How to Cook Meat with a Campfire in Conan Exiles

Survival in the Hyborian age usually ends with tooth, claw, or steel in Conan Exiles, but it’s also entirely too easy to die from more mundane causes — like a lack of cooked meat.

That’s a continuing issue with survival games (especially ones still suffering from a number of bugs and server lag issues…) where certain mechanics just aren’t quite self-explanatory or easy to navigate without explicit instructions.

You need to avoid food poisoning by cooking your raw meat, but the method for getting a campfire going is so unclear that many players are actually dying of starvation.

Haven’t figured out how to cook meat yet? We’ve got you covered with a full run down of how get this process going so you can get to the business of enslaving some thralls and building your own kingdom.

How To Cook Meat In Conan Exiles

First up, your would be conqueror needs to craft the campfire item using this recipe:

• 5 Branch
• 12 Stone

Stone of course is fairly easy to come by, and the branch resources can be  found randomly lying underneath trees, or can be harvested more efficiently by using a hatchet directly on trees.

After crafting the campfire, it should (barring an annoying glitch) show up in your radial wheel. Pull up the wheel, select the campfire, and then place it on the ground using either the right bumper (Xbox One) or R2 (PS4).

Access the campfire’s inventory, then place fuel such as wood or coal on the campfire (with R2 or the right bumper.)

If you haven’t already done so, use an axe on a dead animal to acquire raw meat. Next, place any kind of raw meat on the campfire in the same way as you set the wood or coal.

Now here’s where everyone gets stuck… there’s no clear way to start the fire!

Way down at the bottom of the screen in incredibly tiny font is a list buttons, and that’s where it reveals you press L2 (PS4) or left trigger (Xbox One) to toggle the campfire on (or simply click ON with the PC version).

Once toggled on, the campfire automatically consumes whatever fuel you placed and starts cooking stacks of raw meat one by one. Don’t forget to remove the cooked meat from the campfire inventory and swap it over to your personal inventory!

That’s it! Just repeat the process as necessary to get as much cooked meat as you need — but note that like any other food, cooked meat will still spoil over time and become rotten.

Aside from meat, don’t forget you can make gruel for your slaves at the campfire using this recipe:

• 5 Plant Fiber
• 1 Seed

Other Ways To Eat Meat

If you place 10 points into the Survival bar you can unlock the Raw and Bloody perk, which lets you directly eat raw meat without having to cook it at all. It still reduces your hunger but you don’t contract food poisoning when eating raw meat with this perk activated.

Note that there’s also an alternate method of cooking human meat (yep, human meat, if you’re willing to play a cannibal character). To go this route, devote yourself to Yog at a Pit of Yog, then build the Yog Altar to get the Yog Cleaver recipe.

With that item in hand, you harvest meat from human NPCs, then use it in the Pit of Yog to get purified flesh, which reduces both hunger and thirst.

Finally, don’t forget you can eat insects that are harvested automatically when picking up plant fiber. Every few plant fiber resources you harvested will place a handful of insects into your inventory. While this isn’t as efficient at reducing hunger or increasing health as cooked meat, it will keep you from starving when you don’t have a campfire nearby, and plant fiber resources are plentiful across the map.

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Have any other questions on how to cook and eat meat in Conan Exiles? Hit us up in the comments below and we’ll get you an answer as soon as possible, and don’t forget to check out our other Conan Exiles guides over here!