Conan Exiles Hardened Leather Recipe And Every Ingredient It Needs

Most materials in Conan Exiles are one thing turned into another thing. Hardened leather is four things turned into one thing, and that is what makes it the wall between an ordinary armor set and an epic one. A single unit of it wants leather, thick leather, alchemical base and oil in the same window, and three of those four are themselves the output of some other bench. Nobody stumbles into hardened leather by accident.

The recipe

It is made at a tanner's table, the improved version included, and one craft produces one hardened leather in five seconds from the following:

Five oil and two thick leather per unit is the number that hurts. An armor set is several pieces, each piece wants several hardened leather, and the arithmetic runs away from you quickly. Work out the total before you start rather than after, or you will find yourself back at the river with a fish trap at two in the morning.

Alchemical base is the awkward one

The other three inputs are things you gather. Alchemical base is a manufactured good with its own supply chain behind it. You make it on a firebowl cauldron from one gold dust, one silver dust and two ichor.

Gold dust and silver dust are not found as dust. You mine gold and silver, smelt them into bars, and then put the bars through a grinder to powder them, which means a grinder is a bench you need built before any of this starts. Ichor is the easier half: it comes off spiders, scorpions and rocknoses, all of which are common enough that a single trip through a cave will usually cover you.

The knowledge gate

Having the ingredients is not enough on its own. Hardened leather comes with the Exile Epics knowledge, which sits at level 60 and costs thirteen knowledge points, so this is genuinely an endgame material rather than something to plan for at level 40. That knowledge has prerequisites of its own, the star metal tools line among them, which is why a recipe you believe you have unlocked can still refuse to appear. If the bench is not offering it, work back up the knowledge tree rather than assuming something is broken.

What it buys you

Epic armor, which is the tier above the ordinary sets and the reason anyone tolerates the ingredient list. It is a per piece cost rather than a per set one, and the numbers are not small: a Royal epic piece wants twenty hardened leather alongside forty five iron bars, a Stygian Invader piece wants twenty with eighteen star metal bars, and Cimmerian Steel runs from sixteen to twenty five a piece depending on which part of the body it covers. Multiply by five and the reason people stall here becomes obvious.

There is one use that is not armor at all, and it is the loop worth knowing about. The plant-based tannery and the precision tannery are both built with twenty five hardened leather each. The material your tannery makes is the material you need to build a better tannery, so the first batch you produce is arguably better spent on the bench than on a helmet.

Which sets are worth building, and what heavy, medium and light actually cost you in mobility, is the subject of our armor guide. A named armorer at the bench is what unlocks the flawless versions on top, and our named thralls page covers where those crafters spawn.

Two of the four ingredients have pages of their own here, thick leather and oil, and the resources guide shows where this recipe sits in the wider chain.