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StructurePickUpBalance

Overview

What StructurePickUpBalance changes about structure pickup.

On ARK: Survival Ascended, picking up a structure that other structures are snapped to takes the whole attached build with it, directly into your inventory. On a server running AlwaysAllowStructurePickup, that turns a single pickup into a way to harvest an entire base.

StructurePickUpBalance intercepts that cascade. Only the structure the player actually targeted is picked up. Whatever was depending on it collapses instead, with the normal demolish sound and break effects — the behaviour players expect from ASE.

What counts as a dependent

Only structures genuinely being held up by the one you remove are affected. Something that is merely touching it, or still supported another way, is left alone — so picking up a piece that carries nothing behaves normally.

Modes

One setting decides what happens to dependent structures. See Configuration for how to set it.

ModeWhat happens to dependents
DemolishThey collapse and refund resources as a normal demolish would.
DestroyThey collapse with no resource refund.
BlockThe pickup is refused outright while anything genuinely depends on the structure.
VanillaThe plugin does nothing — stock game behaviour.

Why Demolish is the usual choice

Manually demolishing a support already refunds the whole attached tree in stock ASA. Suppressing the refund only on pickup makes the two paths inconsistent, which is easy for players to notice and awkward for a server economy.

Player-facing behaviour

A player who picks up a support gets the structure they targeted, sees the dependent structures collapse with effects, and receives a message telling them how many collapsed. The wording of that message is configurable.

Structures with nothing snapped to them are untouched — no effects, no message, ordinary pickup.