Conan Exiles Available Now in Xbox Game Preview

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Xbox Wire.

We’re excited to finally open the gates to the Exiled Lands for Xbox One gamers!

Conan Exiles is an open-world survival game that launched into Early Access on PC earlier this year. The version we’re now bringing to Xbox One benefits from months of content additions, new features, improvements, and enhancements.

Today, in addition to bringing the game to Xbox One for the first time, we have also released a massive expansion update: The Frozen North. The expansion increases the game world by 70% and introduces a cold, snowy region to the north, with hundreds of new items, two new dungeons, tons of new monsters, two new NPC tribes, an all-new temperature system, two new types of building pieces, cooking and brewing and much more! The expansion update is free and included in any purchase of Conan Exiles. You can read more about The Frozen North here.

The update also includes many other enhancements, such as improved combat, improved AI for human NPCs, improved loot, reduced building cost and new official server settings, so now is a great time to play Conan Exiles again, with tons of new content and a host of improvements. You can read more about these improvements here. In short: this version of Conan Exiles is bigger and better than ever!

If you’re new to Conan Exiles, we wanted to put together a few helpful hints on how you can stay alive in this ruthless, savage world.

How to Survive

Conan Exiles is open-world survival game set in the brutal lands of “Conan the Barbarian.” You are exiled and sentenced to walk in a barbaric wasteland where the weak are crushed and only the strong can survive. Here you must fight, build, and dominate the world alone on your own server, or with enemies and allies in online multiplayer.

You start the game in the desert and the first thing that will hit you is the overwhelming heat. Near your starting location you’ll find a half filled waterskin. This will help you against dehydration until you can find a permanent source of water.

To get out of the barren desert you should head along the road leading north. Soon you will come to a lush river valley, where you can find food and water. But you should beware, the area is also filled with dangerous creatures, such as imps, shalebacks and deadly crocodiles.

Pick up rocks, branches and plant fiber from the ground to craft your first tools and clothes. The clothes will grant you some protection against the heat, but even better will be a shelter built from wood and stone.

Your first house can also protect you from the wildlife and other exiles. It’s a good place to store your gear and most importantly place a bedroll or bed. You can set a bed to be your spawnpoint, which means that when you die this is where you will respawn.

You can fight with fists and tools, but before you go hunting for enemies you should make your first weapons. As you fight, gather, build and craft you will gain experience points and level up. Spend points on abilities which improve your stats and on feats that will teach you new recipes.

When you’ve gotten the hang of surviving in the river valley, have a secure base, and can defend yourself, head north across the river. Here you will find stronger opponents but also rare and powerful resources.

The Exiled Lands are filled with dangerous creatures and powerful groups of NPCs, such as the Darfari cannibals, Black Hand pirates and many more. You can knock down human NPCs, drag them back to your camp, and put them on your wheel of pain to turn them into your thralls. These thralls can help you craft, entertain you or guard your camp as warriors and archers.

Following a religion can give you many advantages. Each religion requires different offerings but also grants different bonuses. At their highest level all religions allow you to either summon a huge avatar or to create a defense against one. These are mammoth tasks though, and are often best suited for a group of players in a clan.

The Frozen North

When you have reached mid to high level, around level 30, you should be able to survive in The Frozen North. To explore these vast new lands head even further north and make your way through the mountains. On the other side, you’ll find green fields, thick forests, mist-filled valleys and snow-covered mountains.

To protect yourself against the cold, you’ll need to make fur armor and new types of insulated houses available with The Frozen North. Food and drink can also protect you against heat and cold, as well as provide other bonuses, so brewing and cooking can be very useful.

You can also craft armor from the metal found in falling meteors, and take on extreme challenges in the Temple of Frost and Black Keep dungeons, but if you play on a PvP server your most deadly enemies can be other players.

Make sure to build strong defenses and form clans with your friends for the best protection. Conan Exiles is a world where only the strong survive and the weak are butchered like sheep.

The Road Ahead

When playing, keep in mind that Conan Exiles is in Xbox Game Preview, which means it’s constantly changing and improving. As developers, we want to work with you, the players, in identifying what we need to make better, what we should be adding, and what we should (possibly) get rid of.

Xbox Game Preview is all about creating the game together with the community, and we would love to hear from you via our Conan Exiles Twitter and Facebook channels as well as our official site on ConanExiles.com where we put out the latest updates and developments.

Thank you for reading, and we hope to see you in the Exiled Lands!