If you’ve spent your first few hours in Enshrouded chopping wood, mining stone, and fending off low-level shroud creatures, you’ll quickly hit a progression wall when you want to upgrade your rickety wood base to sturdier materials, or craft better healing supplies for longer exploration runs. That’s where knowing how to make a mortar enshrouded comes in handy. It’s one of the most underrated early-game crafting stations, and I spent 10 hours on my first playthrough before I realized I’d skipped it entirely, forcing me to backtrack for materials just to make the glass I needed for my alchemist table. Don’t make that same mistake.
How to Make a Mortar in Enshrouded: Required Materials and Crafting Steps
The best part about the mortar is that you don’t need to rescue any NPCs or explore dangerous high-level areas to unlock its recipe. It’s available from the moment you spawn in your starting base, and all required materials can be gathered in the Springlands starting biome within your first hour of play. You won’t need any upgraded tools to collect these items either, a basic stone pickaxe and axe work perfectly.
- 8 Stone: Mined from any regular gray rock node scattered across fields, hills, and forest edges in the Springlands
- 4 Dirt: Collected by digging grassy or bare ground with a pickaxe or basic shovel
- 2 Twigs: Gathered from small leafy bushes, or as a byproduct of chopping any tree with a stone axe
Once you have all the materials in your inventory, open your personal crafting menu, navigate to the “Utility” tab, and scroll until you see the mortar option. Click craft, and the station will be added to your inventory in a few seconds. You can place it anywhere in your claimed base area, or even carry it with you if you want to refine resources on the go during long exploration trips. I keep a spare mortar in my exploration backpack for grinding stone into powder when I’m clearing out distant shrouded areas, so I don’t have to carry as much raw stone back to my main base.
What Can You Craft With a Mortar in Enshrouded?
If you’re still on the fence about taking the time to make a mortar in Enshrouded, this list of use cases will convince you it’s worth the tiny time and resource investment. It’s not a one-and-done station you use once and forget; you’ll rely on it for every stage of the game, from early base builds to late-game exploration prep.
First, Stone Powder is the most common item you’ll make with your mortar. One piece of raw stone turns into two piles of stone powder, which is the base ingredient for cement, glass, and even explosive ammunition for your crossbow or grenade launcher. Cement is required for all stone building parts, which are three times more durable than wood and won’t catch fire if a stray fire arrow or fire-based enemy attacks your base. Glass is mandatory for the alchemist table, which lets you make healing potions and resistance buffs you’ll need to survive higher-level shrouded areas.
You can also process plant fiber into Crushed Plant Fiber, which is used to make cloth, upgraded bandages, and fire resistance potions. Regular bandages only heal 20 health, but cloth bandages made with crushed fiber heal 50 health, which is a game changer for early-game fights against wolves and shroud scavengers. Later on, once you rescue the Farmer NPC, you can grind monster bones into bone meal to cut crop growth time in half, so you don’t have to wait around for hours to harvest ingredients for cooking recipes.
I like to keep two mortars in my main base once I hit the mid-game: one dedicated to stone and mineral processing, and another for organic materials like fiber and bones, so I don’t have to swap back and forth between recipes when I’m prepping for a long exploration run.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Using Your Mortar
A lot of players skip learning how to make a mortar in Enshrouded early on, so these common missteps are super prevalent in new player communities. Avoiding these will save you hours of wasted time and resources over the course of your playthrough.
First, don’t place your mortar inside unclaimed shrouded areas. If you set up a temporary outpost in a shroud zone to mine rare resources, your crafting stations will take constant damage from the shroud, and the mortar will stop working entirely if the shroud level is higher than your current clearance. Stick to placing it in cleared, claimed base areas for consistent, uninterrupted use.
Second, don’t waste polished or reinforced stone on making stone powder. Regular raw stone works exactly the same for all mortar recipes, so save the higher-grade stone for structural building components that need extra durability. I’ve seen new players grind up a whole stack of polished stone for powder when they could have used the low-grade stone they had sitting in a storage chest, and they had to spend an extra hour re-mining stone for their base upgrades.
Third, remember you can queue up to 20 crafts at once in the mortar. I used to sit around clicking one craft at a time for 10 minutes to make enough stone powder for a cement batch, until I noticed the queue option at the bottom of the station’s crafting menu. That small trick saved me hours of idle waiting over my first playthrough. If you’re playing co-op, assign one person to handle mortar crafting while the rest of your group gathers resources, it speeds up base progression by almost 50%.
Upgrading Your Mortar for Faster, Advanced Crafting
The basic mortar works fine for early-game needs, but once you rescue the Blacksmith NPC from the Ancient Spire in the northern Springlands, you’ll unlock the recipe for the Industrial Mortar, a upgraded version that cuts crafting time in half and lets you process high-tier materials you can’t use with the basic model.
To craft the Industrial Mortar, you’ll need 1 basic mortar, 10 iron bars, 5 mechanical parts, and 2 pieces of glass. It’s a small investment for a huge quality of life boost, especially if you do a lot of building or resource refining. The Industrial Mortar can process obsidian into obsidian powder for late-game building materials, and crystal into crystal dust for powerful magic potions and enchanted weapon upgrades.
You can also place storage chests directly next to any mortar to pull resources automatically, so you don’t have to carry all your raw stone and fiber in your inventory every time you want to craft. I have my Industrial Mortar set up between a stone storage chest and an organic material chest, so I can queue up 100 stone powder crafts in 2 seconds without having to move anything between inventory slots. That makes prepping for large building projects or long shroud exploration runs so much less tedious. You’ll also need the Industrial Mortar to make the large explosive charges required to clear blocked passageways and unlock new biomes later in the game, so it’s not just a quality of life upgrade, it’s a required progression step.
At the end of the day, taking a few minutes early in your playthrough to make a mortar enshrouded will save you hours of frustration later on. It’s a low-investment crafting station that unlocks almost all the core progression paths in the game, from better building materials to stronger healing items and even combat supplies. Don’t put it off like I did my first run, craft it as soon as you have the 8 stone, 4 dirt, and 2 twigs needed, and you’ll be set up for smooth progression through the early and mid-game. If you have any other underrated Enshrouded crafting tips, drop them in the comments below.