I would encourage you to edit the arenas to make them a bit unique though

Potentially. If you know the assets are in the game you generally don't have to copy them over, but if you aren't sure then you should probably use copies in your mod folder to be safe.
As for the deprecate flag if you go into the defaults of your primalitem and search "Deprecate" you should get one or tool boolean parameters make sure they are not set to true.
You can also compare your mod files that are downloaded. if you go into the directory that gets downloaded from steam you can check for yourself to see what files were uploaded. If something is missing then you have a potential starting place to find out what is going wrong.

All three of those are okay to do. The only thing that isn't allowed is re-releasing the paid DLC maps as free mods.

This is possible, though it would be a considerable amount of work for an external management tool, but definitely possible via use of the HTTP nodes that available in the devkit.

Just a few things off the top of my head:
1) make sure your engram is set to a level higher than 0 and requires at least 1 engram point to learn. (I've seen oddities like this with anything less) and that there is a crafting cost to them (1 wood or thatch is what I usually do for testing)
2) Make sure not of your engram items have any of the "deprecate" flags enabled.
3) Make sure any assets referenced are actually in your mod folder. not all of the assets in the devkit are actually packaged in the base game.
If all else fails you can try replicating what I do in my tutorials, having a visual example might help spot anything that was maybe forgotten. Episode 3 is where I actually create a first mod that includes the stuff you are working with now: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2o1TY9xh_JsmbgQfSCydfT-7OSdvxsVR

We're going to zoom through the rough process of converting our tamed creatures into items this time. Specifically, we're making the sentry crystals that will eventually be used with the sentry towers themselves. We'll cover a few things in this video from conditional checks and most notably a brief look at Octree searching.
You can find the specific commit for this video on the gitlab repo here: https://gitlab.com/ZenRowe/VSS-ARK/commit/45a5a5c3c249e5151cc3ce3676c26b3a7925f98e

Explore The Island in a different light. Power fluctuations, loss of gravity and oxygen. The dangers of the island get turned on their head in this interesting twist on the original map.

Introduce some new wildlife to your ARK with these beautifully crafted creatures. ARK additions boasts some skillfully and carefully developed species to add some more life to the game.

Should be fixed now!

It will be probably a few weeks before the devkit update is ready.
I am going to try and get it released as soon as I can, but I cannot give an accurate ETA at this time.

It's time to start getting something together that we can actually see. I have created some simple temporary meshes so let's get these multi-piece structures actually in the world and snapping!
Primarily we will find the progression of these videos on the develop branch of the gitlab repository.
You can find the specific commit for this video here: https://gitlab.com/ZenRowe/VSS-ARK/commit/d1a02fd62b07f8c01a6b55730caa36a381a715e7

Blender - UE4 template project: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Od6_mdkOOTe27ujqo-T0l9lfwIg1JdT/view?usp=sharing

Snap point flags https://wiki.arkmodding.net/index.php?title=Snap_Points

You've been tagged by a scout as an enemy.

Just wait until you see our proper gameplay trailer in approximately and hour

Sorry guys, the dumb counter uses browser time instead of server time or UTC. It starts in 39mins.

I left one field unchanged. Thanks for spotting!

Hello Survivors!

We are happy to announce the conclusion of the Sept-Oct 2018 ARK Modding Contest. More than 60 mod projects were entered for this contest and the community has certainly come a long way since the last one. Mod authors were tasked with putting forth their best creations for a chance at the grand prize. The community also voted on their favorite mods to go alongside evaluations by Wildcard Staff. It was a pleasure to explore everyone's creations, and if you missed it you can find a collection of all the spotlights that Zen Rowe did for the contest over on our Twitch channel.
Without further ado, here are the winners of the Sept-Oct 2018 ARK Modding Contest!

1st Place - $15,000 Valguero

Our grand prize winner is Valguero, made by Nekatus and Buttman, which had a strong showing in both the technical evaluation and the popular vote. This is a beautiful map with a significant degree of polish and the sound effects are on point for immersion, it also features ...

Hello Survivors!

We are happy to announce the conclusion of the Sept-Oct 2018 ARK Modding Contest. More than 60 mod projects were entered for this contest and the community has certainly come a long way since the last one. Mod authors were tasked with putting forth their best creations for a chance at the grand prize. The community also voted on their favorite mods to go alongside evaluations by Wildcard Staff. It was a pleasure to explore everyone's creations, and if you missed it you can find a collection of all the spotlights that Zen Rowe did for the contest over on our Twitch channel.
Without further ado, here are the winners of the Sept-Oct 2018 ARK Modding Contest!

1st Place - $15,000 Valguero

Our grand prize winner is Valguero, made by Nekatus and Buttman, which had a strong showing in both the technical evaluation and the popular vote. This is a beautiful map with a significant degree of polish and the sound effects are on point for immersion, it also features ...

For more info check out the latest Crunch about our new teaser

We're going to get some of our basic setup out of the way today. We'll start with the core stub files for our two main multi-component structures and the base files for our data container items.
Primarily we will find the progression of these videos on the develop branch of the gitlab repository.
You can find the specific commit for this video here: https://gitlab.com/ZenRowe/VSS-ARK/commit/f02d84b78002f20ce696241179fdf162baed636b

I recommend at least the following, you might be able to get by with less depending on what you are doing: 32GB RAM 8+ core processor Decent GPU: If you can play ARK with it, it's should be fine 500GB SSD specifically for the devkit: This might be a tough one for a laptop, but the devkit take over 100GB of space just on initial installation and it gets much bigger as you make mods. You can install the devkit on an HDD if the SSD is prohibitive, but be aware that it's going to mean vastly longer loading times for everything.