Greetings Exiles,
The Age of Sorcery will soon be upon us. This massive update to Conan Exiles brings new free gameplay features, content, overhauls, and quality of life improvements. Among these are sorcery, new followers, an attribute and building revamp, creative mode, and more! Certain building pieces and decorations will be tied to the Battle Pass and Bazaar item store. You can get an overview of the major features coming in the update in our recent announcement.
Today, we look at one of the cornerstones of Conan Exiles: Building. For this update, we decided to really make it shine. After all, it’s something that most you spend a lot of time on, so it deserved to live up to its potential.
A mountain-top city using many new upcoming building pieces.
From the outset, our main goal was to make building as effortless as possible for players using both keyboards and controllers. Let’s dive into how we’ve done this.
The New Building Window
In the Age of Sorcery, building will have a brand-new dedicated interface, separating it from crafting and item management. Rather than crafting building pieces and placing them on your shortcut bar, you simply equip your Construction Hammer and enter the building mode. There, you can access building pieces directly from the new UI. Praise Crom, for the days of building pieces clogging up the shortcut bar are soon behind us!
New Building UI window.
In the new UI, building pieces, crafting stations, and decorations are categorized into separate tabs along the top, with subcategories – like different materials or DLCs – listed in a column on the left. This makes accessing whatever you need much faster, especially for players using controllers, who we know from community feedback (and playing) felt the interface was somewhat fiddly compared to keyboard and mouse players.
Quality of Life and Controls
Construction Hammer equipped and materials collected (preferably from the bloody hands of your enemies)? You’re good to go.
To open the building window, you just need to hit F / left bumper. From there, mouse over a piece to see its required ingredients and description, then click it to exit the window and select your placement. Pieces with a green background are those for which you have the ingredients; red for those you don’t. The number in the box indicates how many you can craft without running out of materials, which are now automatically consumed when you place the piece.
A sorcery tower deep within the swamp.
Let’s look at some of the new commands that facilitate the construction of that fortress you’ve been planning. You can now right click / hit right bumper to toggle between either removing or adding building pieces.
When you want to switch building piece and you’ve already placed that piece in the world, you can simply aim at it and click the middle mouse button / press the right stick, “equipping” it to build – no need to open the menu every time.
Of course, all these commands can all be rebound to your preference. There are a number of other minor tweaks and improvements to look forward to as well, but rather than explain the minutiae here, we urge you to play it on testlive when it becomes available in the near future! The Conan Exiles Testlive Client is listed on Steam as a separate game in your library, or through the main game if you swap branches.
A host of new placeables will arrive with the update.
Mod Compatibility
Needless to say, this new structure is designed with mods in mind, and existing mods should continue to work after these changes go live. With the new UI, modders will be able to add their own sorting for placeables and building pieces by adding new gameplay tags to add new categories. Let’s just say that we are more than mod-erately excited.
Screenshot from the Temple of the Gods building competition.
Combined, all these changes make building faster and easier than ever before, including for controllers, and we can’t wait to see what you’ll all create with it. Keep your eye out for more news and blogs on Age of Sorcery.
Stay alive, Exiles