Conan Exiles Materials & Resources Guide

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Emily, or Zoe if you’re on her discord, is a Conan Exiles guide contributor and long-term fan. She’s been raiding bases since its release, mixing in some Rust, Archeage, Apex Legends, Hearthstone, Don’t Starve, and Horizon Zero Dawn. Video games have been a core aspect of her life since she was a child with an N64. When she needs a break, she’ll switch genres and start a new kind of adventure, though survival games have always been a favorite.

TL:DR: Mats for Days

conan exiles crafting — Image from Conan Exiles Fandom.com

Conan Exiles revolves around access and production of materials. Your success on any server will be determined by how efficiently you harvest resources. If you consider looking up resource locations on a map cheating or no fun, then the truest way to become proficient at resource harvesting is to keep your tools upgraded and kitted. This means prioritizing crafting new tools over a fancy new sword or set of armor and keeping them fitted with upgrade kits from the tinker’s bench. You may also consider dumping points into the hard worker perk to harvest nodes twice as fast.

The second aspect of resource harvesting that I would focus on is where I build my base and camps. If you can shorten your run to the most time-consuming resources, then you’re pulling ahead of the competition. Consider iron nodes, water for fish, and most importantly, for any of my bases, trees for bark. I consider the Highlands to be a top-tier base building zone for resources. Mounds of the Dead are suitable for thrall farming, the trees are the thickest in this zone for bark, and the Frozen North is close by for high-tier resources. Also, it’s pretty.

My Experience as a Loot Hoarder

I like to think I’m good at sharing in multiplayer games, but I also am aware of my treasure-hoarding nature. Stacking my vaults to the brim with trinkets and valuables is always in the back of my mind, but at some point, the clan’s success comes first. After these needs are met, materials should be used for chaos and destruction, and Conan Exiles really shines in this regard.

Since their addition in 2017, my pack is never without explosive orbs. I will spend my entire life savings on explosive orbs. I love exploding things. My thralls are tired of carrying explosive jars, but there are walls and buildings that always need exploding. The explosions don’t stop there. My base always involves the construction of Trapplebee’s, a neighborhood bar and grill. I can’t tell you where the exploding traps are hidden because that would ruin the fun of Trapplebee’s. Come for the game of darts; stay for the explosions.

Your Very First Resources

conan exiles broken highway — Image from Conan Exiles Fandom

While I wouldn’t necessarily call it a tutorial, the game does softball collecting materials for the first hour or so. It’s a gentle introduction to a potentially tricky concept. Someone that has played many survival games before may not need the stepping stool, but I trust that brand new players to the genre appreciate it.

When you start your first adventure in Conan Exiles, pay close attention to the items on the ground. They may just look like environment details, but the sticks and rocks scattered around the beginner area are vital resources. You may consider filling your inventory as you run along the Broken Highway. Nothing here will kill you, so it’s a good opportunity to grab stone and branches from the ground and fiber from the plants around you.

Branches and stone will allow you to craft your first tools, while the fiber can be used for your first bedroll and bandages for when you inevitably get into trouble. To unlock these recipes, find a safe spot and click over to your feats menu to learn the stone tools feat and the survivalist feat. I suggest skipping the fiber armor set and using your fiber for a bedroll. The bedroll will allow you to spawn where it is placed instead of back on the Broken Highway.

Tools for Harvesting

Crafting your first tools will open up a world of possibilities when it comes to material gathering. Crafting or upgrading tools can have a couple of benefits. First, it will allow you to collect more of the same items faster, which is not just a convenience in Conan Exiles, but a necessity. Second, in the beginning, it will unlock new items that were not possible for you to collect without the tool.

The stone pick and the stone hatchet are great examples of both of these principles. The stone pick will allow you to collect more stones from the large boulders scattered around the map and will also allow you to start gathering resources such as bark from trees and coal from coal nodes that were not available to you before. The hatchet is for gathering wood, which is a far superior resource to branches and was not possible to collect with your bare hands.

Tools collect their harvesting power per swing, with a 50% chance of procuring an additional item or a by-product item from the node.

After you’ve made a stone weapon (though I suggest trying several), you’ll be ready to take down monsters, humans, and animals for even more resources. Try crafting a stone-skinning knife for your first crack at leather from downed beasts, which the tannery and armorer’s bench can turn into your first set of leather armor. Craft a cleaver to collect meat instead, though bear in mind that you’ll have to choose between the two when processing a corpse. I highly suggest focusing on leather armor as your first adventure, even before a base. It will open up much more of the map and enemies for material collecting.

Survive the Desert: Food and Water

The first resources you’ll need to focus on are food and water. There is a large river in the southern half of the map built just for beginners. You should be able to walk right up to it and drink. Once you’ve managed to craft a skinning knife and collect some hide, make a little twine from the fiber in your inventory and craft a sealed waterskin. You can fill it at the river and drink on it while you travel to drier sections of the map.

Food can seem like a daunting task when you first start the game, but that’s before you learn about gruel. After learning the primitive cook feat, it only takes five wood and ten stone to build a campfire. I like to scatter them around the map. Not only can you efficiently process food at them, but they provide a friendly stationary source of light in a pinch. Campfires do require fuel to burn, so pre-loading them with a nice stack will save you heartache in the middle of the night.

Once your campfire is placed, add your fuel, five plant fiber, and one seed to its inventory and press the play button. This will craft you ten gruels, which will be more than enough to keep you sated and alive. So, why bother cooking anything else? Better food has higher sated bonuses. Start cooking meat to increase the health regenerated at sated, which is imperative between fights. Build a stove and start cooking more complex items for warming or cooling effects and even some stat bonuses.

Base Building Considerations: Beginner Bases and Material Concerns

conan exiles house — Image from Conan Exiles Fandom

Don’t fret; all of these basic stations can be destroyed or abandoned with very little loss as you accrue a nice set of armor, weapons, and tools. Your first base will likely not be your permanent home, so there are only a couple of considerations that really matter for it.

The first one is water. You may think you know why you would be next to the water in a survival game, and you’re not wrong, but there are actually a couple of reasons it’s a good idea to have a large body nearby. The first is the most obvious, but in my opinion, not the most important. You will fight your thirst meter the whole game, and it’s incredibly helpful not to have to worry about it at home.

Of course, you could always construct a well or stock up on waterskins for this purpose, so what’s the most critical reason your beginner base should be near water? So that you can easily escape from a losing fight. Eventually, you will be powerful enough that a couple of extra NPCs will be no big hindrance to your adventure, but as a low-level player, escaping into the water is an easy out. Enemies will not pursue you once it gets deep, and nothing happens when your stamina runs out, so water escapes are the best option in a tough situation.

The second resource to consider for your beginner base is iron. Your beginner base will revolve around making nicer items from iron, and this can be an intense run for those that build their beginner base too far south. I would consider doing some scouting into the desert to find an easy corridor into the middle of the map. After you’ve located your corridor, find the nearest iron nodes and compromise on a base location.

Crafting Stations

There are two main leveling methods for Conan Exiles. If you are on a PvP server, you may consider a more run-and-gun approach. The only thing other players cannot take from you is your level, so collecting resources and building things may wait until you are fully leveled and prepared. This method requires skipping a lot of natural progressions and is for more advanced players.

For this guide, I will assume you are going the more traditional route. This will be a difficult path on a PvP server, but as a beginner, I would think it’s necessary. After crafting your first round of stone tools, it’ll be time for you to set up all your basic crafting stations. I suggest essentially going through the list in your in-hand crafting menu and making them all. Crafting stations are for processing materials and upgrading/creating new equipment. Your basics should include the furnace, tannery, armorer’s bench, blacksmith’s bench, and carpenter’s bench.

Healing Materials: Potions and Bandages

conan exiles potions — Image from Steam Community

The very first bandages you can create are in your inventory crafting menu and only require a couple of plant fibers to put together. These bandages, along with a stack of food in your inventory, should get you through most battles in the beginner area. Bandages can only be used out of combat (specifically until you get hit again), so you’ll learn the first rule of Conan combat fairly early on: running is often your best solution to a problem. You can outrun most dangers near the southern river, escape combat, and apply a cheap fiber bandage.

However, there’s a very important resource hidden right under your nose at the southern river, and that’s aloe. The large green stalky plants can be found in groups along the bank, and I suggest you collect every node you find. It takes 10 aloe leaves to make one aloe extract at the alchemist’s bench. You won’t have access to this recipe until level 15, but this potion will allow you to heal quickly in battle and can save your life when bandages cannot.

Ten aloe leaves may sound like a lot when collecting by hand, but as soon as you can craft an iron sickle, it won’t take long. If you’ve collected enough aloe by hand for just a couple of extracts, these could give you a considerable advantage when searching for iron to craft your first sickle.

The Tannery: Leather Goods

As I mentioned earlier, the first resource I would focus on is hide so that you can make a decent set of armor. If you managed to defeat any enemies in fiber armor, or none at all, you will feel the benefit of leather armor immediately. There are some prerequisites you’ll need to complete to craft your first set of light leather armor, but as long as you’ve made a stone skinning knife, pick, and sword, you should be able to get there.

The sword and skinning knife will be for killing crocodiles and taking their hide. You can try other creatures, but crocs are the easiest to dodge and produce the best hide for processing. The pick will be for stripping bark off trees to fuel your tannery. Add the hide and the bark to your tannery to turn the hide from the crocodiles into leather. Then take your leather and plenty of twine to the armorer’s bench to craft your first set of leather armor.

Resource Transportation Woes

conan exiles horses — Image from Conan Exiles Fandom

You may think carrying more resources is pretty self-explanatory, and in some way, you’re correct. If you focus on dumping points into encumbrance in the early game, you will undoubtedly have an easier time lugging items home. However, this is not the route I would suggest. When you’re brand new to the Exiled Lands, and almost everything on the map can kill you in numbers, I wouldn’t spare a single point into encumbrance that I didn’t need for equipment and a stack or two of wiggle room.

Your armor will get quite heavy if you choose, and you’ll always need the ability to at least harvest a stack without becoming over-encumbered, but after that, your points will go a long way towards improving your survivability if you invest them in strength or vitality instead. It takes almost no investment of time or resources to turn a shaleback into a pack mule, even if you don’t intend to use it for the entire game.

Beast of Burden

As soon as you hit level 13, click over to the Apprentice Tamer feat and learn how to build an animal pen. If you’d rather put your time into capturing a thrall, by all means, but an animal follower will always be a less complicated process. Capture several baby shale backs for your pen (it raises five at a time), though keep in mind that they are very heavy, and it will make the mothers very angry when you steal them.

Load them and five vines into your pen, and you should have a really nice chance of raising a greater shaleback. You can find vines on very specific short, overgrown-looking trees along the southern river. Vines give the best chance of any beginner item to raise a greater shaleback.

Sure, the greater shaleback is better in a combat situation, but as a loot wagon, you’re really looking to roll one for its high armor and huge health pool. You can leave a huge stack of plant fiber in its inventory, and it will heal itself during a fight for little cost to you. Followers do not have encumbrance problems themselves, so feel free to make your turtle gorilla carry your heaviest items.

Better Beast of Burden

Now that mounts exist, the real secret to becoming rich in resources is to secure one as quickly as possible. While the trek may be a dangerous one for a low-level adventurer, the good news is that there are foal locations with deep water very close by. Learn the stablemaster feat at level 15, build two or three stables, strip anything expensive off of you and grab your least favorite shale back for a sketchy run to the jungle.

Assuming you built your beginner base on the southern river, jog east along the banks until you hit K6 and the biome begins to change. You will get into trouble on this run, but you should be able to easily jog into the water until the enemies lose interest. Don’t worry if your stamina runs out in the deep; the only thing it affects is your speed. When you enter K6, look for an island with a grassy bank in its southern half. You’ll find several foals wandering the bank. Grab one, load it into your shaleback’s inventory and repeat.

Once you return to your base, place the foals in your stables along with at least one plant fiber to start their crafting process (each stable only holds one foal/horse). There is no need for special food, or searching for unique foals; currently, there is no difference between horses except for their color. I told you to build several stables and collect several foals only to have backups for when you inevitably launch your favorite off a cliff.

Don’t forget to make a saddlemaker’s table and collect enough leather for a saddle. This process will arguably be more time-consuming than grabbing the baby horses, but you cannot ride a horse in Conan Exiles without a saddle. Once your projects are complete, you’ll have a speedy, loot-carrying ride to explore even further. Don’t worry about your ambling shale back; followers automatically port behind you while you run on a mount. In fact, even if you aggro everything in sight, you’ll be moving fast enough at a sprint on your new horse that it won’t likely be a problem for either of you.

The First Real Obstacle: Iron

conan exiles ironstone — Image from Conan Exiles Fandom

At this point, your chests are full of weird garbage, and your tools are feeling a little inefficient for your resource needs. We’ll get to the weird garbage part in the press and grinder section, but first, it’s time to make moves towards upgrading your equipment. Upgraded equipment makes it possible to collect more resources, and more resources allow for more progression, which in turn, means you can collect even more resources!

To be clear, when I talk about upgrading equipment, crafting stations, or buildings, I usually mean replacing them. Unfortunately, there is no “upgrade” feature in Conan Exiles. Instead, you must craft a new item. Before you start looking for iron, I highly recommend you check out the tannery section and craft some leather armor for yourself. The first iron nodes in the game are either surrounded by hyenas, NPCs, or worse.

Take your stone sword (or preferred weapon), stone pick, leather armor, bandages, and some food, and head north in search of iron nodes. At first, everything will look like a potential iron node until you actually spot one. They are far more silver than standard stone boulders and really do stick out. They are usually in groups of 5-10 nodes, which will make them stick out even further. If you find coal, it may be a hint that you are close to a collection of iron.

Iron is not an easy resource to find, so don’t feel bad if it takes you a while. If you want to skip the adventure of searching for them, try this resource map. My favorite low-level place to collect iron is just north of Dustdevil Ridge. You can actually run up the path from the river (past Sinner’s Refuge) without any fights and only have to face one rock nose at a time to farm the nodes along the cliff. When you’re ready to accumulate some serious iron and have decent armor and a follower, check out Lookout Point in the middle of J5.

Processed Materials: Shaped Wood, Iron Bars, etc.

Now that you have a pile of ironstone, how will you turn it into something useful? Many of the items in Conan Exiles must be processed into more advanced items at crafting stations. Sometimes the only purpose of the crafting station is to process these items for use in other stations, or sometimes you’ll find the recipe in a crafting station used for other items.

A great example of this is the furnace. Take your ironstone to the furnace along with some kind of fuel (wood, coal, or oil), and press the crafting button to begin processing your ironstone into iron bars. You will often lose some material in the process. In this case, it will take two ironstones to make one iron bar. While the furnace is lit, it’s smelting your ironstone into iron bars.

It’s always helpful to do the math for your end goal before going out and looking for the base ingredients. Sometimes this will require working your way back through several processing steps until you’ve got a quantity for your raw ingredients. As you play, you’ll start to remember the quantities in common recipes and keep a large stockpile of ingredients for when you forget.

Upgrading Your Tools

As you progress through the game, these raw material numbers can seem overwhelming. Always check that you have the most upgraded version of your harvesting tools or that you’ve unlocked any convenience recipes that you can. Trying to craft advanced items with beginner tools and equipment is a massive waste of time, and the mistake can end up getting you killed.

Your first round of replacements will be iron, and I suggest crafting a new pick and sword as soon as you can. With these new items, you’ll be able to safely farm even more iron to accomplish the rest of your set. Better tools in Conan Exiles don’t just mean increased durability; they actually pull far more materials out of each individual node. You can now go back to the same place you originally farmed iron with a stone pick and pull the amount multiple times with an iron pick without having to run any further.

After these two items, the rest of your set should come together easily; then you can feel free to focus on armor. This is the order I tackle each upgrade, but as with everything in Conan Exiles, it depends on your playstyle.

The Press and the Grinder

conan exiles grinder — Image from Conan Exiles Fandom

You’re probably feeling pretty wealthy at this point. Your chests are full of materials, your belly is full, and your base is starting to really come together, and somewhere in a dusty corner, there is a chest full of inventory dumps that you have no idea what to do with. If Funcom had made the game too neat, it would lose a little of its chaotic charm.

Fortunately, I’d be willing to bet several gold coins at least one of those chests full of items belongs to either the press or the grinder. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tell which items will go up in value by grinding or pressing them and which you’ll destroy. It’s tradition to screw this up a few times, but there are a few very useful recipes to get you started.

At level 17, you’ll be able to build a grinder. Use this handy device to turn your bone into bonemeal, stone into salt, and plant fiber into spice. You can certainly grind a variety of other items, but you may not produce anything very valuable. Try horns, fangs, claws, and the like if you don’t have any recipes that call for them directly.

At level 20, you can build your first icky fluid squishing device: the fluid press. The fluid press is perfect for animal parts and carcasses. You can create everything from bones and blood to extra ichor and tar when pressing monster parts. The most useful recipe for the fluid press is pressing seeds and fish into oil, which is the most valuable fuel in the game.

Base Building Considerations: Intermediate Bases and Material Concerns

You might be feeling a little cramped at your beachfront river base; maybe you’re even feeling a little under-challenged or too far from the action as well. In fact, there are several areas where you won’t even experience a purge in the beginner area, and that’s half the fun of Conan Exiles. If you’re considering moving closer to the danger, you’re not crazy. It doesn’t really make sense to keep your base in the beginner zone permanently.

While water and iron should still be at the top of your list for nearby resources, there are some items that change how you think about resources and your proximity to them. First off, you definitely have a horse at this point, so long runs may not seem that far anymore. While I would still prioritize building my base near water for my fish farm, iron nodes can be a little further off now that traveling is much easier.

Additionally, mastering lifts, drawbridges, bridges, and other ways to traverse the terrain comes with the territory of establishing your permanent base. These items can completely change your practical distance to a resource, and learning how to use them will change how you eyeball potential locations.

Personally, I think that bark and wood are the most convenient resource (outside of water) to be right next door to. Tree bark is a fuel that you never seem to have enough of at any level, and I like to collect massive quantities at once so that I don’t have to think about it later. For this reason, I like to have my permanent base in the Highlands. The trees are dense, and you can either build on the lake or near a river. The only downside to the area is that it is a very popular spot on crowded servers.

There’s no need to include advanced base suggestions when it comes to materials because, at this point, the game becomes so personalized that it’s anyone’s guess where you’d like to be. There are also opportunities for fast travel, fast saddles for mounts, and other more advanced ways to travel the map quickly.

Firing the Furnace: Coal, Oil, and Wood

Speaking of oil, you may be wondering about fuel consumption and collection. While fuel is not an overly complex resource to obtain, it is a neverending task. This means that eventually, you will want to make collecting or produce it as efficiently as possible. Wood burns for 10 seconds, coal burns for 35 seconds, and oil burns for 48 seconds. There are other fuels in the game, but these are the ones that you will use most often.

Wood (and even branches in a pinch) works fine while your ingredient list is relatively small. You may even power your furnace with it for a while when you only need to produce ten or twenty iron bars at a time, but eventually, you will build more furnaces, collect more materials, and need a fuel that can outlast the relatively short burn time of this basic fuel. This applies to other crafting stations aside from the furnace, including all of your cooking stations.

This is where coal begins to occupy your thrall’s inventory. Seriously, make your thrall carry it; coal is heavy. Coal burns much longer than wood and can be found scattered around iron nodes and as a drop from rocknoses. Eventually, you may not want to sacrifice even your thrall’s inventory space for coal because you’ll have built a successful oil operation back at your base. I would consider starting on this project as soon as you put down roots; oil is a very important asset.

Oil can be used for advanced crafting or for fuel, so there is an argument for using coal as fuel for the entire game. I prefer just to make a whole bunch of oil and not be distracted by coal, but to each their own. How do you make a whole bunch of oil? By farming a whole bunch of fish. This method essentially requires your base to be near a body of water, so there is no need to read on if you don’t own waterfront property.

For a successful oil operation, you’ll need a fish farm, and a fish farm will require an excess of bugs. The easiest way to generate a lot of bugs at a time is to set up a long row of compost heaps. If there is even one compost left in a compost heap, it will passively generate grubs, and grubs are great for attracting high-quality fish. The better the fish, the more oil it will produce at the fluid press.

Once you have ten or twenty fish traps in operation, you’ll find that fuel is no longer much of a concern to you.

Advanced Materials: The Dryer, Firebowl Cauldron, Etc

conan exiles furnace — Image from Conan Exiles Fandom

Crafting Stations start to get a little more complicated as the items you’re trying to create become more valuable. These stations may take by-products or processed ingredients and process them further or may make items for very specific purposes.

In my mind, there is no reason to build these advanced stations until you have chosen a secure location where you plan on making a permanent base. For instance, you won’t need a firebowl cauldron until you are ready to produce steel. The amount of ironstone required for steel production is excessive: it will require ten ironstones for the iron bars needed for one bar of steel. You will also need two tar and one brimstone at the firebowl cauldron to make steelfire, which must be added to the bars in the furnace to make your first steel bar.

These are valuable ingredients that can take a while to accumulate and would be a target for other players. Best to have an established base before you start putting too much time into steel production.

Advanced Tool Upgrades

The best way to collect more resources is to craft better tools, but sometimes you won’t have access to the ingredients for your next set quite yet. In this case, it is helpful to know about “tool mods” or reinforcement kits.

To craft tool upgrade kits, you’ll need to build yourself a tinker’s bench. It only takes level 26 to learn the feat for the tinker’s bench and the simple tool upgrade kit, but it may get lost in your long list of things to do at this level. A simple tool upgrade kit adds 1 item collection per swing, which may not sound like a lot, but adds up rather quickly through the life of the tool.

The tool upgrade kit adds two items collected per swing, and the advanced tool upgrade kit adds 3. These are per proc of an item, so if the swing includes a by-product, it will increase this collection as well.

Survival Perk: Worker Build

If you’re willing to dump 20 points into survival, then you’ll unlock the hard worker perk. This perk doubles the amount collected per node. When you are at a low level and using low-level tools, this won’t fill your chest at an awe-inspiring rate. Once you have made some decent tools and equipped them with tool upgrade kits, this is a valuable perk to consider.

Higher-level players will sometimes even re-spec into a gathering build with this perk by using a yellow lotus potion or the like. Just make sure you make several to return to your build when you get back to base or in case you’ve made any mistakes.

Bearer Thralls and Mammoths

conan exiles mammoths — Image from Conan Exiles Fandom

Smart resource collectors know that transportation is the key to success when it comes to filling your vault. As we’ve established, materials and resources determine your success in the Exiled Lands, and transporting them is the lion’s share of the battle. So, it makes sense that two of the most challenging followers to acquire in Conan Exiles stand out for their ability to carry treasure, not their fighting prowess.

As there are no encumbrance limits when it comes to followers, inventory slots will be the only thing that matters. The mammoth has the most inventory slots in the game, with a giant 30-slot inventory. Mammoths are the greater version of the elephant (which also has a 30-slot inventory), with triple the health and double the armor at level one. They are exceptionally difficult to craft and not the best choice in a tight fight. They are a hilarious choice in a tight fight.

It’s pretty well established that the best follower for resource collection is the T4 named bearer thrall. While their inventory can only hold 25 items compared to the mammoth’s 30, they are much more helpful in a fight. They already come with decent stats, but they can also be geared to the teeth. This makes them viable anywhere on the map, including dungeons and end-game areas. The bearer pack they come equipped with does not affect their inventory slots, so remove it and give them a nice, tough hat for their precious noggin.

In Love With Material Things

What will be your goal in Conan Exiles? Will it be to conquer all of the dungeons? Defeat other players? Build the cutest base? Or will it be to become grotesquely wealthy in a land without much wealth at all? Stocking your chests and vaults with all the best materials will certainly make your life easier when it comes to crafting and trading, but it may make your life harder when it comes to defending your territory.

Even if your goal is not to be the richest on your server, efficient resource collection is crucial for simply progressing and surviving in a game like Conan Exiles. By considering where you build your base, what quality your tools are, building your own resource-generating operations, and increasing how much inventory you have to haul back materials, you’ll save yourself more trips overall. Freeing up more time that can be spent on other business is a no-brainer; there are always bigger challenges to hunt down in the Exiled Lands.

FAQ – Conan Exiles Materials and Resources

Question: How do you get resources in Conan Exiles?

Answer: In the beginning, you’ll find you can pick up branches, rocks, and fiber with your hands. Very soon, you will be using appropriate tools to harvest from larger sources called nodes. The tool will collect its harvesting power per swing with a 50% chance of harvesting one additional item. The nodes and the environment are seamless in Conan Exiles, unlike some other survival games. Boulders and trees, especially, may appear as though they are simply environment, when the reality is that you’ll be harvesting them for stone and wood.

Question: What tool gets the most hide for leather in Conan Exiles?

Answer: The skinning knife is the best tool for hide, but don’t forget to collect bark to fuel the tannery if you’re turning it into leather. You can collect bark from trees by using a pick instead of a hatchet. The more you upgrade your skinning knife (or make better versions), the more hide per animal that you’ll collect. When your recipes start calling for thick leather, you’ll need to search for thick hide. You must hunt specific animals to procure thick hides, such as rhinoceros or elephants, but you can use any skinning knife to collect it.

Question: What are sickles used for in Conan Exiles?

Answer: You may think you’re doing just fine collecting fiber and other plants with your hands, but once you’ve made your first sickle, you’ll understand why you’re better off keeping one in your inventory. Sickles harvest more items from each plant than your hands, and as some plants are pretty difficult to find, they are a helpful tool to keep on hand. Sickles also increase the number of seeds harvested from plants, which compounds the number of overall plants you’ll get from a run. They also increase the number of bugs that drop when they proc.

Question: Where is the best place to build my base for easy resource collection?

Answer: In concern to resources, the best place to build your beginner base is just north of the southern river, near a corridor into the desert. This corridor should be pretty easy for you to traverse; some are even possible to run up without running into any enemies at all. This will give you early access to ironstone. The base should also be close enough to the water that a fish farm will be easy to harvest every day. Consider the Highlands or similar for your permanent base. At max level, the enemies there won’t be any more than an inconvenience, and the resources there are plentiful. Just watch out for other players.

Question: What does a bearer pack do?

Answer: Nothing on a bearer thrall. You can feel free to remove it once you pull your new bearer thrall off the wheel. Bearer thralls will still have just as many inventory slots as their tier dictates and, as followers aren’t subject to encumbrance, will continue to have no inventory weight limit. The bearer pack provides +5 encumbrance to a player’s character, whether it originally came from a bearer thrall or you’ve crafted it yourself. It must be worn in a head slot.

Question: What fuels a tannery in Conan Exiles?

Answer: Bark fuels a tannery. You can get bark by using a pick on trees. Trees in higher-level areas supply more bark per node, and better quality picks collect more bark per swing. Bark will be one of your most often harvested materials. After water, prioritizing tree density for your base build will ensure it’s easy to supply your tannery with enough bark for your advanced armor and saddle crafting needs.

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