Conan Exiles Hardened Steel Bars: The Two Ingredient Recipe

Hardened steel has the shortest recipe of anything near the top of the Conan Exiles crafting chain, and that is exactly why it catches people out. Two ingredients, fifteen seconds, one bar. The work is not in the craft. It is in the fact that one of those two ingredients has four benches behind it and the other one lives on a mountain full of frost giants.

The recipe itself

One steel bar and one black ice, in a furnace with fuel, produce one hardened steel bar in fifteen seconds. There is no thrall requirement and no knowledge trick to it. Any furnace in the line will take the job, including the improved furnace, the heat efficient and fuel efficient variants, and the kiln, so whichever one you happened to build is the right one.

The half you have to plan for

Steel bars are not mined. Steelfire, which is tar and brimstone cooked on a firebowl cauldron, goes into the furnace with five iron bars to make them, and iron bars are themselves two ironstone each. Count that back and a single hardened steel bar has ten pieces of ore in its history before the black ice even arrives. Our iron page covers where to mine at that volume.

The other half is a trip north. Black ice only comes out of the Frozen North and the Isle of Siptah, and you want cold resistance and a plan before you go. The good news is that the same run stocks you for star metal, which wants black ice too.

Why you want it

Hardened steel is the tier four tool and weapon material, and tier four is a specific threshold rather than a vague improvement. A hardened steel pick is the tool that can finally harvest star metal ore out of a cracked meteorite, which nothing below tier four will touch. So the ladder is strict: brimstone gets you steel, black ice gets you hardened steel, hardened steel gets you the pick, and the pick gets you the best metal in the game.

It also feeds the armor and weapon benches directly, and a named smith standing at an improved bench is what unlocks the flawless versions of what you make. Our named thralls page covers finding one, and the resources guide lays out every step of the chain in order.