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During your gameplay, there will be a time when you will only look for specific resources while exploring, discarding a few items you may already have in excess. Some tools in Conan Exiles help you harvest more of what you need.
Cleavers are an example of that, and, like the Iron Cleaver, if you’re mainly looking into restocking your food or creature head supply containers, it is the perfect tool at a low cost to get the job done quickly! You can learn more about the Iron Cleaver in the Conan Exiles Iron Cleaver guide below.
What is the Purpose of the Iron Cleaver?
As a harvesting tool, you can use the Iron Cleaver to collect diverse resources from carcasses and human corpses. Like any other cleaver in the game, this Iron Cleaver is sharp enough to perfectly slice a body and provide you with more meat, compared with what you would get if you use other tools.
A tool can give you random items in different amounts. Obtaining the head from some deceased creatures is only possible if you use a cleaver due to its design, and the Iron Cleaver is, without a doubt, one of the easiest you can invest right after doing a few upgrades on your character.
Crafting an Iron Cleaver
An Iron Cleaver is a handy tool you want to grab as soon as you discard your stone tools and start leveling up your character and crafting your first workstations and protective gear.
With a small but significant harvesting power, you can make this cleaver at any Blacksmith’s Bench after reaching level 15 and unlocking the Journeyman Butcher Knowledge, which teaches you both Iron Cleaver and Iron Skinning Knife recipes. You can craft the Iron Cleaver with the following resources:
- 30 Iron Bars
- 5 Branches
Pick up Branches from the ground or get them by chopping trees, and obtain Iron Bars by smelting Ironstones inside a fueled Furnace.
If you plan to get better tools and discard your iron tools later, you can get back some Iron Bars from them by putting those inside a Dismantling Bench. An Iron Cleaver will give you about 5 Iron Bars if you dismantle it.
If your Iron Cleaver needs repairs, you’ll need between one to 23 Iron Bars to fully repair it, especially if you plan to keep harvesting with it or add an upgrade to this tool.
Using cleavers as weapons is not recommended, as they only cause small damage to your opponents and they’re simply not practical in combat!
The Different Cleavers
There are diverse cleavers you can use to harvest corpses for resources. You can craft or find them on the map you’re playing in. The Stone Cleaver is the first one you’ll use to get started but also the first to break after chopping some bodies.
The Star Metal and the Eldarium Cleavers will make a difference in how much you collect each time you butcher a carcass. While a low or medium-quality cleaver gets the job done, it will make you spend more time to get more meat in bulk in comparison, and it won’t last as long as a Legendary cleaver does.
The Iron Cleaver is a good headstart until you get a sturdier tool and collect more of the same things from your kills. Get rid of your Stone Cleaver (tier 1) as soon as you get an Iron one (tier 2), as this one lasts longer and harvests more per swing. Here are all the different cleavers you can find in the game:
- Stone Cleaver
- Iron Cleaver
- Steel Cleaver
- Hardened Steel Cleaver
- Star Metal Cleaver
- Eldarium Cleaver (Isle of Siptah DLC exclusive)
- Chef’s Trusted Cleaver (Legendary)
- Reliable Butcher (Legendary) (Isle of Siptah DLC exclusive)
- Maw of The Hyena (Legendary)
High-tier craftable cleavers will allow you to harvest more resources at a time, while Legendary cleavers will last longer.
Make your Iron Cleaver more efficient or use it for longer without having to repair it often by using a tool upgrade:
- A Tool Upgrade Kit will make it more efficient;
- A Reinforcement Kit will make it more durable.
You can craft these kits at a Tinker’s Bench and apply one over your Iron Cleaver. Only one upgrade per tool is allowed, and make sure the cleaver is pristine (with its durability at max) to accept the kit. Use Iron Bars or Weapon Repair Kits to fix your Iron Cleaver.
Avoid applying Oil of Bounty to any Iron tool since this kind of upgrade is worth using mainly on mining tools to harvest a high amount of rare resources and will significantly decrease the tools’ durability while you’re holding them (the crafting cost of this Oil doesn’t justify the use on low tier tools, by the way).
The Resources Harvested
The Iron Cleaver is focused to grant you more meat than other iron tools. The NPCs (human, animal, or other creature) you’ll butcher with this cleaver will also drop a small number of some other random resources you usually get with different harvesting tools (like hatchets, sickles, skinning knives).
However, if you need to get specific resources like Animal Hide in bulk, for example, use a Skinning Knife instead of a cleaver since each tool is designed to collect particular parts of a creature’s body due to the design of its blade.
The resources you’ll obtain by using an Iron Cleaver can depend on the type of creature you choose to harvest. If you want to start collecting creature heads for trophies or other purposes, this cleaver is a cheap tool to get some of them during your early gameplay.
Examples of items you can obtain by using an Iron Cleaver to harvest carcasses:
- Diverse types of meat (Savoury Flesh, Exotic Flesh, Feral Flesh, Exquisite Meat, Human Flesh, Putrid Meat)
- Creature Heads (Examples: Shaleback Head, Wolf Head)
- Severed Arm
- Claws
- Fangs and Tusks
- Horns (Horn, Dragonhorn)
- Ichor
- Dragonbone
- Weathered Skull
- Demon Blood
- Volatile Gland
- Feather
- Ivory
When to Use the Iron Cleaver
Use a cleaver to obtain heads from creatures or a large amount of meat. If you’re playing on a session or server with the default harvesting rates (multipliers at x1.0), you can still collect a fair amount of meat from NPCs with the Iron Cleaver.
Spending points in the Expertise attribute will help you get more resources at a time, making each harvesting trip more productive.
Any cleaver is the best tool when you need specific kinds of meat, such as Exquisite Meat and Exotic Flesh: other utensils won’t likely give you as much as cleavers do from the many creatures you will butcher.
You will accumulate stacks of meat by using a cleaver in no time. You can use the creatures’ heads you get with an Iron Cleaver to make decorative trophies, obtain different crafting ingredients by processing them inside crafting stations like the Fluid Press, or even raise certain kinds of pets, depending on the type of creature you have collected the head from.
FAQs
Question: Is the Iron Cleaver good to get heads?
Answer:Â The Iron Cleaver is as good as any other cleaver (like the Star Metal Cleaver) to obtain heads from creatures. If the game database has a creature’s head item available, that creature will always have a chance of dropping its head for you once you butcher it, as long as you use a cleaver – any cleaver.
However, an Iron Cleaver (tier 2) is one of the cheapest harvesting tools you can get in the game, and it’s fairly efficient, making it a great option if you’re looking into collecting that kind of item from deceased creatures at an early stage.
Question: What is the best cleaver in the game?
Answer: While the best cleaver to collect more meat from corpses per hit is the Star Metal Cleaver (the Eldarium Cleaver as well if you own the Isle of Siptah DLC), the legendary Chef’s Trusted Cleaver and the Reliable Butcher (this last one is exclusive to the Isle of Siptah DLC owners, and has a durability of 3000 points) are the ones that last the longest without needing repairs, as they’re quite sturdy (highly durable).
However, a medium or lower-tier cleaver, like the Iron Cleaver, will still provide you with an acceptable amount of meat and creatures’ heads at a good rate until you can craft or find better cleavers. Plus, the Iron Cleaver is cheap to either craft or repair.
Question: I don’t own a cleaver. Can I use other tools to collect any meat from corpses?
Answer: Most tools will allow you to collect various resources such as all kinds of meat (Feral or Savoury Flesh, Exotic Meat, etc.) from human corpses or animal carcasses (depending on which types of NPCs you’re butchering), meaning you won’t necessarily need to have with you an Iron Cleaver or any other kind of cleaver for that purpose.
A pick, hatchet, sickle, or skinning knife can harvest a small, and maybe enough meat for a while each time.
However, if you need this kind of food in bulk for more specific reasons, you should craft and use, at least, an Iron Cleaver instead since cleavers will cut bodies more carefully to provide you with much more meat compared with what any other kind of sharp tool would.
Summary
Whatever cleaver you’ll choose to harvest corpses with, there is no doubt that an Iron Cleaver is an accessible tool that can help you pack up your inventory with meat from both human corpses and creature carcasses, together with a few other ingredients that you can also collect with different tools.
While cleavers seem to be a little underestimated, they are always the way to go if you need to collect creature heads and lots of meat to complete your quests faster and successfully, something that would be significantly hard or at least slower to accomplish if you opted to use a hatchet instead, for example.
So keep butchering, and don’t forget to bring your Iron Cleaver on your next trip, adventurer!