Conan Exiles Beginner's Guide: Survive and Build Your Kingdom

Starting out in the Exiled Lands: what you need to know

Conan Exiles drops you into a brutal open world with almost no hand-holding. Conan himself cuts you free from a corpse tree, and from that moment you're on your own in a desert that wants you dead. The game runs on journals rather than tutorials, which means the learning curve is real. Get your head around the basics fast and you'll go from scavenging survivor to warlord. Skip them and you'll spend your first few hours dying to dehydration and sandstorms. This guide covers everything you need to get started, based on the game's confirmed mechanics from Funcom and the Steam store page.

First resources in the desert

How do you survive the early game?

Your health meter is fragile in the opening levels. The game's journals walk you through gathering materials, finding food and water, and crafting your first tools. Follow them, but don't treat them as the only path. The desert biome, the original Exiled Lands, is your starting zone, and it punishes players who ignore temperature and hunger.

Here's what matters most in the first hour:

• Food and water are your immediate priority. Hunt animals and cook meat at a campfire before your hunger bar bottoms out.
• Build a shelter early. Sandstorms hit without much warning and they will kill you if you're caught in the open.
• Dress for the climate. The game requires you to manage temperature actively. Light armor works in the desert heat, but you'll need cold-resistant gear the moment you head north toward the Tundra.
• Watch your corruption. Exploring darkened ruins can corrupt your character through foul sorcery, according to Funcom's official description. Corrupted characters unlock special sorcery perks but at the cost of their life force.

What are the four biomes and why do they matter?

Conan Exiles has four distinct terrain types, each with different threats, resources, and rewards. According to the game's description, these are:

The Frozen North is worth heading to once you have decent gear. It's a source of Star Metal, which produces stronger armor and better weapons than anything you can craft in the desert. Pack heat-resistant armor and ice or water supplies before attempting the Volcano, where Living Magma and Serpentmen guard the best loot in the game.

How does crafting and building work?

The crafting system in Conan Exiles is one of the game's strongest features. You progress through material tiers: wood to stone to iron to steel, and you can move through all of them within a few hours of starting. The higher-end recipes require rare materials that force you to explore.

Building armor is a good example of how demanding the system gets. According to the game's description, a full suit of armor requires significant materials and three different crafting stations before you're anywhere near finished. The payoff is real though: once you're properly armored, encounters that would have killed your early-game character become manageable.

Crafting stations themselves have a known quirk worth flagging. Per the Conan Exiles patch notes on the FextraLife wiki, dismantling crafting stations with items still inside them will sometimes not drop a loot bag. Empty your stations before dismantling them.

Building goes far beyond survival shelters. The game's building system lets you construct anything from a single-room base to a full city, with traps, elevators, defenses, furniture, and crafting stations all placeable as individual pieces.

What is the thrall system?

Thralls are one of Conan Exiles' most distinctive mechanics. You capture NPCs from the Exiled Lands, drag them back to your base, and run them through the Wheel of Pain to break their will. Once broken, they become workers: archers, fighters, crafters, entertainers, and more.

Thralls defend your base when you're offline and staff your crafting stations, which speeds up production significantly. Building a strong thrall workforce is the difference between a base that gets raided and one that holds.

The game also has a pet system. Raise animals from cubs or eggs, keep them fed, and they grow into companions that produce fertilizer as a bonus resource. It's a smaller system than thralls but worth setting up once your base is stable.

How does sorcery work in Conan Exiles?

Sorcery was added to Conan Exiles as a major feature update and it changes the late-game significantly. To use dark sorcery, you have to corrupt your own body, giving up a portion of your life force in exchange for power. Players who accept that trade unlock special perks unavailable through normal progression.

The confirmed sorcery abilities, per Funcom's official description, include:

• Sacrificing thralls to summon demons and undead
• Conjuring darkness
• Flying on winged monstrosities
• Calling down lightning on enemies

Sorcery is a high-risk, high-reward path. Your corrupted health pool is permanently smaller, but the combat and utility options you gain are unlike anything available through standard gear and weapons.

What are the god avatars?

Aligning yourself with one of four deities, including Derketo (the goddess of lust and death), lets you work toward summoning a massive avatar of that god. These towering figures can crush enemies and destroy entire buildings. Avatar summoning is an endgame option that requires significant investment at your god's altar, but the payoff in siege situations is hard to match.

How do the Ages and Battle Passes work?

Funcom shifted Conan Exiles to an Ages update model. Each Age brings a theme, free gameplay updates, and a Battle Pass. The free updates add actual gameplay features and improvements. The Battle Pass provides exclusive cosmetics for players who want to support the game's continued development. This model means the core game keeps getting content without requiring additional purchases for the functional stuff.

Single player, co-op, or multiplayer: which should you pick?

Conan Exiles supports all three modes, and the right choice depends on what you want from the game.

• Single player gives you complete control. You can adjust progression speed, spawn monsters, turn yourself invisible, and act as dungeon master of your own world. It plays similarly to Minecraft in its creative freedom, according to the game's description.
• Co-op lets you and a friend explore together, with tethered movement across the map. Combat is more manageable with a partner and the exploration is more rewarding.
• Multiplayer on public servers introduces PvP, raids, and the full social dimension of the game. Public official servers can be unstable and some players have reported losing gear to server connection issues, with Funcom not replacing losses caused by server bugs. Private servers are the better option for a more controlled experience, limited to 40 players per server.

System requirements: can your PC run it?

Conan Exiles needs 115 GB of storage space regardless of your settings. The minimum specs call for an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i5-10400F, 8 GB RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 or Radeon RX 580, according to the Steam store page. For a smoother experience, Funcom recommends a Ryzen 7 5600X or Intel Core i7-11700F, 16 GB RAM, and an RTX 3060, AMD RX 6700, or Intel Arc A750. Running on ultra settings is hardware-intensive, as noted by players in Steam reviews.

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