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Whether you’ve only just begun your adventures in the exiled lands, or you’ve been at it for a while, you’ll eventually come to find that tar is worth its weight in gold. Tar is the foundation of every playthrough, allowing you to build large castles and also tear them down.
There’s not one stage of the game where tar won’t be a crucial part of your success, so mastering the ability to farm it in large quantities is an essential skill if you’re looking to conquer the wastelands of Conan Exiles. So, if you’ve come here after once again running out of this important resource, you can rest easy. By the end of this guide, you’ll know exactly how to obtain as much tar as you could ever need.
Bottom Line Upfront
Conan Exiles Tar is obtained primarily from tanning animal hides with bark inside a tannery of your choosing. This process requires a lot of time and can be made faster with tanner thralls, upgraded tanneries, and better tools for gathering larger quantities of hides in a single trip.
Focusing your gathering on animals that yield hides that can be stretched into thick hide will give you the most bang for your bucks, such as rhinos and elephants. Stretching their hides in a tanner’s table before tanning them will give you three tar’s worth of hides for every two animal hides stretched, meaning you’re getting much more tar per kill compared to other animals.
Make sure to use the best skinning knives available to maximize yields, such as obsidian, black blood, or Eldarium.
What is Tar Used For?
Tar is as versatile as it is sticky. Typically you’ll be using tar to make steel fire, one of the most used crafting reagents in the game. You’ll be using steel fire to make steel (obviously), steel reinforcements, and explosives, so you’re going to need a lot of it, even if you’re only trying to build a pretty home. Check out our complete guide on Conan Exiles Steelfire here!
Additionally, tar is used to craft oil arrows, explosive arrows, grease orbs, warpaints, dyes, and even water wells. So it goes without saying that once you start to crunch the numbers and you realize just how much tar you’re going to need to build your castle, siege your neighbors, and keep yourself from dying to thirst, it can seem a little daunting. Let’s talk about where to get it.
How to Craft Tar
Conan Exiles Tar is primarily obtained from animal hides, but it can be crafted from a few other sources. With a tier 4 alchemist, you can craft tar in an alchemist’s bench by combining raw ash with oil at a rate of 20 oil and five ash for two tar or by combining ten raw ash with ten resin for the same result.
It is also possible to obtain tar from a fluid press by squishing your excess coal. Every 25 coal placed into a fluid press will be crafted into a single unit of tar.
As you can probably guess, neither of these are great ways to obtain tar. Resin and oil are two resources that can be directly farmed but are much harder to obtain in bulk than just farming hides normally, and the conversion rates are nothing short of robbery. Coal can likewise be a scarce resource depending on where you live and on what map you’re playing, with similarly miserable conversion rates.
These methods should only be used in a pinch. Say you need a little bit of additional tar to finish your water well to keep yourself from dying of thirst. In really all other applications, you’re going to need way more than these methods can give you, so let’s talk about the best way to obtain tar, farming hides directly.
See also: Conan Exiles Cleaver Guide
How to Farm Hides for Tar
This is where you’re going to be satisfying your need for liquid gold. There’s simply no better way to get tar in bulk than to farm it through hides. We’ll need to go over your tools, the best locations for hides, and a bit of the finer details in maximizing your yields to get the most out of your time.
Best Tools
Hides should be farmed by using a skinning knife on the corpse of an animal. The tier of your tool makes a big difference in how many hides you receive, so use the best that you can access.
The tools with the highest gathering power in the game are obsidian, black blood, and Eldarium, so use whichever is easiest to get for your situation. If you’re going to go the extra mile and use oils of bounty to increase your yields, you’ll need to use legendary tools, but oils are somewhat out of the scope of this guide.
So if you’re not using oils, typically, you’ll want to use either obsidian or Eldarium tools, depending on if you’re in the Exiled Lands or Siptah, respectively. Star metal is completely fine if you don’t have either of those, you’ll just be getting marginally fewer hides per kill.
Be sure to apply a Tool Upgrade Kit to whatever tool you’re using (unless you’re using oils of bounty, which will be incompatible with any toolkit). These are made in the Tinker’s Bench, and the highest tiers require ten hardened steel to craft.
These will increase how many resources you get from any tool you apply them to while reducing their overall durability, and the tradeoff is well worth it.
Stretching Hides
Before you rush out to slaughter the farm, if you want to make the most of your time, you have to make sure to kill the right animals, which is to say, the animals that drop the best hides.
Regular hides and fur will produce tar at a ratio of 3 hides or fur to 1 tar. Named animal hides such as bat skins can be converted into tar at a 1:1 ratio. All animal hides can be converted this way, but you can get more tar per kill if you stretch the right ones.
Constructing a tanning bench will give you the option to stretch certain hides into Thick Hide, which is more impactful than it seems because thick hide can be tanned into tar at a 1:1 ratio, so stretching your hides into Thick Hide gives you more tar per kill than just tanning them directly.
As an example, if you had 100 elephant hides and put them into the tanner, you’d get 100 tar back. But, if you were to stretch them into thick hides first, you’d get 150 Thick Hide which would convert into 150 tar. That’s a huge increase, especially once you consider that these animals tend to give large quantities of their hides, so even a single elephant or bear can wind up giving you hundreds of tar if handled appropriately.
The types of hides that can be stretched in this way are elephant hides, bear pelts, and rhino hides.
So now that we know what hides to look for let’s talk about where to find them.
Best Places to Farm Hides for Tar
Because Conan Exiles has two maps, we’ll need to talk about both to cover all of your options. In general, you’ll want to focus on farming in areas that have high densities of the types of animals that give hides that can be stretched into thick leather so you can make the most of your time.
Exiled Lands
You have a few options if you live in the Exiled Lands. The place I’d recommend over any other is the midnight grove, also sometimes referred to as the Jhebbal Sag dungeon, for a few reasons.
It has a variety of animals you’ll need to harvest for crafting with anyways, such as feline pelts for light armor and pork for pork feasts. Additionally, it’s easy to get to as all you have to do is craft a potion of midnight, and you can teleport to it from anywhere in an instant, meaning you don’t lose any efficiency due to travel time.
The biggest reason is that it is one of the most densely packed areas to farm hides in the game, and nearly everything you kill here will give you hides that can either be stretched or tanned at a 1:1 ratio. Hyenas, wolves, and panthers will give you 1:1 hides, while further in, you’ll find one of the largest groups of bears in the game, each of which will give you an immense amount of bear pelts and, by extension, thick hides.
It’s also so large that you can practically farm indefinitely. As you finish clearing the dungeon, the enemies you killed at the entrance should begin to respawn, so you can put on a podcast and slay till your weapons break if you so choose.
Beyond the grove, there’s the savannah at G7 and H7. Here you’ll find rhinos, elephants, and tigers, all of which are great sources of hides and are found in large densities. If you’re going to be farming hides in bulk, the savannah and the midnight grove are the best places to do so.
That’s not to say they’re the only places, as there are large groups of bears around the dead mounds and rhinos around D9 or so, but the densities are much lower there, and it will take you a lot longer to get the tar you need.
If you’re on a PVP server, though, you can’t always get away with being picky over where you farm, so remember your principles and stick to locations that give the right kinds of hides and farm as best you can.
The Isle of Siptah
This part should be fairly simple since, as with many resources in the Isle of Siptah, it’s usually a good idea to start at the center of the map.
Here you’ll find bison, rhinos, and elephants scattered in the plains around the central tower, all within large groups. In a pinch, you could farm bears that are relatively populous in the redwood forests around M12 or so, as well as in the southern redwood forests and along the ridges in that same area.
Additionally, after the expansion was added, the Isle of Dawn (the desert-like island in the bottom right of the map) is covered with creatures you’d expect to see in the savannahs of the old map. Rhinos and elephants are in great supply, so if the center of the map is too far, head here and farm away.
While it’s not the most efficient, you should also be harvesting hides within the vaults if you’re farming them. Not all of the vaults have creatures in them that give hides at all, but if you’re in the bat vault, for example, those hides are still converting into tar at a 1:1 ratio, and the vault is packed with enemies, so you should make the most of your time if you’re farming them anyways for Eldarium.
FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions
Question: What tools should I be using to farm hides?
Skinning knives of the best quality you can obtain for your level, with Tool Upgrade Kits applied to them. You can use other tools in a pinch, but try to keep a skinning knife in your inventory when traveling.
Question: Is it worth it to craft tar or farm lower-quality hides?
Answer: Generally, no. It goes without saying that if you’re still in the early game, then farming the savannah or the midnight grove for hides can be a serious challenge, so it might not always be possible, but you also won’t need as much tar compared to someone building a fortified base in the end game.
Obviously, farm what you can safely farm, there’s no shame in farming crocodiles on the noob river if that’s what you can handle, but if you’re at a point where you can handle better sources of hides, you’ll find your tar per hour will increase exponentially.
When you need thousands and thousands of tar, you’ll value every second you save, and squeezing mountains of coal into individual units of tar will start to feel pretty silly.
Question: What are the best places to farm tar?
The Final Wrap Up
After playing Conan Exiles, it can be easy to want to tear your hair out over this cursed black liquid. Every brick you lay, every set of gear you make, and every bomb you need will have you opening your coffers and using up another batch of this precious substance.
But the knowledgable survivor knows that in the harsh wastes of Conan Exiles, tar is worth more than silver and gold, and those who can obtain the most of it will find themselves on the top of the heap, the sticky, sticky heap. Be sure to hose yourself down after handling all that tar.
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