Conan Exiles Hardened Brick Guide

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Within the game, few resources are sought after as much as Conan Exiles Hardened Brick. While it is essentially just a brick, this item represents one of the main components of the end-game experience of Conan Exiles PvP and, to a degree, PvE too.

It’s also heavily used in some extremely useful crafting recipes, including some very important resources that are arguably essential for success in Conan.

You’ve had your fair share of Sandstone and Flotsam huts, maybe you’ve even upgraded to Stonebrick and finally felt the security of being surrounded by a cobbled-together structure of stone and wood, but today we’re taking it one step further, helping you to create the base of your dreams.

Whether it’s a Byzantine palace made from Turanian, an Argossean villa, or just a Medieval European townhouse made from Yamatai and Nemedian, Hardened Brick is instrumental in all of these and more.

Today we’ll be looking at Hardened Brick, how to make it, what it is used for, and the best ways to consistently attain it so that you can build and decorate in peace. So, without further ado, let’s get started.

What is Hardened Brick?

Hardened Brick

Hardened Brick is, well, pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It is a large, square brick that has been hardened in a furnace. It appears in the inventory as a square slab of stone, tan in color with slightly beveled edges.

It weighs in at a moderate 0.13 per piece and can stack up to 1000 bricks in a single inventory slot.

It’s not too bad at all in terms of carrying small amounts, though much like a lot of other building resources, the weight of these items can quite quickly ramp up and you’ll find yourself buckling at the knees, struggling to lug around hundreds of hardened bricks.

Fortunately, these items are best crafted within your base, so you usually don’t have to carry them too far to reach the next workbench you’ll need to use.

What is Hardened Brick Used for?

Argossean Home from Hardened Brick

Hardened Brick is used for quite a few important items within Conan Exiles. This includes some of the high-tier god altars, animal pens and decorations.

Hardened Brick is also used for some extremely useful workstations and storage options, like the Improved Furnace (Kiln), the gargantuan Vault, and perhaps most importantly, Tier 3 building materials.

Being the final tier of building in Conan Exiles, Tier 3 items are stronger than Tier 2 or Tier 1 and are perhaps some of the best-designed pieces in the game. If you own any of the DLCs, this is where you’ll be getting access to the respective material sets included in said DLC.

Aside from the Flotsam set, every other DLC building set is a Tier 3 reskin, and therefore is only accessible if you craft it using Hardened Brick and the other relevant resources necessary to create these pieces.

Within PvE, Single Player, and Roleplay settings, these Tier 3 buildings can be seen fairly often, given that they’re often too stylish to say no to.

However, that being said, you do tend to see fewer Tier 3 building materials in a PvP setting, as gathering the massive amount of resources needed without a decent-sized clan behind you can be pretty difficult.

Nevertheless, Hardened Brick is still a very important resource regardless of the progression through Conan Exiles.

See also: Conan Exiles Brick Guide

How is Hardened Brick Made?

Hardened Brick is fairly simple to make, the only complicating factor is frankly the time required to craft them. Hardened Brick is smelted together in a furnace, requiring 1 regular brick and 1 Stone Consolidant, an item added to the brick to strengthen and transform it into the item we’re looking at here.

Below, I’ll be quickly covering how to attain these ingredients so that you’re fully aware of how you can begin to craft your first few Hardened Bricks.

Brick

Regular old bricks are the core of progressing past the Tier 1 building in Conan. They weigh 0.13 per piece, and stack up to 1000 units in a single inventory slot, the same as Hardened Bricks. These regular bricks are fairly easy to craft. To make a single brick, you need to put 10 pieces of stone into a furnace.

After 10 seconds of waiting, your furnace will spit out a brick for you to use. This sounds quite simple, and at the core it is, but crafting bricks can be the first stumbling block in the mid-game.

I say that in terms of meeting the requirements for building even just a medium-sized base, you’ll have to manage your resources decently well to make sure you have enough materials to craft up a decent amount of brick whilst you’re away from your base, likely farming more resources for even more bricks.

I won’t go over all the smaller points and tips here, however, I would recommend checking out my other guide on making Brick, which you can find right here.

Farming up vast quantities of stone is unfortunately essential for making bricks

Stone Consolidant

Stone Consolidant is an alchemy ingredient that begins to become more prevalent in the mid to end game of Conan Exiles and is used primarily in crafting Hardened Bricks, though it is also used in other decoration pieces.

Making Stone Consolidant is fairly straightforward, though it does have a pretty significant bottleneck in one of the resources needed. Still, it is possible to bypass said bottleneck.

You’ll firstly need to have unlocked the Firebowl Cauldron feat at Level 15 for 3 feat points and built any of the firebowl cauldron stations. From there, you’ll need to put 6 plant fibres and 2 resins into the cauldron, which produces 5 stone consolidants in 10 seconds.

Of course, Plant Fiber is incredibly easy to attain by hand or with a tool like a sickle, but resin can be a stumbling block unless you know the best ways to attain it. I would recommend two different methods, one is passively done, producing a lower amount of resin but freeing up your time to farm other resources.

The other is an active activity that will provide more resin in a given period, though of course requires active effort rather than throwing stuff into a workbench and waiting.

For the passive method, you’ll want to put regular wood into a Dryer. This will of course dry out the wood, leaving you with 2 pieces of Dry Wood at 1 piece of Resin per piece of wood processed. This takes 40 seconds, so it can take quite a while if you need a few hundred resins.

The active method is to find some healthy trees, such as those in the Highlands or Tundra of The Exiled Lands. By harvesting these trees with a Pick, you’ll be able to attain a decent amount of resin much faster than the passive method.

This is a great method if you’re close to either of these biomes or if you need a lot of resin in a short amount of time. However, the passive approach does give you some more free time to farm some other resources or do other activities, so the decision is yours.

Resin can be attained quite easily by harvesting certain trees with a Pick

Making The Bricks

Once you’ve got your plant fiber and resin, you’ll need to put 2 pieces of Resin and 6 Plant Fiber into a Firebowl Cauldron to produce 5 Stone Consolidant. Once you then have your regular brick and your stone consolidant, you need to put them into a furnace at a 1:1 ratio.

As long as your furnace is fuelled and running, you’ll use 1 Brick and 1 Stone Consolidant to make 1 Hardened Brick, with a base craft time of 15 seconds.

What Furnace Should I Use?

Currently, there are 5 different furnaces available in Conan Exiles, all of which will affect your ability to smelt Hardened Bricks in different ways. Usually, the decision between which furnace you’ll want to use is quite difficult, as it relies heavily on personal preference, availability of resources, and access to fuel.

However, I believe that Hardened Brick is a bit of an outlier when it comes to working out which furnace you want to use. Hardened Brick is a very time-consuming resource to craft.

From harvesting your first handfuls of Stone to smelting together your first Hardened Brick, this item has to go through a few different steps to reach its final form.

You have to farm stone, smelt regular bricks, farm plant fiber, and resin, produce stone consolidant, and then smelt together the brick and the stone consolidant to produce the hardened brick.

Just in the crafting times alone, this takes over a minute just for a single stone brick, and that’s not counting the time spent farming the resources, walking between workstations etc.

Some of the different furnaces will decrease smelting time per brick, allowing you to produce more at the cost of using more fuel, whereas others will increase the longevity of your fuel, allowing you effectively smelt more bricks from each unit of fuel, though your bricks won’t be smelted as fast as some other options.

Below, I’ll include a table of all the current furnaces in-game and how they affect Hardened Brick crafting times.

  • Furnace: Regular craft & burn time. 1 Hardened Brick crafted in 15 seconds
  • Improved Furnace: Regular craft time, 43% increase to burn time. 1 Hardened Brick crafted in 15 seconds
  • Improved Furnace (Kiln): 43% increase in craft time, 75% increase to burn time. 1 Hardened Brick crafted in 10.5 seconds
  • Heat-Efficient Furnace: 350% increase in craft time, 77% decrease to burn time. 1 Hardened Brick crafted in 3 seconds
  • Fuel-Efficient Furnace: 43% increase in craft time, 300% increase to burn time. 1 Hardened Brick crafted in 10.5 seconds

From left to right: Furnace, Improved Furnace, Improved Furnace (Kiln), Heat-Efficient Furnace, and Fuel-Efficient Furnace

Usually, the decision here is pretty difficult to make and, as I mentioned, depends highly upon the resources you have access to. However, assuming you’ve accumulated enough levels and resources to have all of these options available to craft, I recommend either the Heat-Efficient Furnace or the Improved Furnace (Kiln).

The Heat-Efficient Furnace craft Hardened Brick incredibly fast, and whilst you will be burning through fuel pretty quickly, it’s a worthy use of the fuel to be able to quickly craft massive quantities of Hardened Brick, arguably one of the most sought after ingredients in the game.

Failing that, the Improved Furnace (Kiln) is a very good jack of all trades option. With its decent increase for both crafting time and burning time, it allows your fuel to last longer whilst also crafting your items a little bit faster.

This furnace does have the downside of only being able to be unlocked by trading Fragments of Power at The Archives in The Unnamed City, and you’re pretty much praying to the gods of luck that you’ll receive the recipe for this workstation.

However, that being said, I think it’s a nice middle-ground option if you can’t or don’t want to fully commit to one of the expensive end-game stations like the Heat-Efficient Furnace.

Frequently Asked Questions

Question: Is there Any Way to Farm Hardened Bricks Outside of Just Making them?

Answer: Unfortunately not. Hardened Brick may drop from some higher leveled enemies, but it’s usually quite uncommon, and often in quantities of one or two. You’d be much better served just trying to farm up the resources and craft the Hardened Brick as intended.

I know, it’s a pretty boring grind and sometimes can seem truly painful, but it’s the most time-efficient way to acquire the Hardened Brick that you need.

Question: Are any of the Tier 3 DLC Pieces Better than the Base Game Black Ice Set?

Answer: No, not at all. All of the Tier 3 DLC pieces are just re-skins of the Black Ice set. The same resources are used to craft them, and thusly, they have the same health, effect on stability etc.

The choice between DLC is entirely aesthetic, though some DLCs do offer things that others don’t such as vaulted ceilings, so it’s worth bearing that in mind when making a decision on which DLC you want to get.

Question: Should I Try to Stockpile Hardened Brick as Early as Possible to Cut Down on the Grind?

Answer: Absolutely not. I usually try my best to play devil’s advocate on questions like this, and sometimes stockpiling certain resources in the early game can be a big help later on.

However, given the massive time and resource requirement for crafting even a decent amount of hardened brick, it’s just not worth it in the early game.

Focus on finding better weapons and armour, levelling up and unlocking feats, then when you’re ready, turn your focus to Hardened Brick. It’ll be much faster if you’re prepared.

Conclusion

Hardened Brick, along with Steel Reinforcements and Alchemical Base, is perhaps one of the most sought after resources in Conan Exiles.

If you’ve never done it before, they can be pretty troublesome to craft at a sustainable rate, however, hopefully, this guide has helped you to work out some of the struggles of the Hardened Brick grind. Now, go forth and farm! Your next wonderful base is just waiting to be built!

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