How Not to Die to Hyenas - Getting an Iron Weapon - Conan Exiles Walkthrough & Guide (2024)

How Not to Die to Hyenas - Getting an Iron Weapon

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At this point, you should start to have a feel for how the game works. You can make gathering runs to get stone and wood/branches and plant fiber, and fighting runs to get hide and meat. You are now an exile and not just walking meat.

Well, except that virtually everything in the game still wants to kill you on sight. So you'll need to start to improve in three areas: tools, armor, and weapons.

We can get a little further with armor first: the first thing you need to unlock at level 10 is the Armorer's Bench. This is really the only workstation you'll put in your hut. Once it's built, keep killing turtles and skinning them, while gathering plant fiber so you can build 5 pieces of Light Padding and use it to make yourself a full set of Light Armor. Even if you have some DLC, I still recommend the normal "Light Armor" armor because it gives +carry weight, which at this point is more useful than the actual armor value from the armor. Once you have all 5, congratulations! Your survivability rating just went from 1% to 5%.

The Riddle of ...Iron

To meaningfully improve your tools or armor or weapons any further, you'll need one thing: iron. Iron is now your biggest roadblock to progress, so you'll want to abuse online maps to tell you were iron is, and/or explore around the map yourself in the daytime. There are hundreds of iron nodes scattered all over the map, but none are near the starting river. This means you'll need to start pushing further away from your starting shack, where there is more iron. There are some isolated nodes here and there, but you won't get much iron until you roam quite a bit from the river. But even when you get iron, you'll probably want a place to smelt it, and start making a bunch of other workstations to expand what you can do, and it's a pain to haul all that crap back to the noob river where the next guy is just going to steal it from you anyway. So let's start talking about the next thing you need: a real base.

Let's Pause for an Update

I promise not to spend a lot of time telling you how the game used to work, but this one is important, because it will help you understand why so many guides seem off. Back when I first wrote this guide, this game was MUCH harder to start. Fighting literally any enemy in the game 2-on-1 was nearly impossible, and 3-on-1 was 100% suicide. Because of this, in order to progress, you needed a thrall ASAP - you needed to get someone to fight your battles for you. It was the only way for an inexperienced exile to get to steel, which was the only way to really get ...anywhere.

But that's all changed with 3.0. Now you can get all the early stuff you need yourself, without help. And because of this, a lot of what I recommend early on is no longer necessary. Which means you have a lot more options when it comes to where you'd like to start building.

Baby's First Base

There are many good places to scout for a base. At this point you'll want to pack light - maybe a couple of bedrolls, plenty of food, and your waterskin - and start getting a feel for the land. You are pretty much invincible in the water, so if you want to scout to the east or west, I suggest using the river. What you're looking for now is a place that has loads of iron, rocks, trees, and plants, with bonus points for coal and water nearby. Coal isn't needed for any recipes, but it will help keep your furnace (or campfire) going a whole lot longer than wasting all your wood. But you also need to be close to the next major ingredient that you didn't know you needed: brimstone. Iron is important now but you need brimstone for steel, so you might as well set yourself up for both.

Since this is a guide, I'm going to go over several options, and then tell you what to pick anyway.

• G4: G4, G5, and the eastern side of F5 are all great places for a starter base. They are very close, centralized, and easy to access from your current location, so if you just need something "now," head north. You'll only need to avoid a few hyenas to get there. G4 is probably the strongest choice for PvE; just north of the oasis are two plateaus on the left and right which are great for building. (Don't build here in PvP because it's like putting out a sign that says "open for brutalizing.") If you choose G4:
  
  • Watch out for the oasis in the middle of that area. When you see an oasis, your first thought should be: crocodiles. These are very tough creatures that can really mess you up, but they're also easy to fight because they attack slowly and you can confuse them by getting behind them. They also tend to travel alone, which is perfect. But you should also be aware that there is a giant "boss" croc in G4 as well. Yes, inches from your starting area there is a boss that will handily kill you in one hit. That's Conan Exiles in a nutshell. But eventually you'll figure out how to get in, get your water and fill your waterskin, and get out.
  • G5 has a lot of iron, and coal to the west on the southern outside wall of the Summoning Place. This place is well-guarded, so be careful, but you should be able to get some coal and get out without being detected. Some of the iron is guarded by rocknoses, which are nearly impossible to kill with your stone sword, so just get iron from an unguarded spot or grab and go for now - you'll soon build a weapon that can help with them.
• I6: If you're up for a little bit of a run, the river basin in I6 is a nice spot for a base. You can swim east to I4, and then follow the river north to I6. Be VERY careful about crocodiles; the ones near rivers tend to be in packs of three, so do your best to avoid them, or run like hell if you get spotted. Eventually you'll find a spot in the middle of I6 with a medium-sized waterfall that protects you from the east, and you can build on the northern riverbank, with plenty of iron and coal nearby. (Building somewhere stops monsters from spawning there.) This location also has lots of berries for food and later recipes. But it also has easy access to something else you didn't know you needed yet: an obelisk. Once you get to mid-game, the obelisks will become incredibly important, because these are how you teleport around the map. If you're playing single player, you always want to build near these so you can easily teleport to a safe spot.
• B8: It takes a long time to reach it, but the southern half of B8 and the northern tip of B7 are one of the best spots in the game to build a base in single player. B8 has trees, rocks, iron, coal, plants, vines, aloe, and easy-to-kill creatures for food right there, and tons of brimstone close by. There's even a silver mine not too far away in B6, near The Jawbone, and rhinos for thick hides for when you need that. And importantly, it's also close to an obelisk. It's really a great place to use for quite some time, until you need to head further north.
  • So how do we get there? The easiest way is to start swimming west in the river. Follow it around to E4, and then climb up and go northwest until you're near the bottom of the Unnamed City (with all the orange sand). Don't go in there yet: instead, follow the edges of the city around west and then eventually north. There are NO enemies this way; you could actually come this way to start the game still naked if you wanted. Just don't cross the giant, green, glowing barrier. Continue north toward the Jawbone, then west, and north again. Around this spot you'll see rhinos: these are an excellent source of thick hides and rhino hides (which can also be turned into thick leather), so make note of this spot. (Careful: there's a large black rhino that is a boss.) You should already see the southern side of the city of Sepermeru, which is filled with neutral NPCs. This place is great, and it's worth wandering around inside. You only need to be careful of the middle area, connected by bridges, where there are bandits who will aggro you on sight. There are a few random NPCs who will also start to attack you for no reason, but just run away from them and climb a building until they lose interest. If you fight them, everyone in the city will start to attack you, because video game logic. Continue heading north through the city until you get to B8, keeping notes on all the coal and iron deposits you pass by.
• Unless it's already taken, just choose B8.

When you've picked a spot, load up only the things you need to survive right now - food and water - and leave the rest behind. You'll quickly replace everything you've already made. Once you reach the area you like, don't forget to throw down your bedroll in a safe location in case you die, so you can get back to your body (and stuff) quickly. You should have 30 minutes to get your stuff after you die - but if you're on a PvP server, anyone will be able to loot you, so be careful.

Now we're going to rebuild our hut - but much bigger. You'll want something at least 5x5 to start, but keep in mind you'll need room to grow. Only 1 wall high is fine for now, just so you can get yourself protected and expand later. (Side tip: if you are on a PVP server, make your walls out of foundations, and then put walls on the inside and outside of them.) You then want to start making some crafting tables. Building all of these and then gathering lots of iron will easily get your level into the teens.

You really don't need everything you can craft. Here's what you do need:

• Furnace: start cooking any iron you get into iron bars; use branches or sticks for fuel (or better: coal).
• Tannery (NOT the tanner's table - this isn't useful until much later): use a pickaxe on a tree to get bark to build and fuel this. Tanneries are crucial for turning hide into leather, a byproduct of which is tar. (You'll still need a few hides for various recipes though.)
• Carpenter's Bench: you can build a bow to give you a way to tag enemies from afar and whittle their HP down if you want. Don't waste many resources on arrows, as you'll find a ton.
• Artisan Table (Furniture Maker feat in Decorations): this might seem like a weird choice, but you need this table to make lights. You can build torches that hang on walls or stick in the ground here. Nice for working inside at night (dangerous for PvP though).
• Armor's Bench: just rebuild it - it doesn't take much.

You really don't need any other crafting stations yet, including the large campfire. It's the exact same as the small one, but with more slots to store stuff. It's actually easier to just build two small ones and save a ton of space and cook twice as fast. (Keep this in mind for furnaces in the future.) Also: the bonfire is pretty much just a taller, more slender large campfire that doesn't take stone to make. No idea why you would want this, but you eventually have to get the feat anyway so you can build a stove. Finally, don't forget to make yourself another bed, so you can spawn here whenever you'd like.

You can build all this stuff while your iron is cooking in the furnace. You first 50 iron bars (100 iron) need to go to a Blacksmith Bench. Your next 30 need to go to an Iron Pick. This will boost your ability to gather iron by about 1 per swing. It may not seem like much, but it will make a huge difference over time.

Continue to gather iron and upgrade your hatchet and skinning knife so you can get wood and skins/meat faster. Note the new tool, an Iron Sickle. This will make gathering plant materials about 10x faster. You can use it on flowers to get more of the flower and seeds, and use it on spiders or spider eggs to get gossamer for silk. Note: you can also use a pick on spiders for ichor.

Now it's finally time for your first real weapon!

Just Get a Mace

So, there are many different viable options here, but the simplest solution to the most problems is: in PvE, just make a mace. You made a sword out of stone because nothing you would hit with it would ever have armor, but from this point on, one-handed maces are great for armor penetration, and they are nearly required for certain monsters, which means it's really the only thing you should bother with. Daggers and axes are useful for bleed, but not everything bleeds. (PvP is a whole other ballgame.)

If you have any DLC, then it cheats a little for you with some early game recipes that are free. Pick the mace out of those. If you don't, go ahead and get the Flanged Iron Mace. If you're somehow already level 20 (or when you get to level 20), definitely grab the Iron Mace - this is a great weapon you'll use for a while.

For a shield, you can probably just skip Wooden Targe and wait until level 20 to make an Iron Targe, which is 3x as good. Keep repairing your junky wooden shield until then.