Conan Exiles Bark: How To Farm It And Why You Always Need More

Bark is the least glamorous thing in your inventory and the reason half your benches are idle. It is not armor, it is not a weapon, it is not even an ingredient in most of what you want to build. It is fuel, and it is the specific fuel the tannery demands, which means every piece of leather armor in Conan Exiles is paid for in tree trunks.

Hit a tree with a pick, not a hatchet

The tool decides what a tree gives you. Swing a hatchet and you get wood. Swing a pick at the same trunk and you strip bark off it instead. That is the entire trick, and it is why players who have been chopping for an hour sometimes have no bark at all.

Here is the part worth knowing before you go shopping for an upgrade: the tier of your pick does not change the bark you get. A stone pick, an iron pick and a steel pick all strip the same amount from the same tree. Bark is an unusual case in this game, because almost everywhere else the better tool is the answer. Save the good pick for the ore you actually need it on, such as star metal, and keep a cheap one in the bag for trees.

Bark also drops off the NPCs you kill, so a camp raid quietly tops you up while you are there for something else. It weighs almost nothing at 0.05 a piece, which is a mercy given how much of it you are about to carry.

What burns it

• The tannery, where one piece of bark buys twenty four seconds of work. This is where your supply actually goes.
• The campfire, as an alternative to wood when wood is what you are short of.

Because the tannery is the bottleneck, bark demand scales with leather demand, and leather demand scales with armor. Working out how much armor you are going to need is really a question of how much bark you are willing to farm, which our armor guide is the place to start on. The conversion itself, hide into leather, is covered on our thick leather page.

The alchemist trick

Bark has one use beyond burning, and it is a good one. A third tier alchemist standing at the bench, or a named one, unlocks a recipe that presses five bark and a single ichor into five oil. Oil is otherwise a fiddly material that wants fish traps and a press, so a bench that turns the thing you have too much of into the thing you never have enough of is worth the thrall hunt. Where to find a crafter of that quality is on our named thralls page.

For where bark sits relative to everything else you are gathering, and which benches turn one material into the next, see the resources guide.