If you’ve spent even a few hours messing around in Enshrouded’s post-apocalyptic open world, you’ve probably hit a wall early on when you realize you can’t upgrade your armor, build better storage, or craft healing wraps without a steady supply of linen. A lot of new players skip over learning how to craft linen in Enshrouded at first, assuming it’s a late-game material, but you can unlock it within your first two hours of play if you know what to do. I’ve put in over 80 hours of playtime across three separate playthroughs, so I’m breaking down exactly what you need, where to get it, and how to avoid the common mistakes that waste your time and resources.
What You Need to Craft Linen in Enshrouded
Linen doesn’t just drop from enemies or spawn in chests randomly—you have to process raw materials at a specific crafting station to make it. Before you can start producing linen on demand, you’ll need to gather three core requirements first. Don’t worry, none of them require high-level gear or deep exploration into dangerous shroud zones.
- 2x Flax: The core raw material for linen, found in specific low-level biomes
- 1x Spinning Wheel: The specialized crafting station required to process flax into linen
- Hunter NPC unlocked: You’ll need to rescue the Hunter from his early-game vault to get the spinning wheel recipe
Flax isn’t the same as the random plant fibers you pick off grass while wandering the starting area. It’s a tall, bright yellow flowering plant that grows almost exclusively in the northern meadows biome, right outside the edge of the initial starter shroud zone. Don’t waste time picking every plant you see hoping to get flax—stick to the open fields north of the Cinder Vault, and you can collect 20+ flax in 10 minutes flat. The spinning wheel recipe unlocks as soon as you bring the Hunter back to your base, so that’s the first priority if you’re trying to get linen fast. You can’t craft linen on a regular workbench, no matter how many resources you have, so don’t skip rescuing the Hunter if linen is on your to-do list.
How to Unlock the Spinning Wheel for Linen Crafting
The spinning wheel is the only station that lets you turn flax into linen, so unlocking it should be one of your first three goals after building your initial base. After you build your first workbench and unlock the Blacksmith, you’ll get a side quest to find the Hunter, who’s trapped in a small vault just west of the Revelwood fast travel point. The vault only has level 3 enemies, so you don’t need high-tier gear to clear it—just a stone sword and a few fire arrows to take out the floating shrouds inside.
Once you free the Hunter, you’ll need to build him a basic hut with at least 4 wall pieces, a door, a torch, and a small chest to store his supplies. You don’t need any fancy materials for his hut; regular wood works perfectly fine. As soon as his hut is placed and he moves in, he’ll give you the spinning wheel recipe for free. The spinning wheel only costs 10 wood planks, 5 metal scraps, and 2 string to build, so you can put it together in minutes after unlocking it. Make sure you place the spinning wheel inside a covered base structure, or it will take damage from rain and stop working entirely. I made that mistake my first playthrough, and spent 20 minutes confused why I couldn’t interact with it at all.
Pro Tips for Farming Flax Fast for Linen Production
Once you have your spinning wheel set up, the only limit to how much linen you can make is how much flax you have on hand. Running back to the meadows every time you need more flax gets tedious fast, so there are a few tricks I use to keep a steady supply without wasting travel time. First, don’t sell or throw away any flax seeds you get from picking wild plants.
You can plant flax in your base’s farm plots once you collect flax seeds from wild plants. Every time you pick a wild flax plant, there’s a 30% chance it drops a seed, so save every seed you get instead of trading it to vendors for extra coins. If you plant 10 flax seeds, you’ll get 20 flax and 5-7 new seeds every harvest, so you’ll never have to leave your base to get flax again after your first farm cycle. Also, wear the gathering gloves you get from the Hunter as soon as you can craft them—they double the amount of resources you get from every plant you pick, so you’ll get twice as much flax and twice as many seeds per run.
If you’re really in a pinch, you can also buy small amounts of flax from the Hunter for 5 coins each, but that’s not cost effective if you need more than 10 linen at a time. Oh, and stay away from flax patches that are inside the shroud if you’re early game— the shroud decay will eat through your health before you can collect more than a few plants, and the enemies in those areas are way harder than the ones in the open meadows. Always bring a stack of wood with you when you go flax farming, so you can build a temporary campfire if you wander too close to the shroud and need to reset your decay meter.
Best Uses for Linen in Enshrouded
Most new players only use linen for basic healing wraps, but it’s useful for way more than that, and it’s worth stockpiling even if you don’t have an immediate use for it. The first thing you should craft with your first 5 linen is the padded cloth armor set, which gives you 3x more defense than the starting rags and reduces shroud decay by 10% when you wear the full set. It’s the best armor you can get for the first 10 hours of play, and it only costs 12 linen total for the full set, so it’s a great investment.
You also need linen to build large storage chests that hold 30 slots instead of the 15 slots you get with basic wooden chests. If you’re like me and hoard every resource you find, upgrading your storage with linen will save you so much time running back and forth to dump items between exploration runs. Linen is also required to craft the glider, which is hands down the most useful item in the entire game. You can’t unlock fast travel to every point on the map, so the glider will cut your travel time by 70% once you craft it. The glider only needs 8 linen, 2 wood planks, and 2 leather, so it’s worth prioritizing as soon as you have a steady linen supply.
Even late in the game, linen stays relevant for crafting enchanted cloth armor, high-tier healing wraps that restore 80% of your health, and decorative cloth items for your base. I still keep a stock of 100+ linen in my storage 60 hours into my main playthrough, because I use it for something every time I log on.
If you follow these steps, you’ll have a steady supply of linen before you even start exploring the Revelwood biome, and you won’t hit the same progression walls that trip up most new players. I still keep a full farm of 20 flax plants at my base 60 hours into my main playthrough, because linen is useful even for late-game crafts like enchanted armor and high-tier healing items. Taking the 30 minutes to rescue the Hunter, unlock the spinning wheel, and set up a flax farm will pay off for your entire playthrough, so don’t put it off for later. Learning how to craft linen in Enshrouded is one of the first big milestones that turns you from a confused survivor into a prepared builder, and it’s way easier to do early than most players realize.