Windrose: How to Get Lamp Oil and Refill Your Lamp

There is no “Lamp Oil” item in Windrose

Stop searching for it. Windrose has no separate Lamp Oil resource — the fuel is Animal Fat, and you convert it into lamp charges at a Workbench. A completely empty lamp takes 3 Animal Fat for a full refill, done through the Workbench’s Refill/Repair tab rather than your inventory screen. Boars drop 2 Animal Fat, Sows drop 1.

Your first lamp is loot, not a craft: it sits in the left chest inside the Smuggler’s Cache on the starting island. You can craft spares later for 4 Copper Ingots and 1 Rope once you are smelting. That is the whole system — everything below is about doing it efficiently so you are not standing blind at a cave mouth.

Patch status: verified against 0.10.0.8 (July 2026)

Windrose has been in Early Access since 14 April 2026. Every build shipped since — the launch-week connectivity hotfixes, the 30 April stability patch, the 4 May comfort and faction-quest fixes, the 18 May performance pass, the late-June localisation and Linux server update, and 0.10.0.8 on 8 July 2026 — has been technical work. No patch has added a dedicated Lamp Oil item or changed the animal-fat refill cost. Animal fat is still the fuel as of late July 2026, and the next content beat, the Ashlands biome, has not shipped.

Step 1 – Getting your first oil lamp

The Smuggler’s Cache lamp (the reliable one)

On the first island, the Coastal Jungle, head to the southern part of the island, near where the game first nudges you to build a base. The Smuggler’s Cache entrance is deliberately hidden: look for a pile of leaves and wood covering the ground. Break the debris and stairs open up beneath it.

1. Break the leaf/wood pile to expose the stairs.
2. Head down. A Drowned enemy is waiting — deal with it before you loot.
3. There are two chests. The lamp is in the left one.

That is the earliest guaranteed lamp in the game. It is worth making this a deliberate trip rather than hoping to stumble into it during a quest, because everything about night play and caves changes once you have it.

Other early chests

Lamps also appear in other Coastal Jungle containers, including a Decrepit Chest at the Pirate Remains near a shipwreck. Those are worth checking for a second lamp for co-op partners, but treat them as bonuses — the Smuggler’s Cache is the one you plan around. While you are down there, the same island rewards a proper sweep; our Traveler’s Camp hidden chest guide covers another container people walk straight past.

Crafting a lamp instead

Once you are producing copper, the lamp becomes craftable at a standard Workbench:

• Oil Lamp: 4 × Copper Ingot + 1 × Rope

That is a genuinely expensive early craft, which is why it is a mid-game redundancy — a second lamp for a co-op base, or a replacement — rather than your first move. If copper is your bottleneck, our copper ore and ingot guide is the faster route.

Step 2 – Farming Animal Fat

Once you have a lamp, fat is the only resource that matters for lighting.

• Boars: 2 Animal Fat per kill. Your main supplier.
• Sows: 1 Animal Fat per kill. Reliable, just half the yield.

Some community guides claim other wildlife — Dodos, for instance — can drop fat occasionally. The major guides that document drops name only Boars and Sows, so treat anything else as an unverified bonus and plan your hunting around pigs.

Where to hunt

Boars and sows roam the early coastal biome, and there is a good concentration around the Smuggler’s Cache area itself. In practice the productive ground is:

• Grassy clearings just inland from the shoreline
• Forest edges where trees thin into open ground
• Low valleys near streams and ponds

You never need to push into later biomes for fat. A short radius around your first proper camp supplies multiple refills if you let spawns recover between hunts.

Killing them without losing half your health bar

Pigs are deceptively dangerous in packs. They aggro in groups when you hit one, favour a charge with a short wind-up, and will chain-hit you if you get surrounded.

• Fight in open ground so you can read charge paths.
• Side-step diagonally across the charge rather than backpedalling — kiting straight back keeps you in the charge lane.
• Each missed charge is a punish window: several melee hits or one heavy.
• Open with a ranged shot if you have one, then close.

Planning your fat budget

Because a full refill is a flat 3 fat, the maths is easy:

• 2 boars = 4 fat = one full refill plus a spare.
• A mixed hunt of 3–4 boars and sows = 2–3 refills.
• Before a long cave run, carry 6–9 Animal Fat. That is 2–3 refills and one short focused hunt.

If you are also chasing hides off the same animals, the routes overlap almost perfectly — see our rough hide farming guide.

Step 3 – Refilling at the Workbench

The refill lives in a tab people never open.

1. Return to any base or outpost with a Workbench.
2. Have the lamp (it reads as an Empty Lamp when drained) and your Animal Fat in your inventory.
3. Interact with the Workbench.
4. Switch to the Refill/Repair tab at the top — this is not under normal crafting.
5. Select the lamp and confirm.

Two details that trip people up. First, 3 fat is the cost from empty; if the lamp still has some of the small starting charge Windrose gives you, 1 or 2 fat may be enough to top it back to full. Second, if the option is greyed out, you are either short on fat or the lamp is not sitting in your inventory where the interface can see it.

Step 4 – Using charges like they cost something

They do. Every charge is a hunt you already paid for.

Turn the lamp on for: caves and underground structures, dense forest at night when navigation gets genuinely dangerous, and interiors dark enough to hide chests or hazards.

Leave it off for: bright daylight in open terrain, and anything within sight of your own base lighting. Ambient light is usually enough and running the lamp there is pure waste.

Multiple lamps or more fat?

Carrying spare fat beats carrying spare lamps for solo play. Three fat is lighter and more flexible than a whole second lamp, the fat stays useful if your plans change, and extra lamps only delay the same bottleneck rather than removing it. Multiple lamps make sense for co-op — one pre-filled at each shared base — not for a single explorer.

Windrose does have other placeable light sources you will unlock while building, but no guide or patch note publishes reliable recipe costs for them, so do not build your cave strategy around a specific torch cost. Budget fat and treat any static lighting you unlock as a bonus.

Common mistakes

• Hunting for a “Lamp Oil” item. It does not exist. The resource is Animal Fat.
• Missing the Refill/Repair tab. Refills are not in the standard crafting list.
• Assuming sows equal boars. Half the fat per kill. Prioritise boars.
• Farming fat after dark. Hunt in daylight, spend the charges at night. Doing it the other way round costs you charges to earn charges.
• Running the lamp constantly. Reserve it for genuinely dark ground.

FAQ

How many animal fat does a full lamp refill cost?

Three, from completely empty. One or two can top off a partially used lamp.

Where is the first oil lamp?

The left chest inside the Smuggler’s Cache on the southern side of the starting Coastal Jungle island, under a breakable pile of leaves and wood, guarded by a Drowned.

Can I craft an oil lamp?

Yes — 4 Copper Ingots and 1 Rope at a Workbench, once you are smelting copper.

Has a patch added real lamp oil?

No. As of version 0.10.0.8 (8 July 2026), animal fat is still the only fuel.

Related Windrose guides

• All our Windrose guides and coverage
• Beginner guide: 5 things to know when starting out
• How to get copper ores and copper ingots
• How to get rough hide fast