Conan Exiles Dry Wood Guide

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Emily Parker

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.

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“I don’t know, the wood seems pretty dry.” – Me to absolutely no one when I stumbled across the first recipe calling for dry wood. I mean, if you’re under level 20, most of your wood is coming out of the desert anyway. Isn’t the wood you’ve collected dry enough already?

It’s not dry enough, and you’ll need to learn how to craft dry wood in Conan Exile to build better equipment and stronger bases. Specifically, you’ll need Conan Exiles dry wood to make insulated wood, which is used in an array of valuable recipes, from weapons to buildings. Dry wood at the dryer to make resin and dry wood, then use resin and dry wood to make insulated wood at the carpenter’s bench.

The recipe is a bit redundant, but it aligns with the real-world process of drying wood. Pulling the resin and humidity out by drying and then resealing with the resin you pulled is an ancient practice for insulating wood. Common practice would be to also apply oil before sealing, and this used to be a step for making insulated wood in Conan Exiles. Funcom scrapped it to address resource balancing, but I always find it interesting when the game mimics real practice.

TL:DR: The Dryer the Better

You may either harvest or craft dry wood, though the bulk of your dry wood will likely come from crafting. Dry wood can be harvested directly from dead trees with the help of a pick or pickaxe. You’ll find the largest stretch of dead trees between Swagger Rock and the Black Galleon in H7. These trees will also yield bark when harvested with a pick or pickaxe, which can be used back at the dryer to craft more dry wood.

The dryer creates resin when crafting dry wood and you’ll take both to the carpenter’s table to craft insulated wood. Insulated wood is a mid-game ingredient for weapons, armor, decorations, and buildings.

Where to Find Dry Wood

It turns out there is wood out in the desert that is already dry enough. Farming dead trees with a pick will yield dry wood and bark. Farming dead trees with a pickaxe will yield dry wood and bark, and because it is a multi-tool, will also produce wood. You can use the bark you collect to craft more dry wood, among other things, so it’s a win-win to process dead trees with a pickaxe.

Dead trees can be distinguished by their leafless, bone-white skins. You’ll find them predominately in the desert biome, but there are also some in the mounds of the dead. The best spot to harvest dead trees for bark and dry wood is the stretch of desert between Swagger Rock and the Black Galleon in southwest H7. This long stretch of dead trees is the largest on the map, and you’ll also find quite a few other nodes in the surrounding area.

How to Harvest the Most Dry Wood

Higher tier picks and pickaxes harvest more resources per node. Each swing will generate more items, meaning you’ll have less running to do before your inventory is full. This is the number one way to harvest more dry wood when harvesting dead trees. A stone pick has less than half of the harvest power of an obsidian pick.

Players also have to option to craft tool upgrade kits, which will add even more collection power to your pick or pickaxe. There are three tiers to tool upgrade kits: the simple tool upgrade kit which increases harvesting power by 1, the tool upgrade kit which increases harvesting power by 2, and the advanced tool upgrade kit which increases harvesting power by 3.

An obsidian pick or pickaxe would be nice if you happen to have extra of the extremely rare items, but the most resource-efficient tool for harvesting dry wood is a pick or pickaxe from hardened steel with an advanced tool upgrade kit equipped.

Lastly, if you know you’ve got a lot of harvesting to do, players can respec and dump 20 points in survival for the hard worker perk, if they don’t have it already. This perk increases your character’s harvesting speed, giving them the ability to make short work of any node. Combine this perk with a good pickaxe and a tool upgrade kit and your inventory will be full of dry wood, bark, and wood in no time.

Should I Use a Pick or a Pickaxe to Harvest Dry Wood?

A pickaxe is a multi-tool that will harvest what a hatchet can harvest from a node and what a pick can harvest from a node. It can process rock and ore, as well as wood and bark. If you are processing a node where a hatchet harvests different resources than a pick, a pickaxe will harvest both of the resources. It doesn’t have any kind of decrease in the number of resources it harvests. The pickaxe will harvest just as much dry wood from a dead tree as a pick of the same tier, with the added benefit of harvesting the same amount of wood as a hatchet of the same tier.

The only time you wouldn’t want to use a pickaxe is if you only wanted specific materials and did not want to fill your inventory with the other type of material. In this case, you would use a tool that would only yield the material you were looking for. In the case of dry wood, a pickaxe is an ideal choice. Not only will you harvest the dry wood and bark that a pick would yield, but you will also harvest the wood that a hatchet would produce as well. The wood and bark can be used to craft more dry wood back at your base.

How to Make Dry Wood

Fortunately for you, there is also a very easy way to craft dry wood from regular wood. First, you’ll need to build a drying rack. Learn the feat dried preserves at level 19 to unlock the recipe for a dryer. A dryer requires 20 shaped wood and 10 twine. The twine is easy to make from the fiber in your inventory, but the shaped wood will need a carpenter’s bench.

A carpenter’s bench is also required to make insulated wood, so you’ll need to put one together anyway. You’ll need 250 wood and 100 stone to craft your first carpenter’s bench. After that, you’ll need 10 wood per shaped wood crafted at the bench or 200 wood for your dryer.

After you’ve constructed your new dryer, you’ll need some bark to fuel it. Add bark and wood to its inventory to begin crafting dry wood. You’ll notice the inventory filling up with both dry wood and resin as time passes.

See also: Conan Exiles Drawbridge Guide

Dry Wood’s Purpose: How to Make Insulated Wood 

You’ll need to be level 20 and learn the journeyman mason feat to start crafting insulated wood at your carpenter’s bench.

After you’ve made some dry wood in your dryer, grab both it and the resin and take them to your carpenter’s bench. It will require one dry wood and two resin to craft one insulated wood. If you are short on resin, you can find it by using a pick on any tree. In particular, trees in the Highlands yield quite a bit of resin per node. Same as dry wood, the higher tier your pick, the more resin you will wind up with.

Dry Wood’s Other Purpose: So Much Dry Wood!

Because the dryer makes two dry wood and one resin out of each piece of wood and the carpenter’s bench makes one piece of insulated wood from one dry wood and two resin, you may end up with quite a bit of extra dry wood.

If you do have extra, dry wood has one more trick up its sleeve. Dry wood burns 3 times longer than regular wood and can be used to fuel campfires, ovens, kilns, bonfires, and anything else you’ve been using wood for. Insulated wood is a far more efficient way to use dry wood, but sometimes you have plenty.

What to Use Insulated Wood For

Insulated wood is a mid-late-game resource used for crafting buildings and equipment. You’ll need it to craft improved versions of your crafting stations, such as the improved planter and the improved beehive. It will also be a required material for new structures, such as the ever-handy preservation box. Your more advanced workstation upgrades will require insulated wood, for instance, the precision firebowl cauldron and precision carpenter’s bench.

Insulated wood will also help you fortify your base. You can craft an entire insulated wood roof to replace your thatch roofing and keep pesky raiders from coming in through the roof. Insulated wood remains relevant into the end-game because it is a required ingredient for black ice reinforced building blocks.

Black ice reinforced bases are a T3 structure or the toughest you can build in Conan Exiles. You will likely end up building a black ice base because along with insulated wood, its other materials are easy to farm relative to other T3 base requirements. This means you’ll be collecting or making dry wood until the very end, especially if you are on a PVP-heavy server and must constantly rebuild. Even if you aren’t, the purge will always be knocking at your door.

There’s Wood and Then There’s Dry Wood

It may seem a little redundant to pull resin from wood to make dry wood at a dryer and then turn around and reapply the resin to dry wood to make insulated wood at a carpenter’s bench. There’s no doubt about it, Funcom just wants a little more of your time invested in building T2 and T3 weapons, equipment, crafting stations, and buildings.

If the process drives you nuts you can just go out and farm either. You’ll get more than enough dry wood while out bark farming if you aim for dead trees (which happen to yield the most bark anyway) and you’ll find more than enough resin when bark farming on regular trees. Just make sure to bring your pick or pickaxe along when you’re out searching for dry wood or resin.

There will always be more dry wood than resin in your chests, and it’s perfectly acceptable to burn it in your campsites and ovens. I tend to hang onto more than I need for base repairs because even my T3 black ice base gets beat into rubble every once in a while. I blame it on my greater panthers Lucy, Drew, and Cameron, for not defending our home fiercely enough, but I think we all know that my greater rhino Bill is mostly to blame.

Dry Wood FAQ

Recommended Reads:

• Conan Exiles Shadebloom Guide
• Conan Exiles How to Get Bark
• Conan Exiles Yellow Lotus Potion Guide
• Conan Exiles Bearer Guide
• Conan Exiles Brick Guide