Conan Exiles Kiln 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: Kiln Wall

Ok, so a Conan Exiles Kiln is just an upgraded furnace, and a furnace is a station you will use to turn any ore you find in the world into metal and stone into brick. Metal is a precious resource in Conan Exiles, and most players dedicate an entire wall in their base to furnaces and metal production.

Star metal ore is the only one with the word “ore” in the name; the rest are called “stone” and can be found by harvesting unique rock nodes. These nodes look slightly different than the standard harvestable rock formations; you’ll become an expert in identifying ironstone, goldstone, brimstone, and Silverstone from a distance. Steel is created in the furnace from iron and steel fire, and steel fire is made in the fire bowl cauldron from brimstone and tar. There are three upgrades to a standard furnace: the improved furnace, the kiln, the fuel-efficient furnace, and the heat-efficient furnace. These are all learnable feats except for the recipe for a kiln, which you must learn out in the world. Specifically, you will need to run Elder Vaults in Siptah to find the recipe for a kiln. You can find it in any Elder vault, but it will be totally by chance that it appears.

My Experience With the Furnace

Furnace Exiles Kiln

Any station that lights up when you use it is going to be among my favorite. I remember being quite overwhelmed with stations during my first play-through. I was putting them outside; not only was my square hut nowhere near large enough to hold even one of the massive benches but by level 20 a new player is swamped with necessary stations. When I placed the furnace and saw its pleasant glow, I started to reconsider my haphazard strategy.

Many worlds later I get excited to set up a blacksmithing room, basement, or shed. I’m now painfully aware of just how many furnaces I like to have in an established base and even how many chests and blacksmith tables should go along with them. Not only that, but I scatter basic furnaces in small buildings in my favorite mining areas like I own all of the Exiled Lands. This tactic doesn’t come without the risk of theft, but it’s convenient to process ore while I’m wrapping things up. I am not an expert and all-knowing weaponsmith, but anyone that has clocked as many hours in Conan Exiles as I have is very comfortable with the furnace.

How to Build a Furnace

Let’s build your first furnace! The most important thing to keep in mind when creating your first furnace is that you will probably eventually want more furnaces. If you have concrete plans for your base, as in you won’t want to change it later, consider an entire wall for your furnaces. You can build a basic furnace now and add more improved furnaces later, but several of these stations are the way to go when it comes to crafting loads of advanced base materials. You will only need 500 stones to craft your first furnace. That sounds like a lot of rock, but as long as you’ve leveled your encumbrance enough to carry it, it’s an accessible resource to gather. Even if you only have a stone pick, it won’t take long to collect enough stone for your first furnace. You will need to be level 10 to learn the blacksmith feat.

Don’t let your encumbrance level stop you from crafting a furnace. Worst case, simply become encumbered while harvesting stone near your base and lug it slowly and safely back. One trick I like to use involves the weight of the furnace versus the weight of its ingredients. A furnace weighs significantly less than the stone required to craft it. If you’re able to position yourself close to several harvestable rock formations, it won’t be a big deal if you wind up encumbered. Simply continue collecting stone until you can craft the furnace from your inventory. More often than not, once the furnace is crafted, you will no longer be encumbered. This is a helpful strategy for many inventory recipes in early game Conan Exiles. I would suggest crafting a chest to a place near where your furnace will go. Not only will you have to empty your inventory to carry the stone for your furnace, but items crafted at your furnace are generally very heavy, and a chest will be a convenient addition.

How to Use a Furnace: Fuel

Fuel

Some stations in Conan Exiles require fuel to operate, and Funcom doesn’t necessarily make this apparent. The furnace is one of these stations and can be run from wood when you’re first starting out or in a pinch. The player should add fuel to the furnace’s inventory along with whatever you’d like to try and smelt. If you have a winning combination, a crafting bar will show up in the top right corner of the menu. It will tell you how long your fuel will burn and what is being produced. Do not bother adding more than one type of fuel to your furnace. As of this version of Conan Exiles, the furnace will not automatically switch fuels. This means that the additional kinds of fuel won’t do anything but take up inventory space. You will still need to manually press the start button for your furnace to begin using the alternate type of fuel.

Wood and branches are not very efficient fuels but will get the job done if needed. Instead, you should look for dark black rock nodes on your travels and harvest them with a pick. These opaque black nodes are coal, and coal burns very efficiently in the furnace. The best fuel for your furnace is oil, and oil comes from squeezing fish on the fluid press. Oil can be used to power several stations in Conan Exiles efficiently, but you’ll find you use the most oil at your furnace.

Making Oil: The Fish Farm and Fluid Press

Fluid press

Collecting enough coal for your furnace is a challenge you don’t need. Coal is heavy, and unless you have a node by your base, it’s a pretty inconvenient way to keep the fires stoked. Instead, try raising fish to squish into oil! To set up a fish farm, build 5-10 fish traps and place them in a shallow, convenient pool of water close to your base. Unfortunately, fish traps do not produce fish on their own. You must supply them with bugs to catch fish. When harvesting the plants that yield fiber, you may collect bugs with your hands (or a scythe), but this is the long way to farm bugs. Instead, try crafting several compost heaps. It’s a good idea to craft as many compost heaps as you built fish traps because you’ll be pulling stacks of grubs from them to stock each trap. It’s not imperative, just more straightforward math.

Craft at least one compost in each heap for it to begin passively producing fat grubs. Be careful not to remove the compost, or your grub production will start all over. The grubs themselves decay rapidly inside the heap, but they also replenish quickly. This means that if you remove the compost, you will lose them quickly and will need to craft another compost to replenish your stock. Fat grubs are the best of the bug types for catching fish. If you stock your fish traps with fat grubs, you will more often catch exotic fish. Exotic fish produce one oil per fish at the fluid press, while it takes several more other fish types to produce one oil. Craft a fluid press from 50 shaped wood, ten twines, and ten iron bar. The station does not require fuel, so once it’s crafted, you may add the items you want to press, and they will begin crafting into their pressed forms. If you add the fish from your traps to the fluid press’s inventory, you will start to generate oil. If oil does not begin crafting, you probably just need to add more fish.

What to Craft in Your Furnace

The main function of your furnace will be to turn out metal for weapons, armor, and building. You’ll need to have come across special rock nodes and mined them with a pick to get your base component. While these items are technically ore, Funcom has decided to leave that word out of their name so that you can be as confused as possible when learning about the furnace for the first time. Instead, the ore in Conan Exiles is called “stone.” For instance, iron bars are smelted from ironstone, which is harvested from ironstone nodes. You won’t need any other ingredients for iron bars, silver bars, and gold bars, just the stone of that type and some fuel in your furnace. These nodes can be found throughout the map, though silver and gold are much rarer resources than iron. The only area you’ll have trouble finding even iron is down by the starting river. I’m sure it was an easy choice to spread nodes further north to encourage homebodies to leave their first base.

Additionally, brick only requires stone and fuel in the furnace to craft. Players constantly wind up with random stones in their inventory from chest drops and random nodes, and it’s pretty standard practice to shed them into the furnace for a steady supply of brick. Similarly, crystal crafts directly into the glass when added to the furnace’s inventory, and it’s best to keep a steady supply for when you need it. Steel bars, hardened steel bars, and star metal bars are a little more complicated. Steel bars require iron bars and a component called steel fire to craft. Steel fire can be crafted at the fire bowl cauldron station from tar and brimstone. Tar is easy enough to pull from your tannery (it is a by-product of tanning hides with bark), but brimstone will have to be farmed out in the wild. You’ll notice brimstone nodes by their yellow color. Caves will contain either brimstone or crystal, and both are beneficial ingredients for your furnace. Hardened steel bars can be crafted with the addition of black ice to a standard steel bar. In the frozen north, you’ll find black ice just southwest of the volcano. The volcano is a dangerous zone, but hardened steel is a valuable resource.

Lastly, star metal bars are the most valuable component a furnace can make in vanilla Conan. Not only will you have to find brimstone and black ice to make star metal bars, but you’ll also need to find star metal ore. These nodes can only be found when a meteorite crashes to earth in the frozen north, usually just north of the mounds of the dead. If you’re not lucky enough to see one shooting across the sky, listen carefully for the telltale “boom,” and you’ll know to comb the area for a star metal node.

A Better Furnace For a Better Life

As with any of your crafting stations, there are bigger and better furnaces out there than the first one you craft. You can craft all of these components on any furnace, but there are furnace upgrades available that come with other valuable perks. Furnaces have three upgrades: the kiln, the fuel-efficient furnace, and the heat-efficient furnace. The kiln requires diving vaults in Siptah to learn, but the others may be learned by investing feats into their recipe trees after leveling up.

Improved Furnace

The first upgrade you may consider to your furnace is called the improved furnace. You’ll need to be level 30 to learn the Master Blacksmith feat and acquire the recipe for the improved furnace. Before picking up your trusty stone furnace, make sure to craft 50 brick and 100 iron bars for your improved furnace. The only benefit to the improved furnace is that fuel lasts around 30% longer than the standard furnace. It has the same amount of inventory slots as the standard furnace and crafts at the same speed. The improved furnace may not have a ton of perks compared to later furnaces, but it is by far the cheapest.

The Kiln

The kiln recipe is a random drop from the Elder Vaults in Siptah. It can be found in any vault and learned at any level. You may get it in your first vault, or it may take several runs to drop. As with other vault recipes, it’s total RNG and can be incredibly frustrating.

So, why bother with a kiln? The kiln has the most inventory slots of any furnace, with 60 spaces. In addition, the kiln has an increased crafting speed of +42.9%. When the purge is at your doorstep or you’re running low on supplies, this bump can make a huge difference. The increased crafting speed alone would save on fuel, but the kiln is also 75% more fuel-efficient than the standard furnace.

The Fuel-Efficient Furnace

When you reach level 55, check your feats tab for the Grandmaster Blacksmith feat. After learning it, you’ll have the recipe for a fuel-efficient furnace. The fuel-efficient furnace’s name is self-explanatory, but I’ll break down the percentages for you. The fuel-efficient furnace is 300% more fuel-efficient than the standard furnace. In addition, the fuel-efficient furnace crafts 42.9% faster and has 40 inventory slots. This is the second most inventory slots for a furnace, but without the hassle of buying the Siptah expansion and finding the recipe for the kiln.

Building a fuel-efficient furnace is no cheap task. You’ll need 300 brick, 100 steel reinforcement, and 100 stone consolidate. You can make the brick directly from stone on your current furnace along with the steel for the steel reinforcements. The stone consolidates, and the steel fire for your steel bars will require a fire bowl cauldron station, and turning the steel bars into steel reinforcements will require a blacksmith’s bench.

The Heat-Efficient Furnace

You will also need to be level 55 to learn the heat-efficient furnace. It will be under the same feat as the fuel-efficient furnace: the Grandmaster Blacksmith feat. The heat-efficient furnace also requires the same materials to build as the fuel-efficient furnace. So, what is the difference between the two?

The heat-efficient furnace crafts items 350% faster than the standard furnace. However, this crafting speed is too big a boon to not come with some consequences. Fuel is 77% less efficient, and this furnace uses 12 times the amount of fuel that a fuel-efficient furnace uses. This is a great furnace for those Exiles that know they can keep up with fuel demands. The biggest advantage of any station in Conan Exiles is increased crafting speed and fuel can be replaced and overproduced.

Benefits of a Smelter Thrall

With all these glorious furnaces, what value could a thrall possibly add? Smelter thralls add crafting speed to your furnace! As with any thrall in Conan, you can find smelter thralls in four tiers. T1 thralls add 25% crafting speed, T2 thralls add 50% crafting speed, T3 thralls add 75% crafting speed, and T4 thralls add 100% crafting speed to your furnace. You could stumble on a T4 smelter anywhere named thralls spawn, but an easy place to farm T4 named thralls is the Black Galleon.

How to Build a Blacksmith’s Bench

To get the most out of your furnace, you’ll want to build a blacksmith’s bench. It is not an expensive bench to craft, and if you’re ready to upgrade your stone weapons into something a little more formidable, it’s best to go ahead and build one. You’ll learn how to build the station under the same feat as you learned the furnace at level 10: the Blacksmith feat. The blacksmith’s bench requires 250 stones and 50 iron bars. The stone should be easy enough to harvest with your pick, but you’ll need to smelt ironstone into iron bars at your furnace to build the bench. This will be your first big ironstone investment, so it’s best to know your closest node location before trying to craft.

How to Use a Blacksmith’s Bench

Conan Fanatics Blacksmith's Bench

A blacksmith’s bench is the sister bench to the furnace. Use it to turn your freshly smelted metal into weapons, tools, and iron and steel reinforcements. Iron reinforcements and steel reinforcements are used in more complicated builds and require much more ironstone to make than just the bars would. The iron requirements on your blacksmith’s bench moving forward are hard to achieve with a stone pick; consider upgrading your pick as your first order of business at the blacksmith’s bench. An iron pick will harvest much more ironstone per node than a stone pick and will exponentially increase your iron bar production at the furnace.

Best Benches: Upgrades

As with anything in Conan Exiles, you’ll have barely gotten used to your first station before it’s time to upgrade. There are three upgrades to the blacksmith bench. While you don’t need to upgrade this particular crafting station, the benefits of the superior stations are hard to pass up.

Improved Blacksmith Bench

An exile can learn the improved blacksmith bench at level 30 with the Master Blacksmith feat. You’ll need 100 bricks and 100 iron reinforcement to craft the station. This seems like a pretty steep price, but this station is a huge upgrade from the standard blacksmith bench. The improved blacksmith bench can hold double the resources in its inventory (40 slots vs. 20 slots), increases crafting speed by 33%, and reduces resource cost by 25%. Not only will you be crafting weapons, tools, and reinforcements faster, but it will cost less iron and steel to do so.

Campaign Blacksmith’s Bench and Garrison Blacksmith’s Bench

The world gets brighter when you hit level 55 in Conan Exiles if you have the resources to take advantage of it. The Grandmaster Blacksmith feat will teach you how to build both the campaign blacksmith’s bench and the garrison blacksmith’s bench. The resources required for these two benches are also the same and expensive. You’ll need 200 hardened brick, 100 insulated wood, 100 steel reinforcement, and 100 hardened steel bar. Short of working with star metal and black ice, these are the most time-consuming resources to obtain in the game.

So, what’s the difference between the campaign blacksmith’s bench and the garrison blacksmith’s bench? You may have already guessed from the names, but the campaign bench maxes out your crafting speed, and the garrison bench maxes out your resource consumption. Specifically, the campaign bench increases your crafting speed by 200%, and the garrison bench reduces resource requirements by 50%. It’s important to note that the benches go back to square one with their opposite stat. The campaign bench uses the same amount of resources as the standard bench, and the garrison bench crafts at the same speed as the standard bench. If you want a more versatile bench, it may be best to stick with the improved blacksmith bench, which improves on the standard bench in all areas. Both the campaign blacksmith’s bench and the garrison blacksmith’s bench have a 40-slot inventory.

Benefits of a Blacksmith Thrall

A blacksmith thrall is an important addition to a blacksmith bench. While thralls at other stations may only increase the crafting speed, which can be nice but not necessary, a blacksmith thrall improves the quality of the items made at their bench. You may not have time to hunt down a best-in-class thrall for your station, but you should put some effort into capturing and stationing any blacksmith thrall you can find at your bench.

Even low-tier thralls will add a helpful boost to weapons and tools crafted at the blacksmith bench. Thralls increase weapon damage, armor penetration, and item durability. They also decrease item weight. The higher tier the thrall, the more bonus you will get in these categories.

T4 or named blacksmith thralls give the highest bonuses, and they also have specializations. The three specializations are Edgesmith, Bladesmith, and Templesmith. Edgesmiths give this highest bonus to armor penetration, Bladesmiths gives the highest bonus to weapon damage, and Tempersmiths give the highest bonus to durability. You can see how having a couple of blacksmith bench and thrall combinations is an appealing tactic for creating the best weapons and tools possible.

You’re Heating Up!

Conan Fanatics furnances

If this is your first play-through of Conan Exiles, I’m happy to relay the good news about a furnace. Building your furnace and finding a generous supply of ironstone will open the game up for you. The armor and weapons you’ll be able to craft with iron bars will make the map far more accessible and the enemies barring your way much easier to take down. The Exiled Lands may be an open world, but the desert and subsequent areas are deceiving. They are well-crafted and cleverly laid out, with enemy choke points and pitfalls. Sure, there are those of us out there with the safe roads memorized, but as a new player, a decent set of armor and weapons makes a lot of sense. You won’t get far without your first furnace and that’s mainly because Funcom doesn’t want you to.

FAQ

Question: How do you get a furnace in Conan Exiles?

Answer: Once you hit level 10 in Conan Exiles, check out your feats tab and learn the blacksmith feat. This feat will teach you the recipe for your basic furnace. This is an inventory recipe; once you have 500 stones in your inventory, it will be available to craft. This amount of stone is very heavy, but some good news is that the crafted furnace is not. If you can position yourself in a large harvestable rock formation, you may be able to gather enough stone even while encumbered. Then simply craft the furnace, and you will become unencumbered.

Question: How do you use the furnace in Conan Exiles?

Answer: A furnace requires fuel in Conan Exiles. Load the ironstone or other ore that you would like to smelt, and then add fuel. Then hit the “play” button on the crafting bar and watch your ore begin to smelt. If your furnace stops producing, you have likely run out of fuel. The furnace will even still produce with an overloaded inventory, but you will need to remove items when it’s time to add more fuel.

Question: Which furnace is best in Conan Exiles?

Answer: This is truly a matter of opinion, but the consensus is the heat-efficient furnace. Fuel is typically relatively easy to farm or collect. I would only consider the fuel-efficient furnace if I was in a complicated area to obtain fuel or the kiln if my base was very small and I happened to find the recipe (it has a small imprint). In every other situation, the high crafting speed of the heat-efficient furnaces beats the other two endgame furnaces.

Question: What does the improved furnace do in Conan Exiles?

Answer: The improved furnace increases fuel duration by 42.9% when compared to the standard furnace. This is not a huge bonus, especially because the furnace does not increase inventory slots or crafting speed, but it is also not a particularly expensive upgrade.

Question: Which thrall do I need for a furnace?

Answer: You will need to find a smelter thrall for a furnace. These thralls will increase crafting speed at the furnace they are stationed at. A blacksmith thrall is for your blacksmith’s bench (or artisan’s or tinkerer’s bench). They will increase the quality of the weapons and tools produced there. Any tier thrall is worth the added boost, but T4 named thralls provide the most significant boost to your station.

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