Last updated on July 14th, 2017

1. Conan Exiles Build Calculator

Thuggery.Every blow you strike with a truncheon deals 100% more concussive damage. Salting the Wound.You now deal 25% increased damage to enemies affected by negative status effect (i.e. Cripple, bleed, sunder).

Through the years the world of Conan the Barbarian has been the height of pulp. Whether it’s through film, comic, book or game, the franchise has always been about delivering sensationalized gore, head decapitations, grotesque monsters, feats of strength and beautiful, scantily clad people. It’s wish fulfillment at its finest. So, why should a survival game based in the world be any different? Tapping into our inner primacy is a formula that works for entertainment and online, open world gaming is a perfect playground for our inner savage. Conan Exiles, an open world, survival game with light RPG elements from developer Funcom may just be the head smashing, war mongering orgy we’ve all been waiting for.

Conan Exiles Features

• Survive the barbaric wasteland by gathering food, water and resources.
• Build your legacy in a vast, seamless world. Construct and improve your home and craft new gear.
• Discover the dark history of ancient civilizations and unlock the secrets of their power.
• Defend your land with an army of slaves to dominate your enemies. Sacrifice your foes to call on the power of the gods.
• Play alone locally or with others on public and private servers that can be fully customized.

Conan Exiles Story & Setting

In Conan Exiles, the premise is simple: you are an exiled outcast punished to wander a wasteland that is defined by survival of the fittest. In order to thrive, you must find a means to live, construct a new life and crush your foes in your rise to glory.

A mysterious serpent bracelet has been placed around your wrist which will kill you if you try to escape by crossing the huge Cursewall surrounding these lands. You will have to forge ahead and discover who put the bracelet on you and why you have been exiled to these harsh and unforgiving lands.

The land you will now call your home is a seamless world populated by the ruins of ancient civilizations. Of course, their secrets have been lost to time and you will have opportunities to uncover these secrets as you conquer their locations. There is treasure and knowledge to be found in these areas, but there are also dark forces of the world you will have to contend with. You will be learning about the former denizens of this world and the story of their fall by reading inscriptions, books and by observing the environments themselves.

The world is a sandbox that can be explored fully and features a variety of different locations such as lush green vegetation, burning sand dunes, and underwater destinations. As you explore you’ll encounter larger than life enemies from mythological lore.

Gameplay

From the get go, after character creation, you start with absolutely nothing. The game is classless so it will be up to your wits and skill to survive and make best use of everything before you. Your first journey will be to find food and water and get out of the dangerous sandstorm that ravages the desert and seek safety. But basic survival is not simply eating and drinking, as you’ll also have to protect against the elements and steel your mind against insanity. Your next step is going to be about securing shelter which is where the game’s build mechanic takes over.

Build Your Foundation

The building blocks you’re going to use to build your domestic domicile are divided into 3 tiers. At the onset, you’re only going to be able to create very basic structures made of stone and wood. They will provide basic protection from the elements but are not sturdy enough to protect you from attacking enemies. The more you progress in the game, the better types of walls and foundations you’ll be able to erect. At tier 2 you will be able to build more reinforced structures that also have an aesthetic upgrade. At tier 3, you’ll be able to create fortress like structures that can stand against enemy onslaughts, while also boasting some impressive architectural design.

Eventually, you’ll be able to progress the interior of your home and outfit it with stations for crafting where you can create better weapons, armor and items. You’ll also be able to decorate and furnish your house with collectibles and trophies you gain from your conquests.

The game will task you with exploring your locations and surroundings to find materials you need to engage in crafting. Everything you find will be used to build your burgeoning empire and the tools and weapons that you will use to defend it.

Violent Tendencies

All of this careful construction has a purpose. Protection. But sometimes you’re defenses will crumble, or you’ll be ambushed while out looking for resources and that’s where the game’s tactical and gory twist on combat take center stage.

Your first line of defense is the weapons you are going to be wielding. There are a variety of different weapons you can wield and each has their own situational benefits and tactical strengths. You can sword and board for a balance of offense or defense. There are a variety of one handed weapons that let you do this and feature quick movesets. The two handed weapons trade the defense of a shield for powerful offense, and the variety of ranged weapons let you pick off enemies and hunted prey from safe distances. All the weapons have their own unique movesets and the game’s combat is designed to be tactical rather than hack and slash. You’ll have to carefully consider your opponent and what their strengths and weaknesses are and when engaged will have to take measured strikes for effectiveness.

When you’ve put it all together and start landing blow, the game will reward your prowess in an all too Conan the Barbarian like fashion. Enemies can be literally cut to pieces; you can sever arms, legs, heads or even cut them in twain as they explode in a bloody mess. Every killing blow can result in these kinds of moments, building an anticipation in combat to a goretacular finish.

Gods of War

As you work to build and improve your living situation you will have the opportunity to build an empire and populate your territory with loyal servants. Via the game’s Thrall system, you can enslave people of these lands and force them into a life of servitude and defense of your land. If they won’t comply, you can break their spirit on the ruthless Wheel of Pain, and then assign them to one of several roles, such as city defense, entertainers which help regen your health and reduce your corruption, and crafters that can make unique gear. In a game based on survival, people are the ultimate resource.

Once you’ve raised an army of sufficient size to satisfy your desire for conquest, you can march forward against your enemies, making use of explosives to demolish their territorial defenses. Once you get through their defenses you can move on in to clean up what’s left in typical bloody fashion.

The brutality doesn’t stop there as you can drag the bodies of your defeated enemies back to your land, cut their hearts out and sacrifice them to your god to earn blessings. Curry enough favor with your god and you will be able to summon avatars of them that will devastate the battlefield.

Mutliplayer & Mods

Conan Exiles can both be played alone or on persistent multiplayer. If you choose to connect online you have a couple of different options. You can join the official public server and engage in survival and battle against players all across the world. Or you can rent and set up your own private servers where you can customize the rules and settings for an adventure that is uniquely yours.

The goal at early access launch is for a player count of up to 70 online in a server. The official public servers will support PvE, PvP and something called PvP Blitz. In PvE and PvP servers what transpires there is pretty straight forward. You either work to survive or survive and fight each other, and the servers never get wiped, making the history persistent. The PvP Blitz server is an accelerated server that speedily lets you experience everything the game has to offer but then wipes after 30 days. Furthermore, the servers with have filters that allow players to select the kind of experience they want:

• Purist
• Relaxed
• Hard core
• Roleplaying
• Experimental

Each one of those servers is tweaked to focus on that core element, allowing for a substantial amount of player diversity.

Private servers will allow for much more control of the game’s settings. You can alter the the environmental effects, NPCs, health, resources, spawn rate, etc. You can even buff your characters by making them invisible, increasing their speed , remove hunger and thirst and more. The amount of options all let you set up special scenarios based on wildest imaginings.

The game will also fully support mods on PC, based on an Unreal Engine editor. Anything created via the mod tools will connect to the Steam Workshop to allow for easy plug in access.

Conan Exiles is aiming to take the survival genre of gaming that has risen in popularity and escape its trite focus on surviving the zombie apocalypse by thrusting players into the height of pulpy adventure. And we do mean pulp. Spectacular kills and brutal subjugation all reign supreme in this hostile desert. The game’s robust crafting and building mechanics combined with the promise or threat of total destruction give it a smart core that belies its gratuitous surface. Early access begins January 31st, and we’ll be sharpening our spears in the meantime. This is Conan after all. What would it be without a little innuendo?

Visit the Conan Exiles Wiki

With so many stats and so few points to distribute, building the perfect Conan Exilescharacter requires a careful stat build focus if you want to survive in either solo single player or a full PvP server.

While choosing your stat build, keep in mind that you can actually respec at any time by brewing a yellow lotus potion with 10 yellow lotus blossoms, so trying out different builds isn't all that difficult.

Below we cover all the worst and best stats to focus on for a killer build. For the TL:DR version, here's the basics of what you need to know:

Conan Exiles Build Calculator

No matter what your particular build focus is, in general, it should have Vitality highest, then decide if your next-best stat should be Encumbrance, Strength, or Grit; then focus on the other two. Any remaining points can be spread across the rest of the stats (except for Survival, which you don't need).

Survival

More than just a dump stat, Survival is pretty actively pointless in nearly all scenarios. Picture a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, and you are almost at the utter uselessness that is the Survival skill.

Sources of food and water are plentiful, and you can craft items like berry pulp that are much more efficient than water skins, so it's just an all-around worthless stat.

Presumably, the developers will change how this stat works in a future patch to make it worthwhile, but for now, put your points elsewhere instead of lighting them on fire and watching them burn with Survival.

Accuracy

At the moment, ranged combat just flat-out isn't as damaging or efficient as melee combat. In other words, this is dump stat number two, and it's best avoided.

If you put a ton of points in here and really focus on bows, you can get something halfway decent going with your Conan Exiles build, but frankly, it's a better idea to go with Strength and a melee weapon.

This remains true in either a solo private server of a PvP scenario, as the many obstacles in the terrain and the stamina system mean that you can pretty much always chase an opponent down and eventually force a confrontation instead of having to hit them from afar with a bow.

Agility

With a direct impact on your armor's effectiveness, Agility seems really useful at first, but in most cases, you really only need to put 10 points in here to get reduced stamina loss from sprinting.

If you tend to get hit a lot, then it can be a better stat to focus on, but for the most part, it's better to avoid getting hit in the first place by staying out of harm's way or simply having more health from the Vitality stat.

Grit

There are ways to game the system and handle your stamina based on skill rather than raw stats, but in general, it's a bad idea to have a low pool of stamina in combat situations (especially in PvP).

At the very least, getting to 20 in Grit for the bonus stamina regeneration is a good idea in most builds. If you manage your sprinting and combat properly through lots of practice, however, you can keep Grit to a minimum and place those points elsewhere.

You want to be able to keep sprinting away when things go badly

Encumbrance

Whether you want to put a focus on points here depends largely on how you play, but for many players, the ability to carry more in a survival game is always welcome.

Yes, food spoils and needs to be consumed rather than hoarded, but when carrying other materials around for building, you generally want more available inventory space. Pack Mule in particular is a pretty hefty perk to aim for. The lower-tier perks also make you more resistant to crippling slow effects and knockdown.

Adobe acrobat 7.0 professional download. Keep in mind that a full set of light armor gives you a big bonus to Encumbrance, so you can artificially inflate this stat without actually putting points here.

Vitality

Ironically, the polar opposite of Survival, you want a hefty Vitality score to actually survive. In particular, you want to get to 30 Vitality quickly for the passive health regeneration perk. That easily makes Vitality the best stat at the moment -- and the one you most want to focus on with your build.

Strength

Points in Strength don't scale quite as well as the other stats, which give you bigger boosts to their various areas of influence, but you still want to put points here. Since ranged weapons aren't as useful, you want to be able to land strong blows more often with a melee weapon.

Particularly at the lower levels, during which you're focusing on Strength, using two daggers can keep you alive due to the bleed effect and ability to cartwheel backwards out of harm's way. Combining dagger attacks with the Salting the Wound perk acquired at the second Strength tier can be very effective.

Going to the full 40 points for the Brutal Strikes perk can be useful, but it means losing out on a lot of other stat boosts, so if you want that perk, be sure to use items and potions that give you a Strength boost.

Bleeding an enemy with daggers (thanks to The Vaniverse Gaming for the screenshot)

What's your favorite Conan Exiles stat build, and do you have any tips for a great stat breakdown and perk scheme for us to try out? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to check out our other Conan Exiles guides here: