My Conan Exiles “Conan Takes Manhattan” project proceeds apace, and I’m nearing the end of the re-build necessitated by a combination of “Living Settlements” (which just highlighted my lazy building style) and the disappearing floor physics bug.

Cleaning up the mess highlighted my inability to distribute thralls and services (crafting stations, taverns, etc) evenly without taking extensive notes. So I started a list of all the thralls that I’d personalized so I could track whether they had housing. Someone took the living settlements press a little too much to heart.

Still, what else at this point am I going to do with my life? Might as well give into the flow.

You just can’t track all that stuff in Notepad, so the dreaded spreadsheet was born.

At first, I just intended to keep track of thralls by name, class, and tier. Then, whether they had housing to go to or not. I realized I’d have to also be able to potentially find that that housing should the thrall in question get lost someplace in between where I expected them to be and home.

A lot of the information was repetitive, and why have to type it in every time, or rely on autofill to kick in when you’ve type enough of a word for it to be unique.

The spreadsheet is now pretty much a database of city activity: thralls, pets, city services like gruel pots and a courier service. There are look-up tables and data views, reports, and soon VBA forms to edit all of it without mucking it up.

I think I mentioned at one point I had over 250 thralls. That was according to the “followers” tab in Conan Exiles, which is a nearly useless feature. Many of those thralls turned out to be “not found on the map” thanks to the Living Settlements release, and many more fell out of foundations during the rebuild.

Currently, Aresburg is probably about 40% larger in terms of habitable square footage than it was before. Keeping track of who is who and where has made the build seem much more alive than previous, and also allowed me to trim down to a current svelt 166 thralls in total (not including pets.)

That seems excessive, but everything runs just fine. I run into performance issues if I start racing around the build and not letting the system catch up with whatever processes run and stop as a player character approaches or distances anything with proximity triggers in it (like bartops). Likewise, if I make a whole bunch of build changes – either to structures or to the npc database – then I’ll get the occasional panicked crash. In general, Conan Exiles is handling what I would consider a relatively large build pretty successfully on a Legion tower (i7) with a RTX 4060 Ti.

My biggest gripe with performance is actually draw distance. I’ve everything cranked to eleven, but half of buildings still disappear as I look over the city from one end to the other, finally breaking into the random block of material. There has to be a limit to LOD somewhere, I suppose. For the most part, if you’re in a city you don’t really expect to see to the horizon anyway. It’s mostly atmosphere breaking in the “I can’t get a good screenshot like this” sense.

At any rate, spreadsheets to track a video game. That’s the kind of person you’re dealing with here. (I have one for legendary armor in Guild Wars 2, as well. Want to know more? No? Weird.)

I’ll probably make a scrubbed and generic version of the Conan Exiles build thrall tracker spreadsheet thingy available on my Dropbox and link to it here when it’s finished. Because that’s the kind of person I am: offering help no on asked for on a blog no one reads.

I make my own fun.