Arksanity

An ARK: Survival Evolved server that defied extinction from 2015 to 2019 and beyond. The server sleeps, but the legacy never dies.

Static site for arksanity.com — a long-running personal ARK: Survival Evolved server. The server itself ran with high player count from October 2015, lived through map migrations, mod corruptions, and one real wipe, and saw brief revivals in 2021 and 2023. This site preserves the rules, mods, configs, and history.

The visual style is cribbed straight from the in-game UI — grid panels, slate-and-cyan palette, the works — to recreate the feel of being in the menus rather than reading a website about them. Built with Eleventy and Tailwind CSS. Mods are pulled live from the Steam Workshop API at build time; news posts come from a private Discord channel via the Discord REST API.

Most of the heavy lifting was done by Claude Code. See the writeup at dahlskebank.com for the story behind it.

Tech stack

• Eleventy 2.0 — static site generator
• Tailwind CSS 3 + hand-written custom CSS — styling
• PostCSS — CSS pipeline
• Nunjucks — templating
• Discord REST API v10 — fetches news at build time
• Steam Workshop API — fetches mod metadata at build time
• Apache — .htaccess for production hosting

Local development

npm install
npm start

npm start runs the CSS watcher and Eleventy concurrently. Output goes to _site/.

For a one-off production build:

npm run build

Environment variables

The Discord news fetcher needs credentials. Create a .env file in the project root:

DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN=your_bot_token_here
DISCORD_CHANNEL_ID=your_channel_id_here

If DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN is missing or unset, the build still succeeds — the news section just stays empty.

Project structure

src/
  _data/         Eleventy data files (site config, nav, mods, Discord)
  _includes/     Shared layouts and partials
  css/           Source stylesheet (compiled by PostCSS)
  js/            Front-end JavaScript
  settings/      ARK config docs (Game.ini, GameUserSettings.ini, command-line)
  *.njk          Page templates
assets/          Static images, video, favicons
.htaccess        Apache rewrite rules / error pages

Hosting

The built _site/ directory deploys to any static host. The included .htaccess is Apache-specific (used in production) — strip or replace it for nginx, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, etc.

License

WTFPL — Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License.