Conan's Workshop is a gold mine and a minefield. There are genuinely brilliant mods in there that have been maintained for years, and then there are dozens of half-finished ones flagged incompatible that still show up on "top 10" lists written by people who clearly didn't install any of them. So instead of padding this out to fifty entries, I went and checked every mod on this list against the live Steam Workshop the day I wrote it, grabbed the actual author and version, and threw out anything I couldn't verify.
A few things to know before you dive in:
- Every player needs to subscribe to the same Workshop mods as the server. Conan enforces this hard – if a client is missing a mod or on the wrong version, they'll bounce at the connection screen. The easiest way to handle this is a Steam Workshop Collection that you share with your players.
- Load order matters, but only a bit. Most "mandatory load order" guides you'll find on Reddit are lore, not science. The only concrete rule I trust is from mod authors themselves – and for this list that's Tot! Roleplay Redux, which wants to load after Fashionist and around Unlock+. Everything else: if you hit a conflict, disable mods in batches to isolate it.
- Workshop status changes. A couple of popular mods are currently flagged incompatible on Steam. I've called those out where relevant – always glance at the Workshop page before you install.
Admin and server management
Pippi – User & Server Management – by Joshtech
If you install one mod, install this one. Pippi is the Swiss-army knife every Conan admin ends up with: a full permissions and moderator role system, chat commands, custom kits, and the Thespian NPC system that lets you place scripted NPCs around your world for quests, shops or just flavour. It's been actively maintained for years and it's the backbone most other admin tooling assumes you already have.
Honestly, most of the other "admin toolkit" mods you see floating around are either broken, abandoned or trying to duplicate a slice of what Pippi already does. Start here.
Quality of life
Fashionist v4.5.8 (Feature Complete) – by Testerle
The transmog mod. Wear one set of armor for the stats, another for the looks. The "Feature Complete" in the title is a bit misleading – Testerle marked it feature complete a while back but has been quietly recompiling it against new Conan builds (most recently in March 2025), so it's still stable on current versions. Universally popular on RP servers and basically every PvE server I've ever touched.
IQOL (Improved Quality of Life)
Note the canonical name – it's IQOL, not "Improved Quality of Life" spelled out, and there are several similarly-named mods on the Workshop that are not this one. IQOL's headline feature is a character customiser you can pull up in-game with SHIFT+M, plus a grab-bag of UI additions. Think of it as the spiritual replacement for the old CharEditLite mod, which is now abandoned and carries an incompatible flag on its Workshop page. If someone on your server wants to re-edit their appearance, point them here.
Pickup+
Does exactly one thing and does it well: lets you pick up placed items you own, instead of destroying them and losing materials. Saves a genuinely surprising amount of support headache – "I placed my wheel of pain in the wrong spot, can an admin move it" is a ticket you will stop receiving the day you install this.
Building
Emberlight 3.6.7
Emberlight gets described a lot of different ways online and most of those descriptions are wrong – it is not a collection of elven/dwarven/gothic building sets. What it actually adds is a homestead content pack: horticulture, animal husbandry, sericulture, a chroma dye system for recolouring items, and an expanded armory. It plays really well on PvE/homestead servers where the fun is in building out a functional base rather than raiding your neighbour's.
Northern Timber 3.0.16
A compact Tier 1 wooden building set with around 95 pieces. It's narrow in scope on purpose – if you want rustic log-cabin vibes in the colder biomes and you don't want to commit to a giant overhaul pack, this is the one to grab.
Less Building Placement Restrictions (LBPR) v7.5.5
LBPR relaxes the placement rules the base game enforces so you can actually build what you're picturing, instead of fighting the snap system for twenty minutes. Worth knowing: on PvP servers this can open up building tricks that your community might consider exploits, so think about your rule set before turning it on. On PvE it's basically standard issue.
Maps
Savage Wilds 1.5.63
The community-made custom map, roughly 36 km² of new terrain, biomes and points of interest. Big enough that a lot of servers run it as their primary map rather than the Exiled Lands. Worth calling out that map mods are heavy – more on that in the RAM section below – and that not every content mod is compatible with every custom map, so test before you commit a live server.
Content overhauls
The Age of Calamitous
The big one. AoC is a sprawling medieval fantasy overhaul built around two alliances containing six factions total, plus sub-factions, with its own weapons, armor, quests and progression layered over the base game. A lot of older write-ups get the faction count wrong ("five factions" is a common one – not correct) so if you're pitching this to your players, get the number right.
AoC is at its best on PvE and RP servers where people have time to actually explore the faction content. It's big and relatively heavy, so pair it with enough RAM and be conservative about stacking other overhaul mods on top.
Endgame Extended Weapon Arsenal (EEWA) v0.29.19
EEWA is specifically an endgame extension: new weapons, new bosses, new zones, and a progression path that picks up where vanilla Conan runs out of things to do. If your server has players who've cleared the base game and are looking for the next thing, this is the next thing. It plays reasonably nicely alongside Age of Calamitous, though as always, test it.
Roleplay
Tot! Roleplay Redux 2.1.55
The active RP framework for Conan – character profiles, RP-focused chat, description systems, the usual toolkit. The mod's own Workshop page is clear about load order: it wants to be after Fashionist and in the region of Unlock+. This is the one "real" load-order rule in this article and it comes straight from the author, not from a Reddit comment, so it's worth honouring.
Pair it with Pippi for moderation tooling and Fashionist for character looks and you've got most of an RP server in three mods.
Mods I left off (and why)
A lot of lists that predate this one include the following. I looked at each of them and chose not to recommend them, so if you're comparing notes:
- Admin Skelos Collector. This is commonly described online as an admin dashboard with player logs and diagnostics. It is not. The actual Workshop entry is a tiny compatibility patch for the WARRIOR Mutator mod that disables a single recipe. Pippi already fills the admin-tooling role.
- CharEditLite. The Workshop page is flagged incompatible and the original has been abandoned. The community moved on to IQOL's character customiser – use that instead.
- Hosav's Custom UI Mod and Stacksize Plus. Both of these were staples for years, but at the time of writing their Workshop pages are flagged incompatible with the current Conan build. If you're reading this later, check the Workshop status before installing – they may well be back.
- Unlock Plus. Gets mis-described in a lot of places as a "feat points" mod. It's actually a recipe and DLC unlock helper with a workbench pull function. Useful, but not what most people expect from the name, so I'd rather you read the Workshop page directly than take my half-summary.
- Arena Mod and Thrall Wars Dungeon Mod. Either couldn't be verified as a canonical Workshop entry, or don't do what the popular descriptions claim (Thrall Wars in particular is a PvP thrall-capture system, not a curated PvE dungeon pack). Skipping both.
Installing mods on your LOW.MS Conan server
The flow on LOW.MS is a lot nicer than the old "paste a Workshop ID, pray it downloads" dance:
- Log in to the LOW.MS Control Panel.
- Open your Conan Exiles service.
- Click Mod Manager in the left sidebar. It has Steam Workshop search built in.
- Type the mod name (e.g.
Pippi), pick it from the results, and click install. - Repeat for each mod, then restart the server from Service Settings.
If you prefer doing it by hand, File Manager lets you edit modlist.txt directly, which is handy for importing a load order from a staging server or a collection.
Once the server's running, the important step is to share a Steam Workshop Collection with your players so everyone subscribes to the exact same set. This is the single biggest cause of "I can't connect" tickets on a modded Conan server, and a collection link fixes it in one go.
RAM and performance
I'm going to skip the "mod count vs RAM" table you'll see on a lot of hosts, because honestly it's nonsense – RAM usage on a Conan server depends on how many players you've got, how much they've built, which overhaul mods are running, and which map. A Savage Wilds + AoC + EEWA server with a giant city built on it is in a completely different universe from a five-player vanilla-ish PvE server running Pippi and Fashionist, and no mod-count table can capture that.
Better rule of thumb: keep an eye on Current Activity & Stats in the control panel. If you're consistently pushing against your memory ceiling – especially after long uptimes – either schedule more frequent restarts or look at the memory add-ons on the Conan Exiles hosting page. Upgrading is a few clicks, and it beats chasing phantom crashes.
A few general habits that actually help:
- Add mods in small batches and restart between each batch. If the server refuses to boot, you know exactly which mod caused it.
- Don't update the server on Conan patch day. Give mod authors a day or two to catch up – almost every mod breaks briefly on patch day and then gets fixed.
- Back the world up before any overhaul mod install or removal. LOW.MS has Cloud Backup in the sidebar – use it. Removing a content mod mid-server is the fastest way to nuke a world you care about.
- Remove mods you're not using. Every loaded mod costs memory even if nobody's touching its features.
If you're just getting started, the Conan Exiles getting-started guide and the server settings guide are the next things to read. And if something's already gone sideways, the troubleshooting guide has the fixes for the usual suspects.