Conan Exiles Leveling Guide: The Route From The Cross To Level 60

Conan Exiles is designed around a group, and the resource costs say so, but a solo character can climb it perfectly well if the route is chosen rather than wandered. This guide is one route, from the cross you are cut down at to the point where you are crafting explosives for sport. The short version is that experience in this game comes from making things far more than from killing things, and the sooner you believe that, the faster the levels come.

Two decisions before you move

Pick Yog at character creation. The cannibal tree is the most forgiving early god because it turns the bodies you were making anyway into food, which solves hunger before you have any real way to solve it. Our race and religion guide covers what the others offer and how to change later, since you can.

Then look at the rock beside you, underneath the next body on a cross, and take the water pouch sitting on it. The desert will dehydrate you inside the first few minutes, and that pouch is the difference between a run north and a respawn.

Journal entries are free levels

The journal hands you experience for doing things you would do anyway, and clearing the opening entries as early as possible is the single cheapest experience in the game. The starting set is short:

• Venerate the gods, which means using an altar
• Ride an elevator
• Drink water from a well
• Get a head, which is exactly what it sounds like and comes from harvesting animals
• Throw an orb, and then combine orb effects
• Catch a fish, which needs a fish trap in the water

Exploration points are the other free source. Travelling to a marked point pays out on arrival, and the desert alone holds six of them. The exceptions are the points marked with a skull and the ones with no name, which sit in conditions that will kill an underdressed character; leave those until you have fur and can survive the temperature, as our armor guide explains.

North to the river, then west

Head straight north from the spawn, picking up stone, branches and plant fiber as you go. There is no need to detour for them, they are everywhere along that path, and by the time the river is in front of you the target is at least thirty stones and fifty branches. There is no upper limit worth respecting here, because everything you are about to build wants these three and the pickaxe and hatchet you are about to make want them first.

Turn west at the river and you will find animals that do not fight back. Craft a sleeping bag before you engage anything and drop it somewhere safe, so a mistake costs you a walk instead of your inventory. Build a campfire, park your surplus stone and wood there, and once the area is producing, put up a Pit of Yog and make yourself a bone club.

The oasis at G9

With a sword, a bone club and a stock of meat, move further west to the oasis near G9. It is full of gazelles, and it is ringed with rocks, which is the actual reason to go: drive an animal into the rocks and it cannot run, and a javelin finishes a trapped gazelle faster than a sword ever will.

This is also horse country. The squares around the Northern Aqueduct at G9 are one of the reliable foal spawns, and a mount at this stage changes the rest of the game, as our horse locations page covers.

E7, and the furnace trick

The moment iron equipment unlocks, go to E7. The corruption area there carries iron and stone together in quantity, which makes it the natural place to stop carrying materials home and start bringing the workshop to the materials. Put up furnaces, a blacksmith's bench and a tannery on the spot.

Then run the trick that carries you through the middle of the game. Set up three or four furnaces, fill each one with a thousand coal, and feed them ironstone until you have bars coming out steadily. Take the bars to the blacksmith's table and turn them into iron arrows and weapons. It is the crafting that pays, not the mining, and when iron stops giving you enough, move the same routine up to steel and then to hardened steel. Our iron and hardened steel pages cover what each tier needs.

Once you have an iron sword, most ordinary enemies stop being a threat if you strafe and keep moving. Stay on the hyenas and gazelles until about level 20, then take the bone club into the nearby city and start on the humans. A bow and iron arrows are worth carrying too: the spiders at Weaver's Hollow and around the Set trainers, both the green and yellow kind and the red and black kind, pay out heavily for the effort.

Steel at thirty, and somewhere to keep it

Steel equipment arrives around level 30, and that is the right moment to build properly rather than camp. F7 and F8 are good ground for it. Keep it small: a solo base does not need to be impressive, it needs to not fall over, and two high walls measuring nine by nine will do more for you than a castle.

Ring the outside with ceiling tiles, including one on the doorway, and stand your chests on them so your materials are outside the footprint you have to defend. Building next to the E7 workshop saves you putting the furnaces and benches up twice. A cliffside position is the safest of the lot if one is available.

From E7, head northwest to D6 and the Stygian city. The NPCs there stand in groups of two to four, which steel weapons handle comfortably, and that city becomes your main experience source for a while. Hit the bodies afterwards with the bone club for meat. This is also the point to move up from light gear into medium or heavy.

After level 34, make explosives

Past the mid thirties the arithmetic changes completely and most of your remaining experience comes from one thing: crafting explosive jars and traps. They are expensive, and they are worth it. Our own numbers put an explosive jar at over 100,000 experience and an explosive trap at a further 400,000.

The chain behind them starts with tar, which means the jungle, because reptile hide comes back from there in stacks and tar comes out of the tannery. Steelfire is made from tar, and steelfire plus demon blood plus crystal plus brimstone gives you dragonpowder. An Artisan Table turns that into the jars themselves.

Two notes to finish. A dismantling table returns the materials from what you have crafted, so the loop can feed itself rather than emptying your chests. And the explosives are not only experience: they are the only thing that opens a meteorite, so this same production line is what unlocks star metal when you are ready for it. The full material chain is in our resources guide, and the rest of the game in the Conan Exiles guide.