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No material in Conan Exiles is interesting on its own. Ironstone is not the point, iron bars are not the point, and neither is the steel after that. Every one of them is a position in a chain that starts with you hitting something and ends with a piece of gear, and the only useful way to think about a resource is to ask what it is a step toward. That is how this guide is arranged, and it is why the table below has a column for the bench in the middle rather than just a list of places.

The whole chain in one table

Material	How you free it	The bench that changes it	What it becomes	Our page
Bark	A pick, swung at a tree	Burned in the tannery	Twenty four seconds of tanning, each piece	Bark
Bones	A pick or hatchet, on a corpse	Grinder	Four bonemeal per bone	Bones
Ironstone	A pick, on nodes	Furnace	One iron bar per two ore	Iron
Crystal	A pick, in five named caves	Furnace	Glass, dragonpowder, the Map Room	Crystal
Brimstone	A pick, through toxic fog	Firebowl cauldron	Steelfire, and then steel	Brimstone
Black ice	A pick, in the Frozen North	Furnace	Hardened steel and star metal bars	Black ice
Star metal ore	Explosives, then a tier four pick	Furnace	The best bars in the game	Star metal
Oil	Nothing. It is pressed, not found	Fluid press	Fuel, and five per hardened leather	Oil
Thick leather	A skinning knife, on big animals	Tannery	Heavy armor, and tar on the side	Thick leather
Hardened leather	Four other materials at once	Tanner's table	Epic armor	Hardened leather
Hardened steel	A steel bar and a black ice	Furnace	Tier four tools and weapons	Hardened steel

The tool decides what you get

Before any bench matters, the thing in your hand does. The same tree gives wood to a hatchet and bark to a pick. The same corpse gives hide to a skinning knife, flesh to a cleaver and bone to a pick. Players who have farmed for an hour and come home with the wrong material almost always made this mistake rather than went to the wrong place.

Tool tier is the second half of the same idea, and it is not consistent. On ore, a better pick pays for itself. On trees it does nothing at all, because bark comes off at the same rate whether you are swinging stone or steel. And on one material, star metal, the tier is not an efficiency question but a gate: below tier four the ore simply will not come out.

The ladder that runs the whole game

Four of these materials form a single line, and almost everything good in Conan Exiles sits somewhere along it. It is worth learning as a sequence rather than as four separate farming problems.

Ironstone into iron bars, two to one in a furnace. Volume work, and the foundation of everything above it.
Brimstone and tar into steelfire, then steelfire plus five iron bars into steel. This is the step that strands most characters, because steelfire is cooked rather than mined and nothing on the map tells you so.
Steel and black ice into hardened steel, one for one, fifteen seconds. The trip north is the cost, not the recipe.
A hardened steel pick into star metal, which is the payoff: tier four is exactly the threshold a meteorite will yield to.

Read down that list and the reason for each trip becomes obvious in advance. You are not going to Shattered Springs for brimstone; you are going for steel. You are not climbing the Frozen North for black ice; you are climbing it for a pick that can open a meteorite.

The leather chain runs in parallel

Armor has its own line and it does not touch the metal one until the very end. Hide off animals becomes leather, thick hide off the large ones becomes thick leather, and both of those plus oil and alchemical base become hardened leather, which is what epic armor is made of. The tannery in the middle burns bark, so a leather habit is really a bark habit, and the arithmetic gets away from people because five oil and two thick leather go into every single unit.

Which sets are worth that outlay is a separate question from how to make the material, and our armor guide is where it is answered.

What to farm, and when

Early on, iron and bark are the only two that matter, and both are close to the river you start beside. Our leveling guide routes you past the ore on the way to everything else, and points out that crafting the products, rather than gathering the materials, is where the experience actually is.

In the middle of the game the bottleneck moves to brimstone, and it stays there until you own a breathing mask. Late on it moves again, to oil, which nobody plans for and everybody runs out of. Build fish traps long before you need them.

One thing improves every bench at once: the right thrall standing at it. A tanner cuts the bark your tannery eats, a named smith unlocks the flawless tier at an improved bench, and an alchemist of the third tier turns bark and ichor straight into oil. Our thrall capturing guide covers taking one, and our named thralls page covers where the best of them stand. For where these materials sit on the map itself, the locations guide is the companion to this one, and the Conan Exiles guide puts both in order.