Leather in Welcome to Elderfield is easy to get confused with Rawhide because both materials start from Bloody Skin, but they split into completely different crafting paths. If you need Leather for equipment or structures, you want to make Scraped Hide at the Witching Mortar and tan that in a Furnace rather than turning your Bloody Skin into Thick Hide.

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How to Make Leather
How to Make Scraped Hide
How to Get a Furnace
Leather vs Rawhide
What Leather Is Used For

Make Scraped Hide and Tan It in a Furnace for Leather

To make Leather in Welcome to Elderfield, you first need to turn Bloody Skin into Scraped Hide using a Witching Mortar. Scraped Hide is specifically described as being ready for tanning and directs you to process it in a Furnace, making this the crafting path you want to follow when Leather is your end goal.

The complete process starts with Bloody Skin, but you cannot simply throw the skin directly into a Furnace. First, use the Witching Mortar to make Scraped Hide with 1 Bloody Skin, 2 Crushed Bones, and 2 Salt. Once you have the Scraped Hide, move over to your Furnace and process it there.

This intermediate step is the important part because Welcome to Elderfield has multiple hide materials with very similar names. Bloody Skin, Scraped Hide, Thick Hide, Rawhide, and Leather are not all different names for the same resource, and choosing the wrong processing method sends your material down a different crafting path.

Scraped Hide Requires Bloody Skin, Crushed Bones, and Salt

The Scraped Hide recipe uses:

1 Bloody Skin
2 Crushed Bones
2 Salt

Make this at the Witching Mortar. The Scraped Hide recipe is automatically available once you have access to the Witching Mortar, so you do not need to hunt down a separate Scraped Hide blueprint first.

Crushed Bones are also made directly at the Witching Mortar, with 1 Bones producing the Crushed Bones crafting ingredient. Since each Scraped Hide requires 2 Crushed Bones, I would keep Bones rather than automatically getting rid of them if you know you are about to start crafting equipment that needs Leather.

The material I would be more careful about spending is Bloody Skin. Leather is not its only processing route, and some of the similarly named hide materials are produced from the same starting resource. If Leather is specifically what you need, make sure you are selecting the Scraped Hide recipe rather than the Thick Hide recipe.

You Need a Furnace to Finish the Leather Process

Scraped Hide cannot be used as a substitute for finished Leather in recipes that specifically ask for Leather. Its description tells you it is ready for tanning and needs to be processed in a Furnace.

If you do not have a Furnace yet, Molly is tied to unlocking it. Completing her Helping Molly tasks and getting her back into the Workshop gives you a Furnace and unlocks its blueprint.

After that, additional Furnaces can be crafted using:

5 Copper Ore
20 Stone

I would prioritize getting the Furnace unlocked if Leather is currently blocking your progression rather than stockpiling a pile of Scraped Hide you cannot finish processing. Leather shows up in enough equipment and utility recipes that the Furnace becomes useful well beyond making a single item.

Leather and Rawhide Use Different Crafting Paths

This is the part that can make Leather unnecessarily confusing. Welcome to Elderfield also has a Rawhide production chain that begins with the exact same Bloody Skin resource, but it does not use the Scraped Hide recipe.

If you put 2 Bloody Skin into a Prep Table, you can make Thick Hide. Thick Hide is specifically described as being ready to be dried into Rawhide and tells you to process it on a Drying Rack.

So the two paths are:

Leather: Bloody Skin + Crushed Bones + Salt → Scraped Hide at the Witching Mortar → Furnace

Rawhide: 2 Bloody Skin → Thick Hide at the Prep Table → Drying Rack

If a recipe asks for Leather, I would not make Thick Hide first. That is the Rawhide branch, and you will have spent 2 Bloody Skin going toward a different material when the Leather route begins with Scraped Hide.

This also explains why simply finding references to “hide” online can be misleading. The machine matters just as much as the starting material: Witching Mortar and Furnace for the Leather route, Prep Table and Drying Rack for the Rawhide route.

You Don't Need a Drying Rack to Follow the Leather Path

If you are specifically trying to make Leather, the Drying Rack is not the machine the Scraped Hide recipe directs you toward. The Drying Rack belongs to the Thick Hide and Rawhide processing path.

That distinction is useful because the game otherwise makes the two production chains look extremely similar. The Prep Table itself is designed to prepare materials for Drying Rack processing, while Scraped Hide instead comes from the Witching Mortar and explicitly points toward the Furnace.

I would therefore check the name of your intermediate material whenever you get stuck. If you have Scraped Hide, go to the Furnace. If you have Thick Hide, you have started the Rawhide route and should be looking at the Drying Rack instead.

Leather Is Worth Keeping Because a Lot of Recipes Need It

I would not immediately sell spare Leather even if the first recipe you needed it for is finished. It appears across both practical farm infrastructure and equipment crafting, so it is one of those materials that can suddenly become a bottleneck again.

For example, the Preserving Barrel requires 4 Leather alongside 30 Wood, 8 Copper Bars, and 2 Iron Bars. The Bat Box requires another 2 Leather alongside Copper Bars, String, and Wood.

Leather also appears in a surprisingly wide range of equipment combinations. The Brutal Knife requires 2 Leather, while recipes including the Cursed Axe, Giant Club, and Improvised Sickle use 4. The Gas Mask needs 2, Red Sneakers and Scrap Pants each require 5, and both the Thick Jacket and Tuxedo Jacket use 3 Leather.

That changes how I would handle Bloody Skin as well. Once you have access to the Leather production chain, it is not merely another random enemy or crafting material to dump into storage and forget about. Every Bloody Skin you spend on the Rawhide branch is one you are not putting toward Scraped Hide and eventual Leather, so I would decide what I actually intend to craft before processing a large stack.

Don't Process Bloody Skin Until You Know Which Hide You Need

The best way to avoid wasting resources is to leave Bloody Skin unprocessed until you know whether the recipe you are working toward requires Leather or Rawhide.

If it needs Leather, take the Bloody Skin to the Witching Mortar, combine it with Crushed Bones and Salt to create Scraped Hide, and finish the tanning process at the Furnace. If it needs Rawhide, use the separate Prep Table and Thick Hide route instead.

I would especially avoid turning every Bloody Skin you find into Thick Hide just because that recipe is available. Thick Hide costs 2 Bloody Skin at a time and commits those resources to the Rawhide processing chain, while Scraped Hide only starts with 1 Bloody Skin and is the intermediate material that points toward tanning in the Furnace.

The actual Leather process is therefore pretty simple once you ignore all of the similarly named materials: make Scraped Hide at the Witching Mortar, then process that Scraped Hide in your Furnace. The confusing part is making sure you do not accidentally start making Rawhide instead.

If you are working through the rest of the game's progression as well, our Welcome to Elderfield achievements guide covers all 51 achievements and the longer objectives worth starting early.