Conan Exiles Iron Locations: Where Ironstone Is Thickest On The Map

Iron is the material you never stop needing. Stone gear gets you off the beach, and everything after that runs on iron: the tools, the medium armor, the weapons, and eventually the steel and hardened steel tiers that are only iron with extra steps. The word you are looking for in the world is ironstone, which is the raw ore, and the only real question is where it sits thickest.

Where to mine it

Bring a pick. Other tools will return ironstone from a node, but not in quantities worth the swings, and the pick tier does make a difference here in a way it does not on trees.

• The Tower of Bats and Pariah's Overlook are the early answer, close enough to the starting stretch of river that a low level character can run them without dying.
• The corruption area around E7 is the spot our own leveling guide sends you to, because it carries iron and stone together and suits building a small forward camp with a furnace on it.
• Fleshtearer Falls, at the western edge, holds the densest concentration of nodes on the Exiled Lands map. It is a trip, and it is worth the trip.
• The canyon north of the two starter statues, in the H3 and G3 squares, runs up to a plateau and along the cliffs by the bridge. A ten minute circuit there returns several hundred ironstone and the nodes come back reliably.
• The Unnamed City region and the ground around the Mounds of the Dead are the late answers, once the things living there are no longer a problem.

Rocknoses are a second source that walks to you. Kill one and harvest it and you can get ironstone out of the remains, and keeping one as a pet gives you a chance at more. That will never replace a mining run, but it means the rock creature you were going to fight anyway is not a waste of time.

Smelting: two ore, one bar

Ironstone is not usable as it comes. It goes in a furnace with fuel and comes out as iron bars at a rate of two ore to one bar, which is the number to plan around, and a batch takes about ten seconds. Note that this is a two to one trade, not the one to one some guides state. Halve whatever your bags say before you decide you have enough for a recipe.

What iron becomes

Iron bars are a destination for about ten minutes and an ingredient forever after. They make the medium armor pieces, the iron tools that replace your stone ones, and the axes, picks, swords, hammers and pikes of the iron tier. Then they become the base of the next tier up: five iron bars plus steelfire give you steel, and steel plus black ice gives you hardened steel.

Steelfire is the piece that catches people out, because it is made on a firebowl cauldron from tar and brimstone rather than mined. A furnace full of iron and no steelfire is a common way to stall. The whole ladder, ore to bar to better bar, is laid out in the resources guide.