If you’ve spent hours building your dream base in Enshrouded, you’ve probably hit a point where plain wooden walls and thatch roofs just don’t cut it anymore. Windows let natural light flood into your shelter, keep Shroud creatures from sneaking up on you through gaps, and make even the most basic outpost feel like a proper home. That’s why figuring out how to make glass in Enshrouded is one of the most useful mid-game crafting milestones you can hit. I’ve spent dozens of hours testing different material farming routes and recipe unlock paths, so I’ve put together everything you need to know to get your first batch of glass made without wasting hours running in circles.
Prerequisites You Need to Make Glass in Enshrouded
You don’t unlock the glass recipe right when you start the game, so you’ll need to hit a few small milestones first before you can start crafting. First, you’ll need to have unlocked the Smelter crafting station first — you get this recipe shortly after rescuing the Carpenter NPC early in the game, but you’ll need to upgrade it to at least tier 2 to process sand into glass. Next, you need to have rescued the Blacksmith from the Forgotten Quarry Shroud zone, as he’s the only NPC that will give you the official glass recipe once you turn in the required quest items.
You’ll also need access to the Desert Biome for most of your sand farming, since the starting meadow area has almost no collectible sand nodes. If you haven’t reached the desert yet, don’t stress — you can collect small amounts of sand from riverbanks in the northern meadow area, but it’s much slower than farming desert nodes. I recommend waiting until you have a fast mount to travel to the desert, so you don’t waste half an hour running through Shroud zones just to gather a handful of sand.
Required Materials for Crafting Glass
Each batch of glass you craft gives you 2 pieces, and the material requirements are consistent no matter what tier of Smelter you use. I recommend farming enough materials for at least 10 batches at a time, since you’ll go through glass fast if you’re building a full base with windows. The exact materials you’ll need per batch are:
- 8 Sand: Collected from desert dunes, riverbanks, or mined from sandstone rock nodes
- 2 Wood Ash: Created by burning any type of wood in a Charcoal Kiln
- 1 Limestone: Mined from grey rock nodes found in hill and mountain areas across the map
- 3 Coal: Used as fuel for the Smelter, can be mined from underground caves or bought from the Blacksmith
A lot of new players make the mistake of thinking they only need sand, but the wood ash and limestone act as binding agents that let the sand melt into solid, usable glass instead of just turning into loose molten grain. I’ve found that the best place to farm all these materials in one trip is the western edge of the desert, where sand nodes sit right next to limestone rock formations and cave entrances full of coal. You can knock out all your material gathering in 15 minutes if you plan your route right, instead of running back and forth across the map.
Step-by-Step Process to Make Glass
Now that you have all your materials gathered and the prerequisites unlocked, the actual crafting process is pretty straightforward, but there are a few small tricks to speed it up. First, make sure your Smelter is placed in a covered, dry area — if it’s exposed to rain or Shroud mist, the crafting speed will drop by 50% and you’ll waste coal. Next, add all your materials to the Smelter inventory in the order listed above, then select the glass recipe from the crafting menu.
Each batch of glass takes 90 seconds to craft, so you can use that time to farm more materials or work on other base upgrades instead of waiting around next to the Smelter. If you have multiple tier 3 Smelters running at once, you can crank out 10+ pieces of glass in just a few minutes, which is perfect if you’re working on a large building project and want to make glass in Enshrouded without waiting around for hours. You don’t have to do anything extra while it’s crafting, but make sure you don’t accidentally cancel the process by removing materials from the Smelter mid-batch, or you’ll lose all the items you added.
Best Uses for Glass Once You’ve Crafted It
A lot of new players only use glass for windows, but it’s a surprisingly versatile material that’s used for dozens of useful crafting recipes across the game. First, reinforced glass windows are twice as strong as regular wooden walls, so they’re great for building base defenses in high-risk Shroud zones where creatures often attack outposts. You can also use glass to craft potion flasks, which let you carry twice as many healing and buff potions as the basic leather pouches you get early in the game. Another underrated use is for crafting the Glass Lens item, which is required to build the Spyglass and the Advanced Alchemy Station, two mid-game items that make exploring and crafting way easier.
I also like to use glass to build greenhouses for my farm plots, since they boost crop growth speed by 30% compared to outdoor farms. The only real downside of using glass for building is that it’s more expensive to repair than wood or stone, so I don’t recommend using it for outer walls in areas that get raided often by bandit camps. Stick to using it for interior windows, greenhouse panels, and crafting components for the first few batches, then branch out to decorative uses once you have a steady supply of materials.
Once you get the hang of gathering materials and using the Smelter, figuring out how to make glass in Enshrouded becomes second nature, and it opens up a ton of new building and crafting options that make the game way more fun. Don’t rush to craft it before you unlock the tier 2 Smelter, though, because you’ll just waste materials on slow, inefficient batches. Play around with different uses for glass once you have a steady supply, and you’ll be surprised how much it upgrades both your base and your general quality of life in the game.