How to Install Conan Exiles and Join a Server

The first person you defeat in Conan Exiles is not something you kill. You beat him unconscious with a blunt weapon, tie him up, and drag him across the desert behind you on a rope. Then you put him on a large wooden wheel until he decides he works for you now.

Conan Exiles is a survival game about labour. You build a base, you fill it with people you have taken, and then something comes to knock it down. Which of those three parts dominates your evenings is decided almost entirely by the server you join, and that decision is made before you have swung anything.

The listing on this site is thin — a single server at the time of writing — which is honest about where this game's population actually sits. Most of it is on Funcom's official servers and on private servers advertised inside their own Discord communities rather than in any public browser.

The server type is the game

Every Conan Exiles server picks a ruleset, and the three of them are not variations on a theme. They are different games sharing a map.

PvE. Players cannot damage each other or each other's buildings. The threats are the world's NPCs and the environment. And the purge. This is the closest the game gets to a building sandbox, and it is where people who want to spend forty hours on a castle end up.

PvE-Conflict. Players can fight each other, but buildings are protected. You will be ambushed at a boss spawn and lose your loot; you will not come home to a crater. A good middle ground and a popular one.

PvP. Everything is fair game, including your walls while you sleep. Most PvP servers restrict building damage to a scheduled window each day so that raids happen when people are online to defend, which is the difference between a competitive server and a server where the largest clan simply deletes everyone.

Read the ruleset before the description. A server calling itself "hardcore roleplay" and a server calling itself "no-rules deathmatch" are the same software with two settings changed.

Official or private

Official servers are run by the publisher, use default settings, and are free of mods. They are also busy, and the good real estate on a popular official server was claimed years ago.

Private servers change things. Faster harvesting so a base does not take a month. Longer or shorter day cycles. Higher player limits, purge frequency turned up or off entirely, mods that add building pieces and storage the base game does not have. Read the settings list a private server publishes, because a ten-times harvest rate and a one-times harvest rate produce two completely different games out of identical code.

Installing it

Conan Exiles is a paid game and it is large. Buy it, install it, and give the first launch longer than you expect — shader compilation on a first run is not the game hanging.

There are two maps. The Exiled Lands is the original, a long desert strip that climbs from a river in the south to snow in the north. The Isle of Siptah is separate content on a separate landmass, and a server runs one or the other. If a server list entry says Siptah and you own only the base game, check whether you can actually join before planning your evening around it.

Single-player exists and is a reasonable place to learn the controls. There is also a co-op mode hosted from one player's client, which works and has a tether — the second player cannot wander to the far side of the map while the host stays home. For anything larger, you want a real server.

Mods, and the error you will get

Private servers use Steam Workshop mods, and this is where most failed joins come from.

Your mod list must match the server's, and on many servers the load order must match too. A mismatch produces a refusal at the join screen rather than a graceful fallback, and the message that comes with it is more useful than most — it names what is wrong.

Two habits make this painless. Subscribe to a server's collection rather than picking mods individually, because the collection carries the order. And when a server updates a mod, let Steam finish downloading before trying again; joining mid-update produces exactly the same error as having the wrong mod entirely.

If you play on more than one modded server, expect to be swapping mod lists between them. There is no elegant way around that.

Finding a server and getting in

The in-game browser is under the multiplayer menu, and it is not the game's strongest feature. It is slow to populate, the filters are unreliable, and refreshing it is a small act of faith.

Use the filters anyway. Filter by map, by ruleset, by region — a server three thousand miles away will feel bad no matter how good its community is, and where a server is hosted matters more in a game with melee combat than in most.

To join a specific machine rather than browsing, use the direct connection field in the server browser and give it the full address including the port. The port is not optional and it is not always the default; a host running several Conan servers on one box has given each of them a different one.

If the in-game path fails you, the Steam client has its own server browser — under the View menu, Game Servers — which accepts an address and adds it to your favourites. Servers you favourite there show up in the game's favourites tab. It is a clumsy route and it works when nothing else does.

Once you find a server you like, favourite it immediately. Conan servers wipe and change hands and quietly disappear, and finding the same one again from memory two weeks later is harder than it should be.

Your first evening on a new server

The game drops you in a desert wearing a bracelet you cannot remove, with no explanation and no tutorial worth the name. Here is the order that works.

Water, then a bedroll. Thirst is the first thing that will kill you and the river is the reason the starting area is where it is. A bedroll is a few branches and it is your respawn point — without one you come back at a random spot on the map, which on a large server means a long and pointless walk.

Stone tools before anything ambitious. Branches and stone give you a pick and an axe, and those give you everything else. The temptation to go and look at the enormous buildings in the distance will get you killed by something with four legs.

Pick your land carefully, and check the rules first. Placing foundations claims the ground around them, which stops other players building nearby. That is a useful defence and it is also the single most rule-governed part of any Conan server. Nearly every community forbids blocking a resource area, a dungeon entrance, or one of the obelisks that the fast-travel system depends on. Building across one of those is the fastest way to have your base removed by an admin, and "I did not know" fails here as reliably as it does everywhere else.

Find the obelisks. They are the map's fast travel, activated by visiting them once and used through a structure you build at home. On a map this size, an evening spent unlocking them is worth more than an evening spent building walls.

Then go and get a thrall. A blunt weapon, some bindings, and the wheel. That is the point at which the game stops being a survival game and becomes the one people stay for.

The loop nobody explains properly

You will work this out eventually. Here is the short version.

Thralls are the progression. Knocking out an NPC and breaking them on the wheel gives you a worker. Crafter thralls make better gear than you can — a good armourer or blacksmith is a bigger upgrade than most recipes. Fighter and archer thralls defend your base and follow you around, and a levelled fighter will out-damage you comfortably.

Not all thralls are equal. The ones from specific camps and from purge waves are meaningfully better than the ones wandering the starting river, which is why players who have been on a server a while are all camping the same three locations.

The purge comes for your base. Activity on the server fills a meter, and when it trips, the game sends NPCs at your buildings. It has been reworked more than once across the game's updates, so the version you meet depends on how current your server is — treat any specific advice about it, including from an old video, as possibly out of date.

The defence is the same either way. Thralls on walls, a base with a chokepoint rather than four open doors, and being present when it happens.

Buildings decay. Structures need a player to visit them or they rot and eventually vanish. Decay timers are a server setting, and they are the mechanism that stops a server filling with the abandoned foundations of everyone who tried it for one evening in 2019. If you go on holiday for a fortnight, ask an admin or a clanmate to touch your base.

Religion is a weapon. Altars let you build toward summoning an avatar — a giant that walks over and flattens a base. Many PvP servers disable them, because a single avatar undoes a month of building in about fifteen seconds. Check whether yours has.

Sorcery is a trade. It was added years after launch and it costs corruption, which caps your health and stamina until you clear it. It is genuinely good and it is not free.

Problems that come up

The browser shows nothing. Refresh, then clear your filters completely and refresh again. The filter state persists between sessions and is the usual culprit.

"Mod mismatch" or a version error. Covered above. Let Steam finish, match the collection, check the load order.

You joined and everything is dark and you are dying. You spawned at night in the desert with no water. This is normal and it is the game's actual opening. Find the river.

Your character is gone. Server wipes are announced by good admins and not by bad ones. This is the single strongest argument for playing somewhere with a community attached rather than the first entry in a browser list.

The server has one person on it. Conan bases take real time, and a base on a dead server is time you will not get back. Check the player count over a few evenings before committing, not once.

If this is not quite it

Conan Exiles sits between two things. If the building and the base defence are what you want and the melee combat is not, ARK and its remastered version do the same job with dinosaurs and a much heavier taming loop, and Rust does the raiding half with guns and no mercy at all.

If it is the survival and the co-operative building without the sieges, Valheim is gentler and much smaller, and V Rising borrows Conan's raid-window idea and puts it in a top-down vampire game that plays better than that description suggests. Soulmask is the closest direct comparison of the recent crop, thralls and all.

For picking between any of them, how to find the best game servers covers the part that matters more than the game does — working out whether the people on a server will still be there next month.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Conan Exiles servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page, and Conan Exiles's own numbers — servers online, players now, activity by hour — are on its statistics page.