Ark: Survival Evolved adds poop eating to avoid suicide button

In many open world and sandbox games players run the risk of getting stuck inside closed-off rooms or features of the landscape that they can't get around. Most games in the genre solve that problem by adding a suicide button, letting players kill themselves and respawn elsewhere.

But when the developers of Ark: Survival Evolved faced that same issue, they didn't want to take that route, as they felt that a suicide button was a cheap solution.

And that's why your character in the game randomly poops, Studio Wildcard co-founder Susan Stieglitz explains to Kotaku.

"If you're trapped in a room," she says, referring to the fact that you can eat your poop in the game and die from it, "it's the only conceivable biological function you could kill yourself with. Originally, we were debating putting in a suicide key to escape situations like that."

"Pooping is obviously pretty funny, and it had some marketing value, but it actually emerged as a solution to the idea of a suicide hot key—of instant death that would just feel cheap."

The poop featured in Ark isn't just for suicidal purposes, though. You can also use your faeces for crafting and as fertilizer.