Conan Exiles Sorcery Guide: The Tome Of Kurak And What Magic Costs

Sorcery cannot be bought with knowledge points. There is no feat to take and no level that unlocks it, which puts it in the same small category as Frost Smithing: a thing you have to go and touch before you can do it. You have to be told where it is by a dead man, walk into a cave, and put your hand on a book, and from that moment every spell you learn takes a piece of your health away and keeps it. It is the only progression in the game that makes you weaker as you advance.

Start with a dead sorcerer

Sorcerers are scattered around the world and it does not matter which one you find. Loot any dead sorcerer and you get the dead sorcerer's map, which is the item that starts the whole thing.

The map points you to one place per landmass: Shaleback Hollow in the Exiled Lands, or the Cave of Kurak if you are playing the Isle of Siptah. Corrupted shalebacks are waiting at the entrance, and you can fight them or walk past them as you prefer. Beyond them the cave opens into a large cavern with a ruined gateway and wooden plank catwalks, and the catwalks lead to a study full of books with an altar in the middle.

Interact with the tome on that altar and you are a sorcerer. You get a basic staff on the spot, and you get the Tome of Kurak itself, which is the container every spell you ever learn will live in.

The thaumaturgy bench

Touching the tome adds a new structure to your construction hammer: the thaumaturgy bench. Build it and put it down wherever you like, at home or in a forward camp, and its recipes appear in the rightmost window when you interact with it.

Spells are not learned, they are installed. You place a sorcerous spell page into the recipe window along with the other ingredients it wants, and imbuing the tome that way adds the spell to it. From then on you cast it through a staff. The bench is therefore the whole of your magical progression, and you will be coming back to it for a long time.

Fifteen upgrades to the tome

Learning everything sorcery has is not a single purchase. The Tome of Kurak has to be upgraded fifteen separate times at the bench before the full body of sorcerous knowledge is yours, and each upgrade has its own shopping list.

Those lists pull from some genuinely unpleasant corners of the game: sorcerous spell pages, human flesh, glowing goop, blood and brimstone among them. The brimstone is worth planning for, because it is the same material your smithing chain is competing for, as our resources guide lays out. A sorcerer and a blacksmith in the same character means twice the trips to Shattered Springs.

Corruption is the price

Practising sorcery corrupts you. Corruption lowers your maximum health and stamina, and it does not wear off on its own, so an unmanaged sorcerer gradually becomes a character who cannot take a hit or run away from one.

There are two answers and you want both. Purification locations in the world will clear it. So will a dancer, and this is the practical one, because a dancer is a thrall you can own: our thrall capturing guide notes that entertainers remove corruption and restore your health to maximum, and identifies them in the field by the daggers they carry. Anyone intending to cast regularly should have one placed at home before they start.

What the spells are good for

Sorcery is not only a combat toolkit. Its most quietly useful application is gathering, because the Mass Cull spell harvests an entire area at once. Cast in a dense pocket of crystal it returns quantities no pick will ever match, which turns one of the more tedious farming jobs in the game into a single cast.

That is the honest case for taking up magic: not the storm effects, but the fact that a sorcerer's afternoon of gathering is a non sorcerer's week. Whether that is worth a permanent cut to your health is the decision the system is built around. The rest of the game, from thralls to dungeons, is gathered in the Conan Exiles guide.