Conan Exiles Thick Leather: Thick Hide Sources And The Tannery

Thick leather is the first material in Conan Exiles that you cannot simply walk up to and hit. There is no thick leather node anywhere on either map. What exists is thick hide, which comes off the biggest animals in the world, and a tannery, which turns that hide into the leather every heavy armor piece asks for. Get both halves working and the heavy armor tier opens up. Miss either one and you are stuck in medium gear well past the point where the world stops being polite.

Which animals carry thick hide

Ordinary hide comes off ordinary animals. Thick hide comes off the large ones, so the size of the corpse in front of you is the best guide you have. Bring a skinning knife, because a knife is what pulls hide from a body at all, and harvest the whole animal rather than taking one swing and moving on.

• Rhinos, which are common enough in the grasslands to be a farming route on their own
• Elephants, slower to kill but generous when they go down
• Bears and elk, the northern equivalents once you can survive the cold
• Dragons, which drop it alongside everything else worth having

None of these animals is a safe first fight. A rhino run is the usual answer because rhinos are predictable, they are close to the early river, and you can bait one into a rock and work it down without being trampled. Our camps and NPC locations page is worth a look before you set out, since the same trips that fill your bags with hide tend to run past the settlements you will want later.

The tannery does the conversion

Thick hide goes into a tannery and thick leather comes out, one for one, so the number of hides in your bag is the number of leathers you are going to get. The tannery also returns tar on the side, which is worth knowing before you throw it away: tar is what steelfire is made from, and steelfire is what turns iron into steel.

The tannery does not run on wood or coal. It burns bark, and a single piece of bark buys you twenty four seconds of work. That is the real cost of a heavy armor set: not the hide, which you get by killing things you were going to kill anyway, but the hours of pick swinging at tree trunks that keep the bench lit.

What thick leather is for

The heavy armor line is built on it, which is the whole reason to care: the heavy helmet, pauldron, gauntlets, tasset and sabatons all want thick leather in the recipe. It is also an ingredient rather than an end product, because two thick leather go into every single hardened leather, the material the epic tier of armor runs on. Anything you spend on armor now is leather you will have to farm again later, so overshoot while the rhinos are in front of you.

Put a tanner on the bench

A tannery with nobody standing at it is a tannery running at its worst rate. Tanners are one of the crafting thrall types, they are recognisable in the field by the large cleaver they carry, and placing one at the bench both speeds the work and cuts the bark it eats. What each tier of thrall is worth, and how to knock one out and break it, is in our thrall capturing guide. If you would rather hold out for the best of them, our named thralls page covers where the tier four crafters spawn.

Thick leather sits one step up a chain that starts at a tree and ends at an epic armor set. The resources guide lays that chain out end to end, and our armor guide covers which sets are worth the leather once you can make them.