If you’ve spent more than a few hours exploring the shrouded biomes and building out your base, you’ve probably run into a wall where common crafting materials just aren’t enough to progress. Whether you’re trying to blow up a blocked cave entrance to find hidden loot, craft high-tier ammo for endgame boss fights, or upgrade your base defenses to fend off raider attacks, nitrate is one of the most valuable mid-game resources you can get your hands on. Many new players struggle to figure out how to make nitrate in Enshrouded at first, since it’s not available through basic crafting stations you unlock in the first hour of play. I spent three runs testing the fastest ways to farm and craft this resource, so you don’t have to waste hours wandering the map looking for scraps of it.
How to Make Nitrate in Enshrouded: Required Crafting Station Unlock Steps
First off, you can’t craft nitrate from scratch with basic materials right away. You’ll need to unlock the Alchemy Lab first, which becomes available once you rescue the Alchemist NPC from the Revelwood biome. If you haven’t found him yet, head to the northern section of Revelwood, near the abandoned alchemist’s hut marked on your map once you pick up the related side quest. Once you bring him back to your base, you can build his Alchemy Lab with 10 Wood Planks, 4 Iron Bars, 2 Glass Bottles, and 1 Water Bucket.
Once the lab is set up, you’ll need two core ingredients to make refined nitrate: raw nitrate deposits and charcoal. Charcoal is super easy to make, just put regular wood in any furnace and wait 30 seconds per piece. Raw nitrate is the harder part to find, which we’ll cover in the next section. Each crafting recipe for refined nitrate takes 2 raw nitrate and 1 charcoal, and produces 2 units of refined nitrate. That means you don’t lose much material during the refining process, which is a nice bonus compared to other mid-game crafting recipes.
Wait, can you find refined nitrate out in the wild? Rarely, yes. You might stumble on a few units in abandoned chests in high-level shroud areas, but it’s not nearly reliable enough to rely on looting alone. Crafting it yourself is always the better bet if you need large quantities.
Fastest Ways to Farm Raw Nitrate Deposits Across the Map
Raw nitrate spawns in very specific biomes, so you don’t have to waste time checking every cave or cliffside you run past. I’ve tested dozens of farming routes over my playthroughs, and these are the only spots you need to focus on:
- Cave systems in the Kindlewastes biome: This is by far the best spot to farm raw nitrate. Most cave walls here have clusters of white, powdery nitrate deposits that you can mine with an iron pickaxe or better. You can get 30 to 50 units of raw nitrate per 10-minute run if you stick to the larger cave systems near the volcano edge.
- Shrouded cliffs in northern Revelwood: If you haven’t unlocked the Kindlewastes yet, this is your go-to spot. Look for light gray rock faces on the edges of shrouded areas, you’ll find small clusters of nitrate scattered across them. You’ll only get 10 to 20 units per run here, but it’s enough to get you started until you can travel to hotter biomes.
- Abandoned raider camps in the Lowlands: This is a backup spot for very new players. Raider chests sometimes have small stacks of raw nitrate, usually 2 to 5 units per chest. It’s not a good long-term farming spot, but it can help you get your first few batches of refined nitrate before you travel to higher-level biomes.
One pro tip I always share: Bring a mining buff potion with you when you go farming. It increases the amount of material you get per mining hit by 30%, which cuts your farming time almost in half. You can buy these potions from the Alchemist once you have him unlocked, or craft them yourself with common herbs.
You also don’t have to worry about nitrate deposits respawning too slowly. Most deposits respawn every 15 to 20 minutes of in-game time, so you can loop the same cave system a few times in one play session if you need a huge stack of nitrate for a big project.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Gathering and Crafting Nitrate
I’ve made all of these mistakes myself when I first started playing, so you can skip the frustration by avoiding them. First, don’t try to mine nitrate with a stone pickaxe. It won’t work at all, you’ll just hit the deposit over and over and get nothing. You need at least an iron pickaxe, and a steel pickaxe works even faster. I can’t tell you how many times I ran to a deposit early on only to realize I left my iron pickaxe back at base.
Second, don’t leave raw nitrate sitting in unprotected chests outside your base. Raider attacks will target chests with rare resources first, and if they get into your storage, they’ll steal every piece of nitrate you’ve saved up. Keep all your nitrate, raw and refined, in a locked chest inside your main base building, or in a storage room with walls high enough to keep raiders out.
Third, don’t craft more nitrate than you need for your immediate project right away. Raw nitrate stacks up to 100 per slot in your inventory, while refined nitrate only stacks to 50. That means you can carry twice as much material if you leave it in raw form until you’re ready to use it. It only takes a few seconds to refine a full stack of raw nitrate when you need it, so there’s no point in wasting inventory space on extra refined nitrate.
So if you’re planning a big boss fight or a base expansion, bring the raw nitrate with you to the Alchemy Lab and refine what you need right before you start the project. You’ll save a ton of inventory space that you can use for other materials instead.
Best Uses for Nitrate to Speed Up Your Progression
Now that you know how to get and craft nitrate, you might be wondering what you should use it on first to get the most value. The first thing I always recommend making is explosive charges for clearing blocked cave entrances. A lot of the best loot and hidden NPC quests are behind walls that you can only blow up with explosives, so having a few charges on hand at all times will open up huge parts of the map you wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.
Next, use nitrate to craft high-tier ammo like explosive arrows and shotgun shells. These are game-changing for boss fights, especially the final boss in the Kindlewastes. Regular iron ammo barely scratches most endgame bosses, but explosive ammo will take them down in half the time, and you won’t have to waste as many healing potions during the fight.
You can also use nitrate to craft fire resistance potions, which are essential for exploring the deeper parts of the Kindlewastes biome. The heat damage in those areas will drain your health fast even if you have heat resistant armor, but a fire resistance potion will make you completely immune to heat damage for 10 minutes, so you can explore and farm as much as you want without worrying about dying to environmental damage.
That means you can use nitrate to unlock more content, beat harder fights, and farm even more rare materials faster. It’s one of the few mid-game resources that has uses all the way through the endgame, so it’s worth taking the time to learn how to farm and craft it efficiently.
Nitrate is one of those underrated resources that a lot of new players overlook until they hit a progression wall, but once you get the hang of farming and crafting it, you’ll wonder how you ever played without it. You don’t have to spend hours wandering the map looking for it, just stick to the farming routes we covered, unlock the Alchemy Lab as early as you can, and avoid the common mistakes that waste your time and resources. Once you know how to make nitrate in Enshrouded, you’ll be able to blow through mid-game content, take down endgame bosses, and build out the base of your dreams way faster than you would otherwise. Just remember to keep a few extra explosive charges in your inventory for unexpected blocked paths, you never know what hidden loot you’ll find behind them.