Conan Exiles Bones: The Right Tool, The Best Corpses And Bonemeal

Bones are a harvest rather than a mine. Everything you kill is a potential source, human and animal alike, and the only thing standing between you and a full stack is which tool you happen to be holding when you crouch over the body. Get that wrong and you will walk away from a hundred corpses with nothing.

Tools, and what each one takes

A corpse is not one resource, it is several, and the tool decides which one you are pulling out. The skinning knife takes hide and leaves the skeleton alone. The cleaver takes flesh and does the same. For bone you want a pick, which is the standard answer for working a body, or a hatchet, which returns bone at a comparable rate and adds a small chance of a head.

That head is worth taking. Run it through a fluid press and it yields further bone, so a hatchet harvest can quietly beat a pick harvest over a long session even though the per swing return looks the same. If you are going out specifically for bone, carry both and finish each body with the one you did not start with.

Where the bodies are

• The desert south of Shattered Springs, where skeletons lie in the open and give up more bone than a fresh corpse does. This is the fastest route early.
• Darfari Cannibal camps, which not only supply bodies but keep chests stocked with bone, so the camp pays twice.
• Refuges and tombs on both maps, worth clearing when you are passing rather than as a trip of their own.

Our camps and NPC locations page maps the Darfari camps by name, twenty one of them, which is as good a farming route as the game offers. The same trip is a thrall run if you bring a truncheon, as our thrall capturing guide explains.

Grinding bone into bonemeal

A grinder turns one bone into four bonemeal, which is a generous rate and the reason nobody needs to farm bonemeal directly. Fangs and horns go in the same bench for the same output, so the odds and ends from your hunting trips are not dead weight.

Bonemeal feeds a set of food recipes and enriches compost, which is the quiet backbone of a working base. Bone itself has a more pointed use at the alchemist's bench, where one gruel, one blood and two bones make totemic fodder. Where all of this sits against the rest of your gathering is in the resources guide.