countdown messages over RCON before an update or restart. Default countdown stops: 10 min, 5 min, 1 min, 30 sec.
v0.8.3 fix: late warnings (4-min and 3-min on heavily-busy RCON channels with cross-chat enabled) now use high priority + a single 12-second retry on first miss (BUG-19), so they're much less likely to silently drop.
The next time Wildcard ships an ARK update, watch the dashboard. You should see:
If a server somehow gets stuck mid-update (rare; usually means SteamCMD itself wedged), v0.8.3 auto-recovers stale updateInProgress flags older than 90 minutes (BUG-14 fix). You can also manually click Update on the server card to force a re-attempt.
Your server now patches itself on Wildcard's schedule, with countdown warnings so players aren't surprised. Combine with scheduled restarts so the update cycle is predictable.