As there are about 11 billion content creator, influencer, and fan vlogs for every single video game on the market, and since many of them are monetized, connected to Twitch for drops and Discord for everything else, I figured it was the perfect time to start an old timey word blog about stuff no one wants to spend time reading.

I’ll get to the “why?” or the about page soon enough, but let’s jump right in…

Conan Exiles has been around for a while, but I didn’t get into the game until a couple of years ago. Survival games have never really piqued my interest. You’d think, given my past history with SimCity and The Sims (I have a past history playing SimCity and The Sims) that survival games would be a natural progression. “OK… but what if you could play from the perspective of the Sim. Oh, yeah. And there are giant monsters.”

It’s a good day to be alive.

At any rate, I’m the last person to write about the history of Conan Exiles, since I wasn’t around for most of it. However, there has just been a massive update. Not only has the game progressed from the Age of War to the Age of Heroes, the new update introduced a feature called “living settlements.”

Until now, thralls in Conan Exiles carried out the same crafting animation at their perspective workstations, or you used them as props to make your base seem more realistic. That never really worked, though, as unanimated thralls just stood or sat there staring mindlessly into the void, or you set them to perform specific animations they performed until you set them to do something else.

For video game NPCs called “thralls”, they were mostly worthless (other than providing crafting boosts).

Living Settlements was supposed to change all that. No longer tied to crafting stations, your thralls would now wander around the city, each with a base set of needs hidden from the user. Thralls would no longer be bound to crafting stations at all, but would still provide a stat boost to the applicable crafting station(s).

If you kept up with news from Funcom about the living settlements feature, you were told that one of the needs your thralls would have is sleep. Makes sense. Even “indentured servants” need to re-up the energy. Funcom advised providing sleeping quarters and access to food and water for all your thralls.

Great!

At the time, I was working on what I consider to be my magnum opus Conan Exiles build (the building tools in Conan are pretty impressive and easy to use), because I’m the sort of person who would consider a video game build where the objects weren’t made – but just placed – by me a magnum opus in any sense of the phrase.

I called it “Conan Takes Manhattan”, and it comprised six fully-functional cities that I planned on growing until they outskirts grew together and they formed a giant metropolis.

I also had 350 thralls.

Oops.

Here’s what happened to my thralls when I first launched my Exiled Lands map with the living settlements feature enabled:

All my thralls scurried away, many never to be seen again.

Many of the remaining thralls high-tailed it to the nearest pot o’ gruel, then found a chair to get stuck in.

Where they remained….

The few thralls I actually saw walking around ever highlighted an old, outstanding issue with Conan Exiles which is this: sometimes the physics of a foundation, floor, or even the map just disappear… and then you fall to your death.

Being somewhat lazy, but also loving stuff that’s cool, I’d built my city around a system of underground tunnels that include an entire shopping district. Where the sub-level wasn’t hollowed out for use, I’d stacked foundation blocks on top of each other to reach the desired height.

Foundation blocks through which my thralls were falling only to get stuck in the foundation block beneath it.

Where they remained…

I was just about to delete my entire build and start from scratch when I decided to read some forums, and holy crap were people having issues. “Where’s Waldo?” but like played with seething anger by people who’d spend potentially months invested in leveling up Waldo until he was a demi-god.

Bye, Waldo!

Fixing Living Settlements

To be fair, Funcom has already patched the living settlements system. I was going to try it on my Isle of Siptah map (both my maps are single-player at the moment), but the two maps share server configurations, so you can’t enable living settlements (on the Server tab under Settings, first checkbox in the section after the “Make me Admin” button) on one map and leave it off on the other.

That’s a real bummer. With only two official maps to choose from, not being able to use one as a test of new features while keeping the other pristine is really annoying. My Siptah build has like five thralls total in a relatively small space. My Exiled Lands build…

It became clear to me that the free movement portion of living settlements wasn’t going to work for the way I built the city, and nor did a bunch of zombies standing on tables eating empty bowls of imaginary gruel do much for the “living” feeling Funcom was trying to deliver.

I disabled that $%#^.

But I still wanted thralls that walked around and did more than repeat the same predictable animation over and over and over again.

Fortunately, Conan Exiles has a fairly robust modding community and a workshop page on Steam. Integrating mods with the game is really as simple as subscribing to the mod, making sure it’s active in the mods panel of the launcher, then re-starting. You have to pay attention to competing mods and run order (sometimes), but that’s as tricky as it gets.

Funcom also introduced a feature in a previous update that allowed the placement of taverns in your settlement. With a tavern built from the standard build menu, and a thrall (rescued from the purge unless you’re a stinking cheater…which I am) to person the bar, various NPCs would wander in and take up any nearby seating, set a while, then wander off again.

My solution to the “but I want living settlements now” dilemma combined both concepts.

First, I installed a mod called “Immersive Routines”, which you can find on the CE Steam Workshop or Nexxus Mods.

Then, rather than have centralized taverns with a bar inside, I placed a bar and barkeep at various spots throughout the city.

Immersive Routines allows you to control the thralls you choose on an individual basis through, as you might have guessed, a routine by assigning one or more (up to 10) tasks to a thrall that it will carry out until you tell it to stop. As opposed to living settlements, this feature isn’t restricted to crafting thralls. You can have archers patrol your ramparts, or a bearer wander the city delivering packages (or appear to, at least). And, because you only apply the routines to a thrall if you choose, the mod doesn’t seem to interfere with other base game features (like living settlements, for instance).

Now there are busy people wandering everywhere, scrubbing the floors, patrolling the streets, and meeting up in the square for a chat.

But it’s still not quite random enough to feel “immersive.” For me, at least. That’s where all the bar tops come in. I scattered them about in strategic locations throughout the city. Tavern patrons will start appearing as soon as you’ve placed a suitable npc behind the bar providing you remain within a certain distance from it. Wander out of range and the patrons start wandering away.

This works great for me, as I now have the occasional rando wandering by when I’m building or getting ready to go out and murder pixel animals for fun and profit. Seating needs to be relatively close to a bar top to attract patrons, but the good news is that proximity seems to be a full sphere. If you have multiple levels, patrons will wander all over your build getting to the best seat nearest the bar, even if that seat is above or below.

People wandering everywhere, and many of them unplanned. Walking the streets, perusing the storefronts of the underground mall, falling through floors to be trapped in stone forever…

Wait!

Did I say that the first thing I did was install Immersive Routines? No.

The first thing I did was rebuild my city almost from scratch.

Immersive Routes is an amazing mod. I don’t know if the path-finding abilities of NPCs following a routine are enhanced by the modder at all, but they’re impressive whether they come from the mod or the base game. I know that with IR installed, NPCs stuck in foundations will pop up out of them and continue on their way when a player gets close (provided their center of mass is above the walkable surface of the foundation). That sure doesn’t happen without the mod.

What was clear to me was that I had been building incorrectly for the strengths and limitations of Conan Exiles. When I rebuilt, I tried a new approach.

No stacking foundations where there is any chance an NPC (or even my toon) could walk on it. It took a long time to fix (and involved completely sacking my other settlements to concentrate on the one big one), but now there isn’t a single staircase in which an NPC can get trapped. All foundation stacks have been replaced with walls or other structural elements (pillars, arches, etc) where possible.

Because of my tentacles (I will explain later and this has nothing to do with manga, anime, or seafood), I also took the time to shore up my thralls.

I made a spreadsheet.

It became necessary. Thralls were transporting themselves to the map’s zero coordinates. They were getting stuck in mid air. Some just showed up as eternally dying and then being “not found” by the game. Yesterday, I unearthed a group of armorsmiths that had been trapped in a stone foundation for an entire week, bless their hearts.

Another benefit of using Immersive Routines and the tavern system is that busy city is busy. With so much activity, and with the crafting benefits of proximal thralls still in effect with living settlements disabled, I was able to drastically reduce my thrall count and keep even the shopping district (a series of crafting stations with storefronts, really) feeling fully-staffed and alive.

The downside of this process is really the time-sink it has become. First off, building an entire virtual city twice can get pretty dry after the 15th straight day wielding the building hammer. Second, I just can’t do this by half measures. My mind took what living settlements was supposed to be and ran with it.

Now, all my thralls are getting dedicated housing.

All 220 of them.

In addition to all the housing, I’ve a hotel for visiting dignitaries (and one for visiting indignitaries as well), city watch precincts in each district, a central park (currently overrun by refugees), a zoo (currently overrun by spiders), a crafting academy, a wall with ramparts and housing/storage, a bank (surrounding the vaults), a gladiator arena and accompany ludus, and the big freakin’ castle is currently underworks…

OK. I’m starting to get carried away, but like I said at the beginning: magnum opus.

Much more fun when you aren’t spending your time picking thralls out of the floors and tables.

With a few adjustments, Conan Exiles is a great survival game. Just avoid the FOMO bazaar (or don’t. you’ve been warned), find a few mods to do what the game doesn’t, and have a blast.

If Funcom has truly fixed living settlements, shoot me a line? Without the ability to test on my Siptah Map, I’m not ready to try it out on EL. Rebuilding the city a third time to free thralls I just got done training? Nopus.