With some patience and a good server, you can fully experience Conan Exiles and what it currently has to offer in a reasonably lag-free environment. Once you’ve conquered the lag gods and the dong slider you will still need to survive the harsh lands of Conan the Barbarian and these tips will help you get started!
General Tips
Switch between first and third person view using V. While in first person you can also use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.
Hide your UI for screenshots by hitting Alt-Z.
Press Num-Lock without holding any movement keys to auto-walk.
Separate stacks into specific amounts by Shift-Clicking a stack and dragging to another empty slot.
Hit M to open the Map and see where you are. Remember when you die you can check the map before teleporting back to the start area to see where your body will be an attempt to run back and loot your corpse.
Double click items to instant equip to hot bars, gear inventory, or to put items in your inventory from chests, corpses etc.
When on a long mission to a clan’s base or any area that you may have trouble getting to, bring Fiber Bedrolls. Craft a few Fiber Bedrolls and place them along the way so that in the case that you die you won’t be all the way back in the desert praising the nudist gods again.
When venturing North or into areas away from water and the main rivers, make sure to take a Waterskin and fill it up before your adventure. Without a Waterskin, Scaleback Eggs can be a lifesaver providing a small amount of thirst reduction as well but you will only find them by the rivers. The desert does have Oases and you can walk up to any water source and drink from it without a Waterskin by pressing E.
Getting Started in Conan Exiles
The first time you spawn on your new character you will find a lore note and a Waterskin on a rock nearby. Don’t forget to pick this up as the Sealed Waterskin takes 20 Hides to craft again later if you lose your initial one and you’ll also have to wait until you level and learn Experienced Survivalist.
Do not run for the green shiny walls of magic that appear between those cool looking pillars in the desert and around the map unless you want to meet your first death rather quickly.
Start collecting Stone (rocks on the ground), Branches (also on the ground), and Plant Fiber (from bushes) straight away as they will be useful for most of the initial crafting you do as well as crafting throughout future levels.
Don’t forget to watch your Thirst and Hunger levels! Running through the desert naked is tiring business and you must remember you’ve just been knocked off a cross after roasting like a chicken for a while. Heading North from the area you start at will lead you to a river and lots of resources to satisfy both your thirst and hunger.
Crafting some tools and finding Shelter should be one of your first priorities after you’ve managed to take care of your thirst and hunger. All of the Stone, Branches and Plant Fiber you collect will allow you to make Stone tools and collect more materials for survival. Being inside shelter will also help you regenerate HP faster.
Learn Experienced Survivalist as soon as possible so you can start building a campfire and roasting your food to avoid getting food poisoning from eating raw meats. Expert Survivalist also opens up the Sealed Waterskin to help you stave off thirst if you lose your original waterskin.
Additionally, learning the Improvised Torch and Wooden Chest recipes will be quite beneficial early on. The Torch makes it so you can keep farming mobs or materials in the dark and the chest will give you a place to store materials and items without carrying them around and potentially losing them in death.
Repairing
Instantly repair items on your hotbar by triple tapping them, providing you have the materials for repair in your inventory. Tap hotkey once to select, a second time to repair, and a third time to re-equip.
Repair items instead of re-crafting them because it takes a lot fewer materials and you can repair on the go.
Higher tiers of tools and weapons will last longer before needing repair and also harvest larger amounts at a faster rate.
Experience and Loot
Killing creatures is better for the experience than crafting but crafting will be necessary to gear up as you level anyhow. As you adventure through Conan Exiles and Hyboria you will notice there are different difficulties of the same type of creatures such as the small and large Scorpions or the different colored Spiders. The experience system will likely be tweaked during Conan Exiles Early Access but as of now this tier system of sorts means the experience granted by the same creature species can award different amounts. The following are some of the best creatures to kill for experience.
- Emu – 2190 XP [Edit: this amount has been adjusted with the latest patch]
- Antelope & other deer – 1750 XP
- Crocodiles – 877 XP
- Spiders – 220 – 2,622 XP depending on tier/type of spider.
At the moment you can combine the durability of stacks of food by stacking different qualities together. If done correctly this method can save entire chests full of food that are about to go putrid.
A handy Conan Exiles advance tip is hiding chests under some building foundations to hide loot, preventing loss during offline raiding.
Crafting
Using different tools to harvest different creatures and resources will give you different yields. These are the ones we know so far:
- Pickaxe on trees will yield more bark.
- Pickaxes on Rocknose corpses will yield Brimstone and Crystals.
- Pickaxe on Spiders will yield more Gossamer and Ichor.
- Hatchet on animal corpses will yield more Hides.
Save your seeds so you can use them with Plant Fiber to make Gruel which is great for your Thralls later on.
Items that burn can use Coal, Wood, or Plant Fiber as fuel.
Collecting fibers, branches, and other plants and useful resources while you’re running somewhere is a good habit to get in as they all become useful and you’ll find yourself in situations where you’re like ‘I need some damn branches!’ particularly if you’re using things like Flinthead Arrows.
Aloe Vera won’t be super useful for a little while until you’ve leveled up enough to craft a Firebowl Cauldron but, once you have you can turn Aloe Vera into heal over time potions that can really save your ass. The Firebowl Cauldron can be used for a bunch of cool stuff like making explosive ingredients, building components and variety of potions:
- Aloe Extract – Aloe Vera Leaves- Heal over time potion
- Yellow Lotus Potion – Yellow Lotus Blossoms – Resets Recipe skill points
- Violet Cureall – Serpent Venom Glands – A cure-all potion for poisons etc.
- Steelfire – Tar and Brimstone – A component for making Steel Bars
- Stone Consolidant – Twine and Ichor – A component for making Hardened Bricks
- Dragonpowder – Steelfire, Brimstone, Demonblood, and Crystals – A component for Explosive Jars
Iron and Coal can be found in bountiful amounts further North and in desert areas.
When learning new recipes consider looking ahead to see which recipes you might want to open up soon as some of them have pre-requisite recipes that must be learned to open them up. This is most common with new crafting tiers.
Thralls and Religion
If you chose a religion and want to change it, don’t reroll. There are Thralls who are priests and can teach you all the religions. In fact, all religions can be learned but you won’t be able to put recipe points into every religion.
NPC/Thrall camps have chests full of materials and occasionally arrows or weapons. These camps are great to clear for a quick overall gather of materials too as most NPCs will drop materials including Bark and Plant Fiber.
Gruel works faster for training/breaking Thralls on Wheels of Pain though you can use any edible food.
Do not click on a training Thrall in the queue as it will reset the training bar.
Thralls can be taken with you and placed to fight other mobs or NPCs with you.
There are different tiers of NPCs and Thralls which can be captured in various areas around the map. Higher tier Thralls will do more damage, craft things faster, or whatever their relevant skill is. Throughout the Conan Exiles map, there is also special named Thralls that can offer different crafting recipes and special effects.
Dancing Thralls will remove corruption from you as well as give you a health Regeneration buff.
Conan Exiles Combat
Lag can work to your benefit when fighting creatures as they also combat lag. Doing circles around them, kiting around rocks and even moving back and forth depending on your weapon can help.
On that note, Shields must actually be used to block as they won’t passively block. This means much like when dual wielding other items, you must use your right mouse button to block an attack. Though be aware, depending on the quality of the shield the durability can go down quite quickly when blocking heavy attacks and you may find yourself without a shield at all.
Daggers can be dual wielded with crafting tools and most swords.
To use arrows with a bow, drag the arrows to the bow on your hotbar.
Additionally, Reddit user Ralathar44 completed comprehensive testing of Armor values and Weapon DPS comparisons in Conan Exiles. This can give you a better idea of what to aim for with your play style.
SAVAGES Stat System
If you haven’t already noticed, the stats in Conan Exiles spell out the word savages.
- Strength – affects your damage with melee weapons.
- Agility – directly affects your Armor value with an equal 10 agility = 10 armor value.
- Vitality – affects your health pool giving you 12 points of HP per point of vitality.
- Accuracy – similar to strength, accuracy affects your damage with ranged weapons.
- Grit – affects your stamina pool and vitally important to lasting longer in fights as well as while running away.
- Encumbrance – affects your inventory space and how much you can carry. Very beneficial for gathering larger amounts of materials but will need points as your gear gets heavier also.
- Survival – determines the tick rate for thirst and hunger meaning you don’t have to drink and eat so often.
Most of the stats are beneficial taken to 5 before the cost increases. However, your stat distribution will depend on your individual play style too. For example, a player focusing on building would likely put more points in Encumbrance for material gathering. Whereas a player focusing on PVP would be more likely to put points into stats like Strength and Grit first.
Building
When placing items or building blocks you can move them in multiple directions. Use the following:
- Mouse-wheel to rotate
- Shift and mouse-wheel to move up and down vertically
- Control and mouse-wheel to change the horizontal angle
Walls can be doubled up for extra protection against explosives and attackers. Moreover, doors are currently a little tougher than walls so double doors can also be beneficial. Higher tiers of walls will not only use more mats but be more resistant to attack.
Building on cliffs and raised areas can give you extra defense that cannot be exploded or removed.
Use a combination of square and triangle building pieces to create circular buildings.
Removing a building foundation that is the base for walls or stairs, the walls and stairs will be removed with the foundation upon deconstruction.
Servers
Find servers quickly by using the Steam Server Browser and add them to favorites. You can see the ping and status of servers without launching the game first from the in-game server menu.
Browse around for a good Conan Exiles server that suits your personal playstyle. Many of the unofficial servers (all 7300 of them) have different settings for things like day/night cycles, PVP, RP, XP. The unofficial Conan Exiles servers are definitely worth checking out. If you’re ok with Early Access kinks and just want to avoid the lag or rubberbanding.
Check back at Gamer’s Greed for more Conan Exiles survival guides and news!
