Z-Colour — players recolour their own tamed dinos with one chat command
Demo
Look at your tamed dino, type
/zdc 0 79, done: region 0 of that dino is now colour 79. Z-Colour does that one thing, server-side, with no game hook and no client mod — it works on PC and on console alike.Only dinos that belong to the player or to their tribe can be recoloured. Access is restricted by default (see "Who can use it").
Works with the ZMenu mod (optional)
Coming soon: ZMenu in 4 languages (French, English, Spanish, German), chosen by each player with flags in the menu. This version is ready, but CurseForge has paused publishing for all ARK mods until the game's Unreal Engine 5.8 update: it will be released on November 5, 2026 at the earliest.
ZMenu is a free client mod by the same author: https://www.curseforge.com/ark-survival-ascended/mods/zmenu With ZMenu on your server, a Z-Colour tab: allowed players pick a region, then a colour from the palette. Handy for console players.
- ZMenu talks to the server through Z-Bridge, a free plugin made for it: it carries the menu clicks to the plugins and brings their answers back into the menu. Install Z-Bridge too, or the menu stays empty.
- Each of these plugins adds its own tab to ZMenu: Z-Points the Z-Points tab, Z-Colour the Z-Colour tab, Z-Info the Z-Info tab, Z-Chat the Z-Link tab. A tab only shows when its plugin is installed.
- Without ZMenu, everything still works through the chat commands below.
Install
Drop the
Z-Colour folder into ShooterGame/Binaries/Win64/ArkApi/Plugins/. Requires AsaApi 2.03+. Loads at server start.Player commands
/zdc <region 0-5> <colour id>— recolours the tamed dino you are looking at./zdc help— reminder of the syntax and of the six regions, in the server's language (General.Language).
Regions: 0 body, 1 face, 2 side, 3 legs, 4 top, 5 under (what each region covers depends on the species). Colours: a number from ARK's dye palette, about 100 colours in game (the ZMenu Z-Colour tab shows them all). A short cooldown (
General.CooldownSec) stops spamming.Who can use it (Access)
The shipped config is restricted:
Access.Mode is "list" and the list is empty, so nobody can use the command until you decide who can.Mode: "list"— ifUsePermissionsistrue, the Permissions plugin is loaded and the group named inPermissionsGroup(defaultDonator) exists, members of that group are allowed. Otherwise only the EOS ids listed inEOSListare allowed.Mode: "open"— every player can recolour their own dinos.
ZColour.Status tells you which of the two actually decides on your server (Permissions group, or the list — and why).Configure (config.json)
General.ChatCommand— what players type (default/zdc);ChatCommandAlias— an optional second name. Both are read at server start.General.Language— EN, FR, DE, ES, or your own block underTexts. A missing sentence falls back to English.General.MaxColourId— highest colour id allowed (lower it to forbid the high shades).General.MaxRangeUnits— how far the targeted dino may be (300 = one foundation).General.CooldownSec— minimum seconds between two uses per player.General.Enabled—falseputs the plugin to sleep without unloading it.Notifications— on-screen banner size (Scale), duration (DisplayTime), andAlsoChatto copy it to chat.Texts— every player message, per language. Keep the{max},{region}and{colour}markers.
RCON commands
ZColour.Reload— re-reads config.json live (access list included).ZColour.Status— version, command, access mode and what decides access.
Notes
- Server-side only; no database.
- If Z-Messages is installed, messages follow its style sheet; otherwise the game's plain messages are used.
- Z-Info's
/info cmdlists/zdconly to players who are allowed to use it.
Compatibility
Built and tested against AsaApi 2.03 (ARK: Survival Ascended dedicated server, Windows).
External connections and data
- No network connection. The plugin opens no connection of its own and sends nothing anywhere: no web request, no telemetry, no licence check, no update check.
- Files written: its own
config.jsononly, rewritten only to rename setting names of older versions (values kept). - Data kept: the EOS ids you list yourself in
Access.EOSList. An external tool (Z-ARK, for example) may keep that list up to date; Z-Colour only reads it. - When the Permissions plugin is loaded, Z-Colour asks it, through functions Permissions exports, whether a player is in the configured group. When Z-Messages or Z-Bridge is loaded, it calls their exported functions (message style, menu language). It exports one function itself, so that Z-Info and Z-Bridge can ask whether a player may use
/zdc. All inside the server process. - No game hook, no registry access, no external program started, no other data collected.
Dependencies and limitations
- No required dependency. Optional: the Permissions plugin (access by group), Z-Messages (styled messages), the ZMenu client mod with Z-Bridge (the Z-Colour tab).
- Restricted by default: nobody can use
/zdcuntil you open it or list players. - Only tamed dinos of the player or of their tribe; what each colour region covers depends on the species.
ChatCommandandChatCommandAliasare read at server start: a change needs a restart.
Updates
Z-ARK (server manager, https://z-ark.fr/en/) checks for new versions of this plugin and installs them from its dashboard.
Without Z-ARK: click Watch at the top of this page to be notified of every new version; what changed is listed in the Updates tab. To update, stop the server, replace the plugin's .dll and PluginInfo.json, keep your config.json, then start the server again.
Built with AI, knowingly
This plugin was written with an artificial intelligence, and we would rather say it plainly. It is not code thrown together at random: behind it is someone from the trade (software development, server operations, community management) who decides every feature, reviews it and puts it to the test on a real cluster, with real players, before it reaches you. The same goes for the ZMenu client mod. Bugs reported in the Discussion tab get fixed.
