ArkKeeper

ArkKeeper is a modernization and optimization of ARK Server Manager, the classic WPF/.NET Framework tool for administering dedicated ARK: Survival Evolved servers. It isn't an original project built from scratch: it's a rewrite of the same codebase — originally from ChronosWS/ARK-Dedicated-Server-Tool — on top of .NET 10 and Avalonia, with a modern interface (Mica, rounded corners, three built-in themes, accent colors) and cross-platform support built in from the design stage.

Legal notice: ArkKeeper and its authors are not affiliated with Studio Wildcard or its partners. ARK: Survival Evolved™ and its related images, trademarks, and rights are the exclusive property of Studio Wildcard and/or its affiliates. Free tool for legal use.

Features

• Live dashboard — real CPU/RAM usage per server (sampled from the actual OS process, not estimated), trend sparklines, and an activity feed of what your servers have actually been doing (starts, stops, backups).
• Server management — create and edit any number of server profiles, covering all ~226 GameUserSettings.ini/Game.ini settings ARK exposes (rates & multipliers, rules, structures, taming, PvP, engrams, world/environment, chat, raw override lists), not just a curated subset. Settings are merged into the server's real config files rather than overwriting them, so manual edits and mod-added directives survive.
• Real process control — Start / Stop / Kill against the actual dedicated server process. Stop asks the server to save and exit gracefully over RCON first, falling back to a hard kill if RCON is unreachable or the timeout elapses.
• Anti-cheat & performance — toggle BattlEye off per server, and tune OS process priority and CPU core affinity without leaving the app.
• RCON console — send commands and watch the live response log.
• Players and tribes — connected-player list with kick/ban, known players and tribes parsed from save files.
• Backups — one-click world save/restore, optionally compressed.
• Scheduler — recurring or daily RCON tasks (e.g. SaveWorld every 6 hours) that keep running in the background.
• Mods — add Steam Workshop mod IDs and download/update them via SteamCMD.
• Discord notifications — server start/stop events posted to a webhook.
• Auto-update — checks a JSON manifest for new ArkKeeper releases and downloads them.
• Three themes — Light, OLED Black, and Navy Blue, plus five accent colors, switchable live from Settings.

Screenshots

Navy Blue	OLED Black	Light

Theme picker in Settings:

Installation

Grab the latest release from the Releases page:

• ArkKeeper-*-win-x64-standalone.zip — no .NET installation required, just extract and run ArkKeeper.App.exe. This is the one most people want.
• ArkKeeper-*-win-x64.zip — smaller download, requires the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime already installed.

Build from Source

Requirements: .NET 10 SDK

git clone https://github.com/Muurrcc/ArkKeeper.git
cd ArkKeeper
dotnet build
dotnet run --project src/ArkKeeper.App

Publishing an optimized build

# Requires .NET 10 installed on the target machine (~36 MB)
dotnet publish src/ArkKeeper.App -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false

# No .NET installation required (~113 MB, includes the runtime)
dotnet publish src/ArkKeeper.App -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true

# Same as above, but trimmed (~48 MB)
dotnet publish src/ArkKeeper.App -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true -p:PublishTrimmed=true

Optimization

Compared to a generic dotnet publish (no RID), pinning the target to win-x64 avoids bundling the native Skia/HarfBuzz binaries for every supported platform and strips native debug symbols that add nothing to a release build:

Build	Size
Generic (dotnet publish, no RID)	570 MB
win-x64, framework-dependent	36 MB
win-x64, self-contained (includes runtime)	113 MB
win-x64, self-contained + trimmed	48 MB

Startup time to visible window (framework-dependent, average of 3 measurements): ~656 ms.

Trimming (PublishTrimmed) works end to end, verified by launching the published .exe — it took fixing two things first:

• ViewLocator resolved View↔ViewModel by reflection (Type.GetType with the name as a string); the trimmer removes types nothing references statically, so this broke in production ("Not Found: DashboardView"). Replaced with an explicit, reflection-free mapping.
• ServerProfile serialization: the System.Text.Json source generator doesn't see the properties CommunityToolkit.Mvvm generates from [ObservableProperty] — serializing it directly silently dropped almost all of the profile's data (found by inspecting the actual JSON, not from any warning or error). ProfileStore now serializes through ServerProfileData, a flat, hand-written snapshot built exactly for this — see the comment in that file.

With both fixes in place, dotnet publish ... -p:PublishTrimmed=true leaves no trimming warnings of its own (only two remain, neither ours: a low-risk one in the .ini engine from generic reflection, and one from FluentAvalonia's DataGrid control, which isn't even used yet).

Tech stack

Layer	Technology
UI	Avalonia UI + FluentAvalonia
MVVM	CommunityToolkit.Mvvm
DI / Hosting	Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting
Logging	Microsoft.Extensions.Logging
Runtime	.NET 10

Credits

Based on the original work by ChronosWS and the ARK Server Manager community, published under GPL-3.0.

License

GPL-3.0 — as a derivative of a GPL-3.0 project, ArkKeeper is distributed under the same terms: source code always available, and any fork or modification must remain open under this same license.