Raster to ASCII bias file/work flow problem

[Jeremy Davis]

Hello,

I am having an issue creating an ASCII bias file that functions properly in Maxent from a raster that I have generated in ArcGIS 10.3.

Up until needing this particular bias file I have had relatively no problems with my workflow. I am using ArcGIS 10.3 to read in environmental raster data and use the Raster to ASCII tool built in to convert it to a usable format for Maxent to operate with. I always make sure that the maximum inputs, cell size, raster snap, and extract by mask are to the same as the extent I am using, and all of the environmental layers I have generated this way have never had an issue. 

The issue has arisen then when I was in need of bias files. I have generated a way of accounting for my bias and used raster calculation to produce a raster that I need. The problem begins when I use the raster to ASCII tool. I have used this tool successfully before, but only when I had a bias file that read either 1 or 0 for every single area that it read in. My current bias file, however, requires me to have numbers ranging from 1 to 50, and the problem arises when I use raster to ASCII on this raster it produces an ASCII file with values of 1 everywhere instead of the variety of values that were on the raster. 

What is going on here? I tried troubleshooting it a bit to no avail: I tried the raster being a .bil or .tif file on a suggestion from a colleague, but nothing changed. 

A more frustrating/separate issue is that I WAS able to successfully generate an ASCII file with the proper values by doing the conversion manually in R, but it was not georeferenced properly and gave me an error. When I went back to ArcGIS and corrected this error, or went directly to the ASCII file and manually wrote in the correct header, I continue to get the same error when I run it through maxent. Anyone know the issue to this part? If I cannot get the first option to work, this would be an acceptable work-around. 

Any help with either of these issues would be much, much appreciated, I have been stuck on a conversion problem for too long now. 

Happy New Year to all,

Jeremy