Revision 70

Rough Hide is one of Windrose's most important early-to-mid game animal materials. It shows up quickly in the starter armor path, keeps turning up in practical equipment recipes, and remains relevant well after the opening tutorial because so many survival and combat crafts lean on leather.

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Where You Notice It First

• Survivor's Set and the early armor path

• Islander Questwhich explicitly walks the player into rough-hide use through the first armor step

• Razor and other early weapon or gear recipes that ask for leather instead of only metal and wood

• NPC Crew via boarding-related gear and other practical upgrade recipes that still want hide long after the tutorial

Why It Stays Relevant

Rough Hide sits in a useful middle ground. It is basic enough to farm in quantity, but valuable enough that you keep spending it on real upgrades instead of throwaway crafts. That is why groups on busy servers feel rough-hide shortages quickly. It is not rare, but it is heavily contested.

Verified Current References

Farming Advice

• Do not wait until you need a full set or upgrade chain to start stockpiling it.

• If your shared world has stripped the starter biome clean, switch to a quieter route or a different world before the shortage wastes more time than the farm would have taken.

• If your base economy is online, check whether the Animal Products merchant route is enough to smooth shortages between hunting runs.

See Also

• Animal Fat - the other animal-drop bottleneck tied to early utility gear

• Survivor's Set - the earliest full armor step that depends on animal materials

• Resources - broader gathering and processing context

Practical Hunting Notes

Hide comes almost entirely from killing Boar in the early game, and that farm is more annoying than it looks on paper. Boars charge on sight, they move in small groups, and they can easily stagger-lock an under-geared character. Most players spend a frustrating evening learning that before settling on a rhythm: bait the charge, dodge laterally, hit the flank, repeat.

The common beginner trap: pouring every hide you farm into maxing the starter armor set. The starter gear gets replaced quickly once story quests start opening up Ancient Ruins and better loot tables, so over-upgrading the first armor tier is usually wasted hide. A sensible default is to upgrade starter pieces only as far as the next quest or unlock actually requires, then shift farming effort toward later crafts (ship gear, boarding equipment, upgraded weapons) where the hide cost is harder to skip.

Drop Count per Kill

Every animal that drops Rough Hide drops it at a 100% rate, so the question is not whether a kill yields hide but how many units each species returns. The table below consolidates community-tested drop counts so you can plan farming rotations around the animals that give the highest hide return per kill rather than whichever is closest to base.

Practical takeaway: Savage Boars pay out five times what a regular Boar does in a single kill, so once the Coastal Jungle is cleared of the obvious wandering pigs, look for the elite variant before chasing an ordinary flock. In the Foothills tier, Goat Leaders and Nanny Goats outpace basic goats by two to three hides each, and the same positioning that lets you pull wolves safely also covers them. Routes that chain a Foothills goat cluster into an Alpha Wolf fight efficiently load a Sailor Backpack in a single trip.