Conan Exiles Alchemical Base Guide

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Ceronesthes is our resident expert and Conan Exiles influencer here at Conan Fanatics. He is a well-known figure within the Conan Exiles community and has poured countless hours into this open-world survival adventure. Don't believe us, just check out his Youtube channel and see for yourself!

TL;DR Version

Alchemical base is produced with gold dust, silver dust, and ichor in a fire bowl cauldron. For clans that need larger quantities, farming the various components directly will overall give you the best returns, but farming bearer thralls and using loot chests to supplement your alchemical needs is still completely viable.

What is Alchemical Base?

alc

Alchemical base is the product of combining gold dust, silver dust, and ichor inside a firebowl cauldron. The two most precious metals combined with a fairly foul paste derived from generally poisonous creatures, it’s an endgame resource you’ll need for just about everything once you get past the midgame or so.

What Benches Should I Use?

Alchemical base is crafted inside any firebowl cauldron, of which there are four. As with many other resources that you’ll need in bulk, you’ll often find the best benches to use are the ones that reduce cost. The Improved Firebowl Cauldron and the Precision Firebowl Cauldron will both reduce the cost of alchemical base considerably.

The original cost of alchemical base is two silver dust, two ichor, and one gold dust – inside these two benches, it will only cost you one silver dust, one ichor and one gold dust, cutting the cost of several of the resources in half.

The Giant’s Firebowl Cauldron will offer you faster crafting speed, but the resources needed for alchemical base will take you quite some time to farm, and so generally making this paste cheaper will save you an immense amount of time in the long run. It is not recommended to use this variant firebowl cauldron for this reason.

Keep in mind, firebowl cauldrons do not require any fuel to run, and improved firebowl cauldrons are fairly cheap, only costing iron and brick which are both early game resources. Building a few extra of these and tucking them away to craft while you go on your journeys is the best way to cut down on your overall time investment into alchemical base.

See also: Conan Exiles Wheel of Pain Guide

Where to Get Alchemical Base

Unlike some other resources, there are a few different and completely viable ways to obtain the components for alchemical base, making it a fairly flexible resource to obtain regardless of what your circumstances may be.

The first and most obvious choice is to simply farm up the base components and craft them at home. We’ll go into detail on how best to achieve this in the next section.

The second but still incredibly viable choice is to kill bearer thralls. Bearer thralls carry in their inventories an item known as “Supply Materials”, when opened these packs will give you a number of supplies, hence the name. Tier 3 bearers have a chance to yield alchemical base from these supply crates, and it can often be a lot.

Typically you’ll get alchemical base from these supply crates in increments of 250, up to a whopping one thousand, which is more than enough to supply even smaller clans for the majority of their playthrough. We’ll go over some tips on how to best farm bearers further on.

Farming Alchemical Base

farming map

When you’re in need of huge quantities of alchemical base, say you’re running as part of a clan or larger group, it’s often best to get your best gathering tools and farm the requisite components in bulk. It should be noted that, should you choose to go this route, your farming will be sped up immensely by the use of obelisks and maprooms.

Without fast travel, gathering these components from across the map will be very time consuming, as unfortunately for us alchemical base requires some fairly sporadic resources. We’ll focus on each of them individually.

Gold

Gold is the first resource you need, and can be one of the most annoying to obtain as there are only a few sources of gold in the game.

Gold bars and coins from loot chests
Gold ore from obsidian nodes
Gold harvested from rocknoses
(Siptah Only) Goldstone Ore

Gold and Silver from Loot Chests

In various loot chests around the map, you can find both gold and silver coins and bars that can then be ground up inside a grinder to produce the dusts you need. In Siptah, these chests are everywhere and even inside the vaults with relatively high frequencies. In the Exiled Lands, the best place to search is under the water in the eastern portion of the map.

Around the NPC city named Flotsam, you’ll find a ton of treasure in treasure chests at the bottom of the ocean. It can be a little tedious to farm these, but they respawn fairly quickly and can give you a surprising amount of gold and silver.

Alternatively, “The Sunken City” also referred to sometimes as the Dagon Dungeon likewise has chests under the water filled with precious coins and metals. You can access this dungeon by interacting with the canoe in the bay of the Xel’Ha Docks at O6.

If you go this route, it’s recommended to bring fish gill potions to help you breath under the water, it will reduce the tedium considerably and give you the breathing room (no pun intended) to farm at your leisure. The only trouble is that these fish gill potions require alchemical base to craft, so you may have to do a bit of swimming the hard way first.

At N8, you can find a group of Lemurians guarding a few animal pens, alongside a thrall named “Beastmaster Teimos”. This thrall is an amazing combat thrall in his own right, but killing him has a chance to drop an underwater breathing mask that can also help you with plundering the undersea loot boxes. Just be warned, he hits quite hard and is in high demand, so you may have more than just NPCs to worry about if you’re on a pvp server.

Gold from Obsidian

Goldstone can be obtained as a byproduct from mining obsidian. It’s not uncommon at all to fully mine an obsidian node only to not receive any gold at all, so be prepared to farm a lot to get your time’s worth from this source.

That said, goldstone smelts directly into gold bars, which give an immense amount of gold dust when ground, so if you commit the time and energy your yields will be incredibly high as well.

In the Exiled Lands, obsidian is found within the volcano in no particular location. Scattered around the edges, alongside lava flows, and even tucked into smaller caves, be sure to scour every inch of the volcano to find them all. Just south of the volcano is a location known as the “Road of the Pilgrim”, which is likewise covered in obsidian nodes.

In Siptah, the Isle of Dusk has a number of obsidian nodes scattered throughout on the western side of the island, typically around lava flows.

Gold (and Silver) from Rocknoses

This is your least likely source of gold, but one worth mentioning due to its renewable nature.

Firstly, you have goldstone rocknoses that have a chance to spawn within the volcano. They’ll have the texture of regular rocknoses with flecks of gold streaming around their body, you’ll know them when you see them. Killing these and harvesting them with a tool will net you a large amount of gold.

Rocknoses can be kept as pets however, and have a chance to produce gold in a very different way.

Obtaining a rocknose pet means buying a rocknose egg from Shawna the Strange, located within The Den at E8. The egg itself will need to hatch before you can grow it inside an animal pen, which means either waiting 24 hours for it to expire, or leaving it inside a compost heap which will speed the process up to only take a little over an hour.

It’s worth noting that all pets that begin as eggs such as spiders and locusts can be handled in the same way.

Once the egg is hatched, place them into an animal pen along with the requisite food. The food you feed them will influence the type of rocknose you get, and what we’re aiming for here is the rare gold-vein rocknose. Feeding them goldstone, shadespiced gold, gold dust, or shadespiced gold dust will give you increasing chances of obtaining a gold-vein rocknose, with a 26% chance from shadespiced gold dust being the highest chance.

While we are discussing gold at the moment, it’s worth noting that you can also obtain silver veined rocknoses from this process. simply substitute silverstone, shadespided silver, silver dust or shadespiced silver dust in place of the gold food to instead roll for a silver veined rocknose.

Should you succeed in producing your gold or silver veined rocknose of choice, leaving them in the animal pen and feeding them stone will then give you a small chance of precious metals. When fed a single stone, a gold-veined rocknose has an 80% chance of producing stone, a 15% chance of producing iron, and a 5% chance of producing goldstone. The same rates apply for the silver-veined variant.

This gives you a constant passive supply of the metals, provided you can obtain these pets and keep them from being stolen. Simply fill the animal pen with “food”, aka rocks, and then leave them to their business. This will never be the fastest method of producing these metals, since each cycle of production takes about twenty minutes, but you can have up to five of them in each animal pen crafting constantly as you’re traveling, which can add up over time.

Goldstone Ore

mining map

If you’re playing on Siptah, your job gets a lot easier. Scattered around a number of the vaults you can find small goldstone ores which yield gold ore directly, much like silver ore veins will. You’ll find them around nearly every vault, with the largest clusters being around The Bastion of the Bat Demons in O8 and The Harbor of the Drowned in D12.

In the Isle of Dusk, north of the central city at F5 you’ll also find a large amount of goldstone.

Silver

We already covered obtaining silver from chests and rocknoses in the previous section, so I won’t repeat that here – please scroll up to the relevant section above if you skipped ahead for tips on silver specifically.

Thankfully on both maps silver is much easier to obtain than gold, though there are still only a few sources of it, they’re much easier to reach.

Underwater Loot Chests (Covered in the gold section)
Silver Ore
Rocknoses (Covered in the gold section)

Because we already covered two of these sources, we’ll dive into silver ore locations.

Exiled Lands

There are two places to mine silver ore in the exiled lands. At the bottom of “The Descent of Dagon” at M6 you’ll find a number of silver ore veins along the walls, closely packed together.

The other location is The Scorpion Den, often referred to by players as “the silver mine” for this exact reason. The nodes will be scattered all throughout the dungeon as well as just outside of it, and in large quantities. This is the best place to farm silver in bulk on the exiled lands, and it wont take you more than a few trips to produce the silver you need.

Siptah

If you’ve noticed a trend with the Siptah resource locations in these guides, it’s that nearly every resource you need can be found just about everywhere and especially around the vaults. Silver ore is no exception. Nearly every vault has silver ore dotting the regions around it, so a quick circling of any of these structures will yield you both gold and silver.

Ichor

The final component we need to discuss is ichor, and while this resource can be annoying to obtain given the source, it will not be by any means the most difficult.

Ichor will largely come from three sources.

Harvesting creatures directly
Passive production from certain pets
Squishing various components into a fluid press

It’s worth stating now that many guides state you can cook unappetizing fish to obtain ichor, this information is very outdated. This is no longer a source of ichor and no fish when cooked will produce ichor as a byproduct. You can still cook abysmal flesh to receive one ichor per piece, which we’ll talk about more in this section.

Harvesting Creatures

Luckily for us the amount of creatures that produce ichor when harvested is quite high. Nearly any poisonous creature and creepy crawly you can find will yield some ichor when harvested.

It’s recommended that you use a pick, as this will give you the best returns of ichor.

Komodo dragons, locusts, spiders, scorpions, multiple maelstrom specific enemies, salamanders, and giant snakes will all yield ichor when harvested. For pvp’ers looking to boost their efficiency, you’ll be farming locusts already for poisons to be used on your weapons, simply harvest these creatures with a pick and you can kill two birds with one stone.

In the Exiled Lands the areas north of the Black Galleon are covered with locusts, and in the southern area of the center of the map for Siptah you can likewise find large packs of locusts. That said, any area with large quantities of spiders or komodos will also serve as an excellent source of ichor, just pay attention to where you’re farming and make a detour to your local ichor source when you’re out adventuring to save yourself a headache in the future.

Passive Production from Pets

pets

We went over how to hatch and grow eggs in the gold section of this guide in regards to rocknoses with the intention of feeding them to passively produce gold and silver. Ichor can be obtained in the same way, only instead of growing rocknoses, you’ll be growing spiders and locusts. Both kinds of eggs can be purchased at Flotsam from Ignatius the Greedy, or at the Camp of the Castaways in Siptah, for 10 gold coins apiece.

Unlike rocknoses, you do not need a special variant of spider or locust to produce ichor. Once they’re grown and placed into an animal pen, you can feed them any food they eat (abysmal flesh, demon blood, human flesh, grubs, putrid meat… they’re not very picky) and they’ll have a 10% chance to produce ichor per cycle.

It should be said however that queen scorpions and corrupted spiders, the rarest variants of these creatures, have a much higher chance to produce ichor, 20% and 50% respectively.

Given how easy it is to farm ichor in bulk from creatures in the wild however and how impractical it can be to setup large farms of spiders to produce ichor, I wouldn’t recommend this as a primary source of ichor at all.

The Fluid Press

Our final ichor source is one many people overlook. The fluid press is a crafting bench that is often used to produce blood and berry pulp, but it can also be used to take various otherwise worthless materials and squeeze them into ichor.

Most of said items don’t yield that much ichor at all and are generally impractical to use as a primary source, so we’ll skip to the stuff that really works.

Putrid meat will yield 1 ichor per 50 stacks of meat. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but all of that food you have rotting away anyways can be repurposed and made useful. If you have the essence of rot, which causes food to rot even faster, you can throw all of your feral flesh into a box and rot it out quickly to produce ichor.

Abysmal flesh, which can be harvested in larger quantities in the exiled lands, can also be squished to produce ichor – though it’s highly recommended that you cook it instead, as every single piece when cooked will give you a single ichor. Nearly every vault boss in siptah will also give abysmal flesh when harvested, so bring a cleaver whenever you delve into a nearby vault.

Siptah is where these methods really come into their own, however, as all vault creatures have a specific resource they give when harvested. You’ll tell them apart by their prefix, “devolved”. Devolved bat claws, devolved drowned scales and so on are harvested from every basic enemy inside the vaults, as well as any vault creatures you find patrolling the outside.

Each one of these devolved components will give you ten ichor when squished in a fluid press, which doesn’t sound like much until you’ve fully cleared a vault and returned home with tons of them. It’s not uncommon to receive hundreds of ichor just from that alone, and since you’ll need to farm the vaults anyways for eldarium and other supplies, it has a way of consolidating your grind and saving you a lot of time.

Bearer Thrall Farming

So, we’ve finally covered all the individual components for alchemical base, now we can talk about farming the complete resource directly from bearer resource packs.

As mentioned earlier, tier 3 bearer thralls drop a resource pack that has a chance to give huge quantities of alchemical base when opened. Making the most of this just means finding dense packs of reliable bearer spawnpoints and killing them whenever you’re in the area.

In the Exiled Lands, bearers are almost everywhere, so you’ll want to prioritize camps that are safe to farm and have large amounts of them. The Den and The Black Galleon (E8 and I6/7 respectively) both have multiple bearer spawnpoints and because these are fairly early to midgame camps, they tend to have fairly low health, making them a quick and easy farm.

At E4 along the cliffs you’ll find a bearer thrall spawn point within the Darfari camp, and at E5 at Fleshtearer Falls there is another. Both of these camps have some of the squishiest NPCs in the game, making them excellent for farming bearer thralls in the early game.

In Siptah, things get a bit trickier since bearer thralls are much harder to come by. You’ll find at least one in every major NPC city, but you wont find clusters of them like in Exiled Lands, and the NPCs tend to be a lot tougher.

The tradeoff is that farming gold, silver and ichor directly are much easier in Siptah, so you won’t necessarily find yourself needing to go bearer hunting. It’s something to keep in mind, but not something I’d prioritize.

Frequently Asked Questions

Question: Where do I get alchemical base?

Answer: You can get it directly from loot chests (rarely) and tier 3 bearer thrall resource packs. Alternatively you can craft it yourself by combining silver dust, gold dust and ichor into a firebowl cauldron.

Question: What is the best way to get alchemical base?

Answer: For solos and smaller clans, you can get enough alchemical base from swimming from loot chests and killing a few bearer thralls. Even large clans can benefit from clobbering any bearers they see. For larger resource requirements though, farming the resources directly in larger farming trips will give you much more.

Question: Is it worth it to farm pets for gold and silver to make alchemical base?

Answer: It’s highly debatable. In the exiled lands gold and silver are found in opposite corners of the map, so if you have the resources it can sometimes be worth the trouble to save you some travel, however fast travel negates a lot of this.

In Siptah, gold and silver are so plentiful that farming it would be counterintuitive. Generally, I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you’re playing on a pve server or in co-op, it can be a fun side project to tackle with your friends.

The Final Word

Alchemical base will bottleneck just about every playthrough sooner or later, and learning how to produce it in bulk will give you the edge you need to succeed. Whether you’re just exploring with a few friends or fighting for your life on an official pvp server, the team with the most access to this precious resource will always have the advantage.

As we’ve seen, the components required will take you just about everywhere on the map, to the frozen north and the bottom of the ocean. Once you’ve mastered it, your future self will thank you every time you need a potion. Or a piece of armor. Or a map room. Or an obsidian tool. Or an upgraded bench. Or… well, you get the idea. Happy crafting!

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