If you’ve spent even a few hours building your first base or upgrading basic tools in Enshrouded, you’ve probably hit a wall where you can’t progress without a steady supply of nails. These tiny, unassuming metal pieces are used for everything from reinforcing wooden walls to crafting higher-tier workbenches and even some mid-game weapons. Figuring out how to craft nails enshrouded isn’t overly complicated, but a lot of new players miss the required steps to unlock the recipe and gather the right materials without wasting hours farming unnecessary resources. We’ve put together this guide based on 40+ hours of early-game play to help you get your nail production up and running as fast as possible, no guesswork required.
What You Need to Know Before You Learn How to Craft Nails in Enshrouded
A lot of new players run straight to their workbench expecting to find the nail recipe, only to come up empty handed. That’s because nails aren’t craftable at the basic workbench you build at the start of the game. You’ll need to unlock two key things before you can start producing nails consistently, and skipping either will leave you stuck waiting for random drops from chests or enemy camps.
First, you need to rescue the Blacksmith NPC from the Forgotten Thicket vault, located just northwest of your first starting spawn point. The vault is low-level, so you can clear it with basic stone tools and a few healing berries if you’re careful. Second, you’ll need to build a Smelter at your base, which the Blacksmith will give you the recipe for as soon as you add him to your settlement. You don’t need any rare upgrades to the Smelter to make nails, so you can start production the second you have both of these requirements met. Don’t waste time looting enemy camps for nails early on, since drop rates are low and you’ll need hundreds of them for even a small base, so crafting is always the more efficient option.
Step-by-Step Process for Crafting Nails in Enshrouded
Once you have the Blacksmith and Smelter set up, the actual crafting process is straightforward, even for new players who are learning how to craft nails enshrouded for the first time. Follow these steps and you’ll have piles of nails in no time.
First, you need to farm iron ore, the only raw material required for making nails. You can find iron ore nodes all across the starting grasslands biome, usually on rocky outcrops or near the edges of mountain areas. Each node drops between 3 and 6 iron ore when you hit it with a pickaxe, so you don’t need to spend hours farming to get enough for a big batch. Next, bring your iron ore back to the Smelter and smelt it into iron ingots. Each ingot takes 2 iron ore to make, and takes about 10 seconds to process if you have a full fuel supply for the Smelter. Use wood as fuel for the Smelter when making nails, since it’s the easiest resource to farm in large quantities and you don’t need higher-tier fuel for basic ingot production. Finally, take your iron ingots to the Blacksmith’s crafting bench, select the nail recipe, and start crafting. Each iron ingot produces 10 nails, so even a small stack of 10 ingots will give you 100 nails to work with.
There are a few small tweaks you can make to your routine to make the whole process even smoother:
- Always keep a stack of 50+ iron ingots on hand if you’re planning a big building project, so you don’t have to stop mid-build to farm more ore.
- Upgrade your pickaxe to copper as soon as possible, it cuts down iron ore farming time by almost 50% compared to the basic stone pickaxe.
- If you’re running low on storage space, store extra iron ore instead of pre-crafted nails, since ore takes up less inventory space per batch of 10 nails.
Best Uses for Nails in Your Enshrouded Playthrough
Now that you know how to make nails, you might be wondering why they’re such a high-demand material for most players. Nails are used in hundreds of crafting recipes across every stage of the game, so you’ll never really have “too many” of them sitting in your storage chests.
The most common use for nails early on is base building. Almost every wooden structure upgrade from basic thatch to reinforced wood requires nails to hold the pieces together, and you’ll need dozens of them just to build a basic 3-room shelter with a roof and storage space. You’ll also need nails to craft almost every mid-tier workbench and crafting station, including the Carpenter’s Bench, the Loom, and the upgraded Blacksmith Forge. You can’t unlock mid-game armor and weapon recipes without building these stations first, so stockpiling nails early will help you progress much faster than players who only make them when they’re immediately needed.
Nails are also used in a lot of common consumables and tools, like metal-reinforced arrows, lockpicks for opening rare chests, and even some basic trap builds for defending your base from wandering enemies. If you play with a group, you’ll go through nails even faster, since every player will need their own supply for personal builds and gear upgrades.
How to Speed Up Nail Production for Large Builds
If you’re the type of player who loves building huge castles or complex base layouts, you’ll quickly find that basic nail production can’t keep up with your demand. There are a few simple changes you can make to your setup to cut down production time and get thousands of nails in the time it takes to make a few hundred normally.
First, set up a dedicated iron ore farming route near your base. Mark 10 to 15 iron ore nodes on your map that are within 2 minutes of fast travel points, and run the route once every 30 minutes. Nodes respawn quickly, so you’ll never run out of ore if you stick to a consistent farming schedule. Second, build two or three extra Smelters and set them all to process iron ore into ingots at the same time. Smelters are cheap to build, and running multiple at once cuts down your ingot production time by a huge margin. You don’t need to assign NPCs to run the Smelters if you don’t want to, but adding a worker to each one will let them process ore even when you’re out exploring the map, so you come back to full stacks of ingots ready to turn into nails.
Third, upgrade your Blacksmith’s bench to the second tier as soon as you unlock the recipe. The upgraded bench lets you craft nails 30% faster than the basic version, and also unlocks bulk crafting options so you can make 100 nails at a time instead of 10, which saves you a ton of clicking time. If you really want to maximize production, you can also trade extra resources with other players on your server for nails, but most people find that a few extra Smelters and a solid farming route are more than enough to cover even the biggest building projects. Never buy nails from wandering traders if you can avoid it, since they charge way more in resources than you’d spend making them yourself.
At the end of the day, nailing down your nail production setup early will save you hours of frustration later in your playthrough, when you’re stuck waiting for materials to finish your dream base or unlock a powerful new weapon. The best part is that once you have the Blacksmith and a Smelter set up, the whole process is almost entirely hands off, so you can spend more time exploring the Shroud or fighting bosses instead of grinding for basic materials. If you follow the steps we’ve laid out, you’ll never have to worry about running out mid-project again, and you’ll have a much smoother time learning how to craft nails enshrouded regardless of your playstyle or experience level with survival games.