Taking Screenshots is something every video game player loves doing even if a player is not trying to take them to share them. I can’t name a single friend or family member that hasn’t kept an archived file folder of memories from video games, other than those who play on consoles with no capture cards and quite frankly even before I started streaming on Twitch or writing for Basically Average I would take screenshots of anything random that happened in a video game or just odd funny moments.
Admittedly, I wasn’t sharing these memories as much as I do now, regularly sharing occurrences that take place in Discord or on Twitter, but as my desire and need to share Screenshots grew, so did the importance of ensuring that the screenshots were good to look at.
Now, it’s really unfortunate, but the reality is that not every video games has a focus on screenshots and makes it really difficult for players to share their favourite moments from them and truthfully Conan Exiles is one of those games in my opinion. It’s quite shocking to me that the game has been out since 2018 and they haven’t implemented any functionality for screenshots. I even went on the hunt for workshop mods that were going to make taking screenshots easier, but it didn’t seem like there were any, but before you think I’m going to leave you hanging… I won’t.
There are a few things players can ensure that they do and play around with to ensure that they are getting the best screenshots available to them.
HOW TO GET RID OF THE HUD IN CONAN EXILES
To begin, we’re first going to get rid of the most annoying part of taking screenshots in Conan Exiles, the HUD.
This is a simple toggle that only requires you hit Alt+Z on your keyboard or if you’re on controller oftentimes you can simply hold down the pause button for a while to make the HUD disappear, though this isn’t always the case. I would strongly recommend seeing if you can rebind this option, though as I’m not someone who owns a console I cannot tell you whether or not this is possible.
Now, I want to give you a fair warning, Conan Exiles can be pretty glitchy and sometimes Alt+Z doesn’t work. It seems like players may have to use either of the Alts on your keyboard, meaning that sometimes the Right Alt will work and sometimes the Left Alt will work. I don’t know why this is, but I will say that I tend to have more success with the Right Alt than the Left Alt.
CHANGE YOUR FIELD OF VIEW
I strongly recommend that players tamper with their Field of View for every single one of their Screenshots unless they already have the perfect angle that you want.
If you don’t know how to access the Field of View options, it’s actually quite simple and it will require you to first head into the Settings of your game and is under the video options. Here players will be able to tamper with both the Horizontal and the Vertical Field of View in order to get the most of their screenshots.
CHOOSING HOW TO STAND OR POSE
Players will want to ensure that if their main focus is their character that they have something that isn’t so generic. My best solution for this is to use emotes where applicable.
To emote in Conan Exiles players will simply need to hold down their R button or will need to type in /emote with the emote they would like to use.
Now, note that many of the Emotes are not persistent, meaning that you’re going to have to be very quick about actually snagging the moment you want or will have to take a rapid succession of screenshots. I personally do the second as I’ve gotten extremely used to seeing failed screenshots because I’m not fast enough.
I would like to pretend that I have cat-like reflexes, but if you’ve seen me try to successfully complete quick-time events… well, that’s how bad I am at taking screenshots sometimes.
My recommendation is that you use R at first to see what emote you’re going to use and then use the text command so you can quickly use the up arrow to spam that emote and gets the perfect screenshot.
CAN I CHANGE THE TIME OF DAY FOR MY SCREENSHOT?
Yes and no.
Players will only be able to change the time of day if they are an admin on their server, meaning that players who are wanting to take scenic pictures will need to be on a single-player server or will need to make themselves the admin of their server if they are playing with others.
I will only be explaining how to make yourself the admin on a single-player file as I’m assuming this is where the majority of you will be taking your screenshots.
There are a few steps to this process:
Press escape to open your Menu
Select Settings
Select Server Settings
Select MAKE ME ADMIN
Close your Settings or go back to the main menu and now Admin Panel will appear as an option
At the bottom of your Admin Panel you will have some choices on how you want to play with your time of day.
I would strongly recommend using daytime to capture the majority of your images and then using filters on a program such as Luminar to add filters, though at this point there’s a good amount of freeware that can give you what you need.
HOW TO ACTUALLY TAKE THE SCREENSHOT
For any game running through Steam players will simply need to press F12 while Steam is open. Admittedly, I always have Steam open on my computer, but in the instance that a player chooses to not use steam while opening the game they can resort to using Windows Snipping.
Windows Snipping is accessed by using the Windows logo key + Shift + S. This will prompt a user to select which portion of the screen they would like to screenshot and will then be able to save the file wherever they would like, unlike Steam Screenshots which are just the full screen and will automatically save to your Steam folder.
Typically I will use a Steam screenshot if I have to take it quickly in battle and a Snipping Screenshot if I have the time to manipulate the photo.
Users can also download a third-party app such as Dropbox or Onedrive so whenever you hit Print Screen that Screenshot is already saved to your Cloud. For folks who are nostalgic about their gaming, I strongly recommend this as I’ve been the dummy who has lost gigabytes of data from a hard drive crashing which I still have yet to recover.
There are plenty of options for these apps, many of which are free so pick whatever you already have or grab something like Dropbox which has a limited amount of storage for free.
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