cwage/valheim.md Secret

## valheim.md

      
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              valheim.md
            
          
    This is a list of tips/tricks/strategy I made for a group of friends playing on our server. It's not comprehensive and it's not authoritative. It DEFINITELY contains spoilers, so read no further if you want to enjoy the game's experiences on your own. (Which I recommend, because some of the things you encounter are quite hilariously fun.) I've wrapped each section in a spoiler tag so you can at least selectively preview tips for where you're at in the game if you want, but be warned even the General Stuff section involves later game spoilers.
General stuff


  Spoilers below!

At world spawn, there are some altars where you place the trophy for boss mobs. Each mounted trophy lets you take a power to use. Early/mid-game the Eikthyr power (decreased stamina use for running) is most useful. Something I didn't know till recently: when you activate a power, it also affects everyone else in proximity. So eventually you reach a point where it's useful to have everyone in a crew take a different power so you can stack them.
We need wood. Haha, no, more. More. More wood. We never stop needing wood.
Outside of trophies and maybe greydwarf eyes (greydwarf eyes now even more useful for eyescream in addition to portals), basically gather everything you possibly can. Dandelions, berries, mushrooms. Kill every deer, bird and boar and neck you see. Everything. Necks are good for earlygame food but also still useful for mead recipes.
Finding stuff like mushrooms, berries, etc on the ground can be a bit of a pain visually. It somewhat detracts from the aesthetics, but I like to turn the grass detail in the graphics options all the way down -- it makes things easier to spot.
Keep at least a few medium health restoration and stamina mead on you. Same for poison protection if travelling in the swamp. Keep as much tasty mead as you want, it's cheap and insanely useful.
Your maximum health and stamina is governed by your foods. When you need health, make sure you've eaten 3 solid foods. Mid-game roasted meat, sausages and turnip stew are an OP combo. Conversely, conserve your food. Farming is a PITA and we go through food quickly, so if you're just screwing around the base, just eat one or two cheaper foods. You don't need 150 hitpoints to farm turnips.
With the H&H (and now Mistlands) update, there's now more variety of food available, with some food giving you a massive health buff, some giving you a massive stamina buff, and some a good compromise. Pay attention to the food you make and try to eat a combo appropriate for what you're doing.
Similarly, there's a "rested" bonus you get from resting, the duration of which depends on your "comfort" level, which is improved by various furniture, etc. See this for details. The rested buff gives you: Health regen +50%, Stamina regen +100%, XP gain +50%, Eitr regen +100%. It's huge. You want to prioritize adding these build pieces to your base ASAP -- it's not all aesthetics, turns out. ABR -- Always Be Rested. If you see your rested buff about to run out, it's time to go home or re-up it somehow.
If you're far from home and lose your rested buff, plonk down a campfire and sit next to it. Bonus if you can get a roof of your head somehow -- a temporary shelter, or burial chambers and troll caves count, too.
Along those lines, early game it can be advantageous to use deer hides and make a deer rug and early finewood for furniture/banners to maximize the rested buff. You can always dismantle it later for workbench upgrades or whatever.
Boats take damage, sometimes/often even when just parked, depending on where they are docked. They can get battered on rocks and even destroyed. Check the health of a boat before you disembark and repair it if you need to. Keep enough wood on you so you can quickly park the boat, make a crafting station and repair the boat.
Sailing is pretty realistic (well, for my rudimentary understanding). If the wind isn't blowing where you need to go, you sometimes you can tack into the wind or just paddle. However, in my experience, the areas of ocean between coasts are often just too small for tacking to be worth it -- easier to just paddle into the wind until it shifts.
Despite nails being metal, they can be taken through portals, which means you can take boat materials through a portal. This means that if you boated somewhere with a portal, you don't necessarily have to sail back -- you can break the boat with an axe, grab the materials, and portal.
Relatedly: when exploring by boat (you're gonna be doing a lot of this), setup a portal at your base and bring the mats for another and a workbench, as a rule. Sailing is a lot less dangerous when you can deal with dangerous situations or just park for the night and portal home.
Keep arrows on you and lots of them. Fire arrows are best mid-game. If trolls show up and you don't have arrows, you will have a bad time.
Don't ever bother making metal tipped arrows. They are only marginally better and frankly not worth the metal.
When a troll attack happens ("The Ground Is Shaking") do your best to kite them away from buildings. They'll follow you and you can patiently snipe them with arrows. If they get near buildings and can't pathfind to you, they absolutely will smash them to bits. Hiding inside is the last thing you want to do.
We need to find the trader, which is only found in Black Forest biomes. When you get close it will appear as an icon on your map. Best way to find is just circumnavigate (in boat if you can) any black forest biome you find. You don't have to be super close. This is what all the amber, gold coins, etc are for. You can sell/buy stuff with the trader, most importantly a belt that gives you 50% carrying capacity, which makes mining a lot less tedious. Black forest is most often found slightly out from the center of the map, so a good strategy is sailing in a circle somewhat around the inner middle of the map. You also have a good chance of finding a leviathan for chitin this way, which is great for unlocking the abyssal razor, a knife that is pretty OP for early/mid game.
If you die, your death location will show on the map. Add a new marker for it anyway, because if you die again, that marker goes away. No longer relevant after H&H update. You now get multiple death markers labelled with the day on which you died.
You lose skill points upon death (5% I think), but there's a certain period of time after dying (10 min) where a subsequent death will not result in skill loss. You'll see the "no skill loss" indicator in your HUD when this is active.
Spamming various base structures -- anything in this list -- is a somewhat cheesey but effective way to deter mob spawnings. (They don't spawn in a certain radius around them)
Everything in valheim sucks slightly more to do yourself. Soloing is doable but Valheim is definitely oriented around team play. If you have a chore, exploration, kill boss, whatever, bring a friend(s).
There are a variety of mob attacks that happen periodically (randomly), and each boss you kill unlocks a more powerful type of attack. They happen in a radius centered around a given player, as long as there are 3 or more player base structures, with the exception of the wolf event, which can happen anywhere. There's no way to make it go away except be in that radius and fight them off until the event ends. As such:
Try not to afk, you'll regret it (see above). If you're afk during a troll raid, RIP your base.
If you're playing with a group, don't feel bad (but ask, ofc) about yoinking someone's unneeded armor. The tech tree is somewhat linear so once someone moves on to higher-tier gear they probably won't care about old gear, except for doing corpse runs. (but see below for more on corpse runs)
Burial grounds are smaller/easier cave things that contain surtling cores and various mobs (mostly skeletons, sometimes ghosts which are kinda powerful early-game)
Navigate the burial grounds (and later, the sunken crypts) like you would a maze: follow the wall to the left or right until you have explored everything. You will 100% get lost if you don't.
Personal preference but I don't use a torch. Because it's a point light source I find it more distracting/blinding than actually helpful.
Larger caves in black forest are troll caves. They are usually occupied by a troll (it will never leave). Scary at first, but they are kinda easy to kill because you can just peg with arrows and leave the cave. Re-enter, wash, rinse, repeat. If you're confident with defense and stamina management, you can also dodgeroll into them and attack -- especially effective once you can parry them.
You need a fishing pole (bought from the trader) to get fish. It's tedious but kinda fun I guess? Sometimes after a storm, fish will wash up on the banks. Free fish!
With the Mistlands update, there are now different kinds of bait used to fish in different biomes.
The best initial base location is probably in meadows, on the coast, with black forest nearby (but not too close). This will make the initial ore mining and smelting a lot easier since you can hoof the metal back on foot or with a cart.
It's thus generally useful to setup an area on the coast with a kiln and smelter, so you don't have to lug metal from a boat very far. You may be tempted to do this on the first coastal area you find, but do yourself a favor and explore the coast, first. I've built out an elaborate dock and smelting area only to realize that the "ocean" I thought I was on the coast of is actually an enclosed sea that doesn't lead anywhere, or that the black forest was tiny without any ores.
If you're having bad luck finding surtling cores early-on, note that if you have at least five, you can build the kiln to pre-fire a bunch of charcoal and then dismantle it and build the smelter instead.
Don't bother making a raft, really. They are last-resort options and usually lead to sad outcomes. The leather scraps are better put to use upgrading your workbench with the tanning rack and other stuff instead of a floating deathtrap.
The game is kinda like minecraft in that areas of the world are only "active" so long as a player is nearby, in a certain radius. This means that you don't have to worry about mobs breaking stuff (e.g. a portal) if you're not there. It also means that you have to be present for certain things to happen (e.g. mob taming and breeding).
When mining copper or silver ores, they spawn in large veins -- much larger than what's on the surface. Make sure to dig around and under them to unearth everything. If you mine them out entirely (so that no part of it is in contact with the ground), you can then mine it from on top and everything will break at once.
In the early phases of mining copper, it can be tedious to repair your pickaxe all the time. The antler pickaxe can be repaired with an unupgraded workbench, so build a covered bench near the ore vein, so you can quickly repair without having to run home. Make as many pickaxes as you can so you can rotate through them to save time -- it can be worth killing eikthyr multiple times to maximize this.
I noted above that you should excavate entirely around a copper vein to get it all, but I've found it's faster to just skim the tops of them to get started with bronze. You can always come back later to fully excavate once you have a bronze pickaxe, which breaks the copper faster.
While the bronze (and subsequent other tiers) of pickaxe mine stone/ore/etc faster, note that they don't mine the ground any faster than the antler pickaxe, so if you're excavating the ground around ore, or just digging, you can just use the antler pickaxe(s) consistently through the game for this.
Pressing 'r' will take anything equipped and put them on your back. This lets you run faster than with them equipped. Hit 'r' to quickly re-equip as well.
Always make a cape for a tier of armor last. No matter what tier of armor the cape is for, it still only gives the same armor -- 1 point for lvl 1, 2 points for lvl 2 and so on. As such the cape should be the last thing you make (if you make it at all). I cry when I see so many people make the trollhide cape first. It only gives you 1 more armor point, and requires twice as much hide -- the same amount could be used to make or upgrade both the tunic and pants. The wolf/lox cape is an obvious exception to this, since it gives you the cold resistance buff early.


Bugs/oddities


Valheim is a game that is "client authoritative", at least as far as the player's location and inventory. It only periodically syncs with the server, and of course syncs when you log out or quit the game. This means, unfortunately, that if you kill the game without quitting, or it crashes, or your PC crashes, there can be a discontinuity between the server and your client. This can result in some unfortunate experiences .. there's not much to do about it except be aware. If you just pulled off a highly risky corpse run, e.g., you may want to log out to force a sync with the server.

Combat:


  Spoilers below!

Combat in valheim is more a game of patience and not panicking than actual reflex skill. Hitboxes are generous and most mobs are pretty slow.
You can usually survive almost any situation by calmly walking (to conserve stamina) out of harm's way and then booking it. (Eikthyr power is useful for fleeing).
Choice of weapon is important. Some mobs are vulnerable to blunt damage (i.e. a mace) vs other vulnerable to pierce, etc. It's a good idea to take time to use many weapons to level up your skills.
Don't sleep on knives -- highly underrated. The abyssal razor is pretty OP when fully leveled. Once you're strong enough, you can even parry their initial attack of trolls and stab them in the junk repeatedly. It's pretty satisfying, A+ would recommend.
Kiting trolls and pegging with arrows is pretty much the only way to go, early game
Mobs have a "star" rating that you can see over their label. more stars, more powerful. This includes trolls, even! There are even 2-star trolls that are pretty dangerous.
If you time a block just as an enemy attacks, you can parry the attack. Parrying with a round shield or buckler can "stagger" an enemy, which gives you a bonus (depending on the shield -- more with bucklers) on blocking, and also for a short window doubles the damage you inflict with a weapon.
As such I tend to stick with shields that let me parry, but early-mid game the bone tower shield is pretty cheap and pretty OP when fully upgraded, so it can be a fun choice until you can make a banded shield.
Dodging left/right also works rather well once you get used to it. You don't have to literally dodge out of the way of an attack -- the simple act of being in a roll makes you momentarily immune to damage. This means counterintuitively it might make sense to actually roll forward into a mob to continue attacking them.
Health restoration and stamina mead are your friends, but it's tricky to consume them in combat. Consuming them stops any running to a slow walk, so if you are at low health and an enemy is right behind you, it's probably too late to use mead. Get out of their attack range first to give you time to quaff.
A common question: What is the difference between stamina restoration mead and tasty mead? Answer: stamina restoration mead is instantaneous (i.e. replenishes your stamina), but it has a cooldown after use. Tasty mead, on the other hand, simply speeds up your rate of stamina regeneration, but only when you'd be regenerating stamina anyway. Tasty mead also has no cooldown, so you can use it repeatedly. So, stamina restoration mead is more for emergency/combat situations, and tasty mead is more general purpose/convenience. You can use both!
Armor upgrading: The decision of when and how to upgrade your armor or move to a next tier of armor is a tough one. IF you play smart, you can actually roll in trollhide armor all the way to mountain biome and silver armor, but you do have to be careful. Fully upgraded trollhide armor (requires a maxed out workstation, so you will need to get some obsidian and iron) is as good as first-tier bronze armor, so personally I just rush this and don't bother making bronze or even iron armor. This reduces the bronze and iron grind somewhat, and you also retain the light weight/movement speed of the troll armor. If you prefer a safer existence, you can make and max out every tier of armor, but it increases the grind and the reduced movement speed can be a liability.
Leveling up your combat skills is important. You'll get plenty of this just playing the game, of course, but if you want to quickly level up a skill (e.g. say you were largely using maces but want to start using a sword), a good way to do this is find a greydwarf nest in black forest and just chill there killing the mobs as they spawn.
Don't sleep on the root armor. It has some pieces that have specific buffs that are easily overlooked. As a complete set, you get a +15 buff to your bow skill, which is nice. But the root mask makes you resistant vs. poison, which is useful in the swamps. Not as good as the poison resist mead (which makes you "very resistant"), but once your HP is high enough it's sufficient. The root harnesk makes you resistant vs. pierce damage, which is absolutely huge when it comes to deathsquitos in the plains -- it basically reduces them from a one-hit kill threat to a minor nuisance. It's also useful even in the Mistlands, because the seeker damage is mostly pierce.


Corpse runs:


  Spoilers below!

Dying sucks, but it happens in Valheim. A lot. You get used to it.
When you die, the spot is marked on your map, and there will be a tombstone there containing all your stuff.
Thus after you die, you will spawn naked and will have to run back to your stuff, affectionately referred to as a "Corpse Run"
IMPORTANT: if your inventory is completely empty and you rightclick the tombstone, everything will go back into your inventory where it was, and the tombstone will disappear. The minute you do this, you get a "Corpse Run" buff, giving you insane buffs to your damage and stamina resistance and regeneration, in order to give you a chance in hell of running away if you need to.
NOTE: if you had a lot of heavy stuff on you when you died (e.g. while mining) and were wearing the megingjord belt, it won't auto-move everything to your inventory. Be prepared to do this manually by clicking "Take all" and re-equipping the belt as quickly as you can.
(ANOTHER) NOTE: related to heavy stuff: if you died while fighting something that generated a lot of stuff on the ground (e.g. trolls or abominations leveling trees and breaking rocks), note that the Corpse Run buff temporarily gives you expanded carrying capacity. if you recover your corpse while surrounded by lots of stuff, auto-pickup will pickup all this stuff up to the limit of your total (temporarily expanded) carrying capacity. You may thus be surprised to learn after it wears off that you are suddenly encumbered when trying to flee or fight back. Make sure you check your inventory to dump unneeded rocks/wood/etc.
It may feel like you need to gear up fully with spare gear if you think the situation is too dire to even run into, but generally it's a better idea to fight this impulse and to prioritize getting the Corpse Run effect above all.
So, the best practice for a corpse run:

Don't panic, take a breath.
Go eat the best food you can for the situation you're facing. Health food if you died in a swarm of baddies, Stamina if you just have a long run, or a good mix of both.
Make sure you get your rested buff with as high comfort as you can, and give time for your HP to regen to full after eating.
Wait for morning. If it's close to dusk, no sense running through the night, since it's much more dangerous. (Exception: if you are fighting a boss, don't sleep, if you can avoid it. The bosses heal, and sleeping will expedite their healing overnight.)
Make sure your inventory is empty. I can't emphasize this enough, as it's crucial for the ability to run into a dangerous situation, empty your tombstone and then bee-line out of danger. It's okay to take some tasty mead or whatever, just make sure it's gone by the time you get there.
If the situation is both dangerous and also far away, you may want to gear up and head close to your death and plonk down a portal somewhere safe. That way you can quickly try again if you fail the first few times -- this can be especially useful if there are tons of baddies camping your tombstone. If you have the "No skill drain" effect from a previous death, there's no loss in portaling to where you died, kiting the baddies away, fully prepared to die again, but clearing the way for a subsequent retrieval of your gear.
Profit!


If you find yourself in a situation where you think your gear is hopelessly lost -- e.g. lost the waypoint, bug, etc. My recommendation is not to despair or ragequit. Games are meant to be fun, so if you're not having fun, cheat. No sense ragequitting a game just cus of a bug or whatever. If you start the game with "-console", you can press F5 to access the console. Entering "devcommands" will enable various console commands, including "debugmode". Among other things, this lets you hit "b" to "build without resources". You can then build a workbench or forge and "make" and upgrade all your old gear, without needing any of the source materials. If you're playing on a dedicated server, you will need to spin up a solo world, as these commands don't work on a server. Use this knowledge wisely -- don't cheat yourself out of the fun of the game, but use discretion.
Similarly, this can be an opportunity to lean on help from some friends. There's a crew of people called the Body Recovery Squad that can log on to your world with you to give you a hand.


Death at sea:


  Spoilers below!

Dying at sea sucks, but don't panic. IF you're the only one that was in the boat, the boat will instantly stop.
Your tombstone floats and will be where you died.
If the boat is destroyed, the cargo will be floating crates you can access like a tombstone.
So, even if you die at sea you can generally sail back to that place (bring a friend) and pilot both boats back (if it still exists)


Farming:


  Spoilers below!

Turnips, carrots and onions are a renewable resource, but only in the sense that you have to plant the carrot/turnip itself to grow it into a seed plant. (i.e. it's not like minecraft where you just get both as a drop) So make sure we don't ever run out of turnips entirely, do regular batches of seed crops. Otherwise we'll have to hunt down the seeds in the wild again.
Try to keep the cultivator on site in the chest so other people can harvest/plant.
Later on, we'll get barley and flax, but they only grow in the Plains biome
Despite only being able to play barley and flax in the Plains, you can actually plant carrots, turnips and onions there too, so it might be wise to relocate your farm to the Plains entirely to save time.
It's a real grind, the more people you have, so if you see harvestable crops, please harvest and replant.
Mistlands introduces some new food that is also a plantable crop (though it may not be obvious at first). When you first get some, don't eat it! Like the plains crops, these can only be grown in Mistlands.


Fishing:


  Spoilers below!

Fishing in valheim is not the same as in games like Minecraft, if you've played that -- i.e. you can actually see the fish already in the water and you have to cast in proximity for them to take the bait.
When you see the bobber plunge below the water (often right after a fish darts towards it), rightclick to start reeling in. It will say "Hooked" if you got it, and stamina will start draining.
Fishing is now a skill that improves (reduces) your stamina usage while reeling in, which is important for fish that like to fight. Don't fret if you lose the fish at first -- it will improve with your skill. Even just reeling in without a fish improves your skill (I think).
Fish will "fight" which you can see/hear as they wriggle -- stop reeling in when this happens, as it drains stamina way faster. Once they stop, you can resume reeling in.
Since it involves stamina, a good strategy is to eat 3 high-stamina foods while fishing. You can also use a stamina restoration mead midway if you're quick enough to avoid losing the fish.
Different fish in different biomes now require different baits, which you can unlock by catching the first few fish most commonly found in Meadows.
Despite fish technically being biome-specific, since biomes overlap and fish like to wander, you may often encounter fish not in their native biomes. Pay attention to what fish look like so you can learn to recognize and target them with the appropriate bait.
Fish now jump a lot, and often manage to beach themselves on shore (or in your boat) where you can pick them up.
If you are lazy/impatient, you can actually often hook a fish just by casting out to where they are and just start slowly reeling in. Often times you'll get lucky and be reeling in when a fish bites, hooking it. This will also accelerate your skill points accumulation.
Sometimes fish are some distance from shore such that a long cast is necessary to get to them, which in turn means that it will take much longer (and more stamina) to reel them in. One way to avoid this is to use a raft to sail out to where they are and cast right off the boat. The raft is better than the karve or longboat for this, since it has no sides obscuring vision. This is probably the only actual useful thing about the raft.


Mob taming:


  Spoilers below!

Boars can be tamed -- contain them (roundpole fences are usually sufficient, but they can still see you and aggro, so probably better to make an actual fence), drop in food, let nature take its course. Unpopular opinion but I don't actually think it's worth taming them unless they are at least 1-star, preferrably 2-star boars. Even then, frankly, it's often not worth it. Unless you want to help feed people you're playing with that can't be arsed to hunt themselves, you will get as much meat and leather scraps from running around hunting/gathering as you would in the time spent taming and breeding them. It can be fun to tame them, but it's not strictly necessary.
Wolves can be tamed, but it's a bit more dangerous. I like to make a pit out of raised earth in a circle, which lets you harpoon them, run into the pit, release and jump out. They will absolutely (and quickly) tear the shit out of a roundpole fence. A regular fence might suffice, but I prefer the safety of raised earth. They'll start taming if you feed them any raw meat (except wolfmeat itself, I think). The howling is annoying Adult wolves no longer howl -- only babies! The base defense of a big pack is nice, and meat for wolfskewers is a pretty good mid-game food. A pack of 2-star wolves is pretty formidable. Some people even breed up big packs of them to bring to a boss fight. Same with Lox, speaking of:
Loxes can now be tamed and ridden with a saddle! It pretty much works like taming any other mob -- in this case Lox like to eat cloudberries. As above, I like to make a big pit by raising the earth in a circle and then luring them to the edge and harpooning to pull them in.
Transporting the tame loxes is a pain. You have to build a ramp to ride them on to a longboat. They do damage to the boat, so repair before you depart, and if it's a long journey, you probably are going to want to establish some safe places with a workbench to do pitstops to repair. They WILL aggro at basically anything, so make sure it's not in spots likely to have deer, necks, or other mobs, otherwise it will aggro and jump out of the boat, which is not fun.


Building:


  Spoilers below!

Building is fun but weird and takes a bit to get used to. There's a crude approximation of "gravity", wherein a block has to be rooted on the ground to be "foundational" -- so make sure the lowest parts of your build are touching the ground (or trees) -- it'll show blue when you have the hammer equipped.
"Core wood" lets you make log poles that are much stronger, so try to use those as a base.
"Fine wood" is largely used for decorational stuff, bows, boats and other stuff. It's annoyingly rare and comes only from Birch or Oak trees (which I always feel bad cutting down cus they look so cool).
Eventually you get stonecutting abilities and can make stronger foundations, but even with that, large builds are difficult. Start small, don't go overboard with a build. It can get overwhelming quickly -- my first attempt at a large build I got in way over my head and never even finished it.
Builds take damage in inclement weather unless they are covered with a roof. This is mostly an aesthetic thing, since they will only deteriorate down to 50%, but it lets mobs (greydwarves, greylings, etc) more easily break stuff.
For that reason, it's good to build fences around stuff (and eventually entire areas). Mobs will show up and break shit and you may not notice if you're a bit away from it.
Trees count as "ground" so if you build around a tree you can get away with some impressively larger builds. The indestructible trees in swamps are popular for this reason.


Biome specific stuff:

Meadows:


  Spoilers below!

Meadows is pretty much the training-wheels biome, including the boss. Except for the first day or two when you're running around naked, there aren't many real threats, even at night.
A good option for making shelter and sleeping by the first night is to find and revamp an abandoned structure.
Explore abandoned structures to find beehives (and loot) as much as possible to start maximizing early honey production
In general, earlygame meadows is your opportunity to start gathering everything you can so that you can make a good set of your preferred armor and gear, and good food for killing the boss and/or venturing into the next biome.
The Eikthyr boss can be easily killed quite early with only minimal gear, but it can be worth waiting because the mob attack event at this stage is just boars and necks, so it's basically just free food delivery service.
You may be tempted to upgrade your leather armor like everything else, but I usually don't bother. One of the weirder things about valheim's progression is that upgrading the leather armor requires bone fragments (like.. a lot), which you don't really start having until you're well into black forest, by which point troll armor is a much better option. Even if you do decide to grind the bones to upgrade, prioritize other stuff (e.g. upgrading the club) where it will pay off faster.


Black Forest:


  Spoilers below!

BF is the first biome with a significant jump in difficulty, so don't let it sneak up on you.
Upgraded flint axe and knife are both pretty good for making short work of greydwarves early on
Optimize for finding carrot seeds and blueberries. Good food is life.
If you get swarmed by greydwarves, try to just walk away to conserve stamina and then sprint away, you'll eventually lose them. Eikthyr's power is useful for this.
Also, note that they are afraid of fire, so if you get surrounded whipping out a torch or slapping down a campfire can help distract them while you take them out one by one.
Once you start mining copper and tin, I like to optimize for the cauldron because it quickly unlocks much better food.
Cut down some pine trees, they drop a new wood that unlocks some things.


Swamps:


  Spoilers below!

Swamps are intimidating and you can quickly get rekt if you're not careful. You usually find them via boat and it can be tempting to just careen into them on the boat, but it's much safer to find an adjacent safer biome, park there, setup a portal and then tiptoe into the swamp. Circumnavigate the border to figure out how big it is.
Spend some time clearing out the draugr/skeleton nests (spawners) and surtling spawners to make things a lot safer. Early-game you want to be careful of the draugr elites. A 2-star draugr elite will ruin your day in a hurry.
As with Black Forest, cut down some of the new Ancient Trees, they also drop the bark that unlocks some things.
You can clear the nests pretty safely from a distance using a bow and targetting the nests. If you do head in for melee, prioritize attacking the nest while ignoring the actual draugrs/skeletons to the extent you can. Many a time I've targetted the mobs first only to have a 2-star elite spawn.
Similarly (and even more safely), you can use a stagbreaker (the two star hammer) and later the iron sledge from behind the cover of a scrap pile to slowly kill draugrs and their spawner nest without ever even seeing them.
Abominations are a new tree-like mob that spawn from the ground (kinda like stone golems in the mountains). They are really tough when you are first getting to swamps. Your best bet early-on is probably to just avoid them or run. You can also snipe with fire arrows repeatedly from a safe place, but it takes a long time. If there's a surtling spawner nearby you can also kite it and when it runs over it, it takes a ton of fire damage quickly. However once you're strong enough, they are simple enough to melee, just like trolls. I prefer stand directly underneath them, forcing them to do the "stomp" attack, which I parry and then wail on them with a knife (technically, an axe does more damage, but it's much slower). Another option is standing on top of a crypt and meleeing them from there -- none of their attacks can reach you on top of a crypt.
But if you don't panic you can stay pretty safe. Conserve your stamina -- walk everywhere, patiently. You're already always "wet" in swamps, so your stamina regen is already much lower. For this reason, avoid being there at night and/or unrested initially. The combo of being unrested, cold and wet at the same time makes your stamina situation a nightmare. You can out-walk some of the mobs if you have to, so try not to panic sprint. Use the terrain to your advantage by jumping over trees/etc (forcing the mob AI to path around it). Keep a poison resistance mead on you and quaff it the minute you see blobs/oozes/leeches. They aren't super expensive so feel free to quaff one before you even head out, they last a long time.
Scrap iron is found (mostly/easily) in sunken crypts. Flag them on your map and open it with a swamp key. We need more scrap iron. Haha, no .. more than that. More. We never stop needing iron. If you click a second time on a marker on your map, it will x it out. Useful for marking crypts we've already cleared. We need soooooo much iron. (It's also a building ingredient, and an ingredient in near-endgame armor.) If I had one major beef with this game it's the amount of iron you need, but what's a game without grind i guess.
Maces are particularly effective against swamp mobs, including the boss.
Surtlings are a near harmless mob found by spawners that are a giant get of flaming gas. If you find one, snipe them with arrows and then move in quickly before the next round spawns. Dig out the ground around it so it's flooded with water, which will kill them as they spawn, thus creating an infinite supply of surtling cores, which is needed for portals and other stuff. Yes, it's a mob that dies near instantly in water that spawns in the swamp. Don't ask me.


Mountains:


  Spoilers below!

Mountain biome is cold so requires wolf armor or frost resist mead, which doesn't last long. Be careful - if you have the "freezing" effect, you become super weak and drakes can basically insta-kill you.
Wolf and Lox capes are enough to protect you from the cold, so if you can manage to kill a few and get some silver, it's a good way to progress to exploring mountain
Silver is what you mine in mountain, and it's found with the wishbone that drops from killing the swamp boss, but you can get lucky sometimes and find exposed veins on the surface.
Some mountains are not very tall and don't have any obsidian or silver at all. If you don't see obsidian spawning, you won't find silver. They're still useful for farming wolves and stuff, but look elsewhere for silver.
Stone golems are intimidating (for good reason, especially early game). They are vulnerable to blunt damage, so a good strategy (once you are strong enough) is to parry their attacks and mace them. They are also vulnerable to a pickaxe, so you can jump on their head (if you dare) and wail away on them with a pickaxe, though once you have a good mace, this is way less efficient (and more dangerous).
Small note for summoning Moder (the mountain boss). Don't make the mistake I did my first playthrough: when I first encountered dragon eggs, I painstakingly transported them (they are very heavy, and I hadn't found the trader yet, so no belt) one at a time to my boat and sailed them aaaall the way back to my base, and then when I found Moder's location, sailed them aaaaall the way to that location. It wasn't till after we killed her that I realized (at least most) mountain biomes tend to have those nests. So don't bother with the eggs till you find Moder's summoning point. Explore around the mountain, transport the eggs to the site, plunk into the slots until you're ready to summon her.
Poor terrain (uneven/steep) can be a huge annoyance for the Moder fight, so if you find an especially terrible spawn altar, it might be worth it to just keep exploring for a better one in other parts of the world.
Frost caves are now a thing! They are really good at hiding, and you'll of course find more in bigger mountains, but you can still find them hiding in even lower areas of crappier mountains.
The entrance is quite flat which makes plonking down a portal right at the frost cave pretty easy, for safe return if you die.
Navigate from left to right like the crypts or burial chambers to avoid getting lost.
Smash everything in the frost caves -- curtains, etc. They will drop small but nonzero amounts of jute or fenris hair.
There are also rooms with hanging fenris hair that you can just grab. But there's also a bit at the top you can shoot with an arrow to get a little extra. Worth it because you need quite a bit for the fenris armor set.


Plains:


  Spoilers below!

early/mid-game Plains biome is like instadeath territory. Deathsquitos can one-shot you iirc even in fairly beefy iron armor before you even see them. Same with fulings. Basically in early/mid game: if you see plains, run/sail away. Deathsquitos can aggro if you get close enough and take you out even on a boat.
Black metal is what you get from plains to make some next-level gear. It drops from fulings, and can be found in chests at the fuling villages.
Needles (dropped from deathsquitos) make the next-level arrow and a few weapons.
Once you can survive in Plains, hunting Lox is a good use of time -- both for their pelts and the meat, which is a great food. You can pretty easily snipe them with arrows from the safety of a boulder. If you're daring (or suicidal) you can also jump on their back and wail on them with a pickaxe, but you have to jump when they do the stomp attack. Once you're strong enough, you can parry them and attack with your weapon of choice as with trolls.
There are villages of Fulings that are populated by more dangerous variants: shamans and berzerkers. If you're powerful enough you can leeroyjenkins them, but it probably won't end well. A good strategy is to pick them off one by one from a distance. You can snipe them with a bow, and depending on your bow's power and arrows, you can one-shot the weaker fulings. Often the one you hit will aggro and run out towards you and the rest don't notice -- sometimes they'll bring a buddy. If you alert the whole horde, it's probably a good idea to bug out to safety.
After the H&H update there are now tarpits with a "Growth" mob. It shoots a surprisingly powerful blast of tar that does a lot of damage and also gives you a modifier that slows you down. They're low health, though, so sniping with fire arrows from a distance is easy enough. You can also roll through their attacks to get into melee range.
Growths respawn in a tar pit, so to clear one and get the tar, you need to kill the growths and then pickaxe a channel to drain the pit. The mechanics of this are kinda funky and tedious, but not a big deal.


Mistlands


  Spoilers below!

Mistlands is a biome found in a wide ring around the world just inside the last end of the world biomes.
Mistlands is much, much harder (sortof -- read on) than plains, so be prepared. Best gear to your liking, best food, etc.
The placeholder from Yagluth is now a "torn spirit", which is used to make something you need to craft a Wisplight -- an equipable item like the belt & wishbone that helps clear the mist. You won't want to spend much time in the mistlands without this. Make a few spares to have around in case of having to do a corpse run there.
As with entering any new biome for the first time, you probably want to setup a portal outside in a safer biome like Plains first. Yes, you read that right. Plains is now a safer biome.
The terrain is VERY steep and erratic, so stamina is your friend. Keeping Eikthyr's power may be advantageous to keep stamina up, but bonemass may be useful for emergencies. If you're playing multi-player try to have both.
There is also new mead that has a lingering status regen effect (haven't looked into the specifics, but I think it's clearly designed to be useful in mistlands in particular but also would be useful in mountains probably)
The very first thing you should seek out is ygdrassil wood, which comes from the trees in mistlands and can only be chopped down by the blackmetal axe. There's also now a new black metal pickaxe, which you will need to mine in the mistlands.
There is an epic new cape called the feather cape, which adds a slow fall effect and reduces all fall damage to zero. It's relatively cheap once you're digging around in the Mistlands, too, which is nice.
Since the Mistlands update, different enemies have different weak spots. For the seekers it's their abdomen in the back. For the Gjall, it's the underside of its belly.
The new mobs in mistlands are fairly tanky, but elemental damage (poison, frost, fire etc) still do a pretty good job, especially if you stack them by rotating arrows, for example (hat tip: Nick Rawcliffe)
There are two new mushrooms that are actually farmable, but apparently only in the Mistlands biome
One of the more counterintuitive things is how you acquire black marble. Your first instinct might be to break the black marble bricks in the generated structures (which you can) or lug in a stonecutter (which you also can) to dismantle. But if you make the new pickaxe (black metal), you can mine it from the large skeletons you find.
You get the "Soft Tissue" by digging further into the head. Basically brain matter (eww). The dwarves will drop small amounts on death, but it's inefficient. One way to safely mine the soft tissue without having to deal with aggroed mobs is to pickaxe a small hole in the top of the skull and then mine down to the ground. This lets you mine out all the soft tissue with the protection of the skull around you.
The first thing you need to start making mistlands era gear is the black cores from the infested mines. Arguably the toughest part of taking on mistlands is the era before you have any and thus are still in plains-era padded armor & weapons (ideally fully upgraded). Note that like with the kiln/smelter, all you need is 5 cores at first, since you can break and rebuild the other mistlands workbenches for different things.
One strategy for the mines is to bring oozebombs and the iron sledge. It depends on the mine, but in many of them, most of the baddies are contained behind doors, slime, or wooden planks. You can use the sledge from an unopened door/etc to spam hits that will make quick work of the baddies before you even open it. Similarly, raining oozebombs from above can also kill them (slowly) without having to directly engage. Don't bother spamming a bunch of oozebombs at once, the poison damage doesn't stack.
In order to refine eitr, you need to extract it from the tree roots. To do this, you need an "extractor", which is only found in crates in dvergr outposts.
Dvergrs are the first truly neutral mob, but they will aggro on you if you attack them or break their stuff. They seem friendly at first, but if you damage any of their stuff, they get pissed in a hurry, and they are not to be trifled with.
The most direct route to acquiring an extractor is simply to kill the dvergrs. However, as noted -- they are tough and with high numbers of them, this can be suicide. There are a few ways to get the extractor without directly engaging them:

You can lure as many mobs to their outpost to let them kill off the dvergrs. The dvergrs are tough, though, so it will likely require a lot, ideally seeker soldiers and gjalls.
You can also bring materials for a cart and build it in front of the crate, facing away. You can then equip the cart and back it into the crate over and over until it breaks. The game doesn't register this as damage done by you directly, so it doesn't aggro them.
Similarly, eitr (if you already have some) shoots particles that do damage to any structure they hit, including the crate. You can drop them (one at a time) near the crate. It takes a while, but eventually it will break the crate.


Mistlands update introduces the concept of magic. New foods will give you 'Eitr', a stamina-like bar for your mana, basically. You can craft new weapons that use this magic. They are actually fairly powerful when upgraded, especially as you increase your skills -- lobbing fireballs into plains villages can be fun and profitable.
The Eitr refinery shoots sparks when operating that will damage your structures, so you might want to put it outside.
Like with any skill, grinding greywarf or draugr nests can be a great way to level up your magic skills. For elemental magic, just kill with the frost staff.. for blood magic, spawn two of the skellets and pop a bubble on them, sit on a rock nearby and watch them fight.
The addition of magic comes with some new alternate armor that buffs your Eitr regeneration. This means there's now somewhat of a choice of a full mage buildout, a tanky new armor buildout, or a mix/match. All seem pretty effective in their own ways.


Ocean:


  Spoilers below!

Not much to say here, it's ocean. The only hazard here is drowning and sea serpents.
Sea serpents are vulnerable to frost arrows, so carry some if you're on a trip where you're likely to encounter them. Their scales sink, but their meat floats, so if you kill at sea, you can get the meat. To actually get the scales, you have to drag them to land with a harpoon, or kill them in a shallow area.
Sea serpents only spawn at night or during storms in the ocean biome. So, if you must sail at night, try to hug the coasts so you're technically in a land biome, if you can.
You can, in fact, sail off the edge of the world so uh don't do that.
You will occasionally encounter Leviathans, which is how you get chitin for the abyssal razor and the harpoon. Have fun. :D


Cheesing the game:


  Spoilers below!
If you feel so inclined, there are some bugs and techniques you can use to progress to better gear/food before you're "technically" supposed to get them by killing the bosses. This can be kindof fun to do e.g. a no-boss run so you can build peacefully without mob attack events, and then if you want, going through the bosses once you are incredibly overpowered. Here are a list of the ways I know of:

First, you can get finewood a few ways before you get the bronze axe: you can occasionally find shipwrecks on the shore (i think only in black forest and plains, but I'm not sure) that you can break to get fine wood. You can also dismantle finewood furniture in the greydwarf populated stone structures in the black forest. You can also strategically cut down beech and hope they knock into a birch or oak, felling it. You can then roll the log back/forth into things until it breaks. This is incredibly tedious but it can be nice to rush the finewood bow and player base furniture for added rested comfort buff. You can speed up this process by building a door next to a log and open the door -- the door will push a log with much more force than just rolling and do more damage to what it hits.
If you're confident enough in your dodgerolling, finding a troll to help smash up birch trees is a great way to get finewood (and ore, more about that below).
This is more of a normal gameplay recommendation, but: prioritize scouring coasts for flint. Even an upgraded flint knife is fairly OP for shredding greydwarves early-on.
My personal preference for surviving burial chambers is to max out a round wooden shield (for parrying skeletons) and maxing out an upgraded club as soon as possible. If you're no good at parrying, another option is the bone tower shield for tanking them.
In order to get mining you need a pickaxe, which obviously you can't do if you haven't killed Eikthyr. To get around this, mark every copper/tin ore you see as normal, and when you run into a troll (ideally one with a log), bait it over to the ore. The troll attacks do enough damage to break copper and tin. Once you have enough to make a forge and a bronze pickaxe, you're off to the races.
At this point, ideally you want to make a karve and rush finding leviathans, because a bronze buckler + abyssal razor is enough to parry and quickly kill trolls, which makes grinding the hide much quicker.
I personally only make the following from bronze: axe (for finewood), buckler (first shield that can parry a troll), mace (useful for swamps), cultivator (for better food), nails for a karve, adze and anvils for upgrades, and at least one fermenter. Sometimes I'll make and upgrade a copper knife if I have bad luck finding leviathans for the abyssal razor.
On that note, fully upgraded troll armor is surprisingly good, and if you are confident enough, you can get away with skipping bronze and iron armor entirely, which significantly reduces the grind. The full level 4 set requires a workbench upgrade that needs obsidian and iron though (see below for more on this).
In general, once you are feeling confident enough in your ability to sneak, a dip into the plains is useful because cloudberries unlock the superior medium stamina restoring mead.
Iron is the next thing that gates a lot of things. One way to get it early is to use the stagbreaker. If you roam around hitting the ground, you will eventually see a "Too hard" notification. The stagbreaker has a large area of effect, so when you see that it means you're close to a scrap pile.
The stagbreaker method for scrap piles is a little tedious imo, so an easier way is to take advantage of a glitch to get into the crypts without a key. If you place a finewood chair facing the door as close as possible, you can sit in the chair and get up. It's finnicky but eventually you will glitch into the crypt.
While you're in the swamps, grind as many bloodbags, entrails as you can and keep an eye out for turnip seeds. Bloodbags unlock the frost resistance and stamina restoration mead, which is necessary for early trips in to the mountains, and the rest unlocks much better food.
Once you have enough iron to make an iron pickaxe, it's probably worth a trip to the mountains to get some obsidian. The last upgrade for the workbench requires 4 obsidian, and a fully upgraded workbench is needed to fully upgrade troll armor. If you are lucky you can sometimes find it in chests in the mountains, eliminating the need for the early iron pickaxe. You may also find onions early, which unlocks onion soup, a great midgame stamina food choice.
As with iron, if you equip the stagbreaker and hit the ground in the mountains, can also find silver veins with this same technique.
Once you've unlocked silver you can make near-endgame gear. Unfortunately with the Mistlands update though, ymir flesh is now gated behind killing Bonemassthe Elder, so you can't make frostner till then.
From here, gameplay is fairly normal as far as grinding out stuff for wolf armor (and/or fenris/root armor). If you want to make the last tier of gear that requires black metal, unfortunately there's no glitch to make the blast furnace, so you will just need to cheat in some dragon tears.


Very Hard/Hardcore mode:


  Spoilers below!
In the new public test branch, there is now a new release with lots of sliders to change various things about your world, including the difficulty and ramifications of dying. There are a few presets, including one called "Hardcore". I have spent a little time playing it (up to the mountains biome so far) and it is indeed hardcore. Some notes/tips below:

The first thing you'll notice is that all mobs hit harder. On "Very Hard" it's 200%, so twice as hard. This may not sound like much, but trust me, it changes the game quite a bit.
Conversely, you inflict 70% damage as normal, so you're a bit less powerful, but not so much it actually changes any offensive approach. It's important to internalize what this means: you can attack as normal, but any attempt at blocking, parrying or surviving a hit(s) is much riskier.
The more powerful mobs mean that even when you first spawn in naked, necks, greylings and boars are actually a mortal threat.
In hardcore, you also have no map. I eventually disabled that once I got to iron age (I need to git gud, apparently).
In hardcore mode, when you die, you lose everything in your inventory permanently, and all your skills reset to zero. The world isn't deleted (like some people like to consider doing traditional perma runs), but it can effectively kill your run.
As such, as silly as it sounds, when you first undertake more dangerous tasks (e.g. attempting to kill your first troll) you might want to go in with the bare minumum -- i.e. naked and only with the weapon you're using, e.g. a knife or bow + arrows. Not having armor doesn't really matter at this stage, because if you get hit by a troll, you're dead anyway.
Similarly, if you get in a position where it seems like you might die (e.g. a swarm of greydwarves) you might want to just start chucking stuff out of your inventory. Mostly you just want to avoid this, though.
Raids are also much more common in this mode, and because mobs hit so much harder, they are much, much more dangerous.
As such, base defense is also now way more important. I traditionally never bother trenching off my base and using other defense. This time? Not so much.
My strategy was traditional base defenses in the meadows. I planned ahead quite a bit before killing Eikthyr, since I rightly figured the greydwarf raids it unlocks could be a game-over moment.
For similar reasons, I put off killing any further bosses until I absolutely had to, utilizing all the above cheese methods to avoid it, since I wanted to put off having to deal with the raids.
For a base to have once greydwarf raids were a thing, I picked out a small peninsula right on the edge of (and in) a nice black forest, and the second that I killed Eikthyr, I made the pickaxes and avoided my base entirely (to avoid triggering a raid) and trenched off the island before I started building anything.
I then raised/flattened the earth enough that no mobs could path onto the new island and it was high enough even trolls throwing rocks should be mostly mitigated. Only then did I undertake the tedious task of relocating my base to this island.
Once that was done, I spammed campfires all over the other side of my trench to ensure as few spawns during raids as possible. Most of the time I got none at all, after that. Cheesey, but it works.
Forget about parrying any mob correlating with the stage/biome you're in. You will die. Embrace dodgerolling -- it's a way of life now. You don't want to get hit by anything if you can avoid it. I don't think I was able to parry a troll until I had silver age gear/food.
The first few trolls I encountered I didn't even bother engaging right there.. I popped off a fire arrow shot to the head (weak spot) and then kited them back to my base and hopped across the trench. From there it went into the trench to try to get at me and I was able to just unload arrows into its head until dead.
You can however stagger enemies if your weapon is good enough -- e.g. i think by the time I had a lvl 3 iron atgeir, I was able to finally stagger and kill trolls fairly quickly. Getting hit by them was still a near death sentence, though.
Traditionally, I (and lots of players) skip bronze and iron armor, using troll and/or root armor through to the silver age. This time I was much more cautious and actually made a full set of upgraded bronze and iron armor (sans the iron chestpiece -- i just kept the root harnesk for the pierce resistance). I am not entirely sure that was the right move, since even in bronze armor, the mobs hit so hard that it was often nearly a death sentence.
Usually I am also much more cavalier about venturing into other biomes to get various things to speed up progress (e.g. swamps for turnips, mountains for onions and obsidian). Not so much this time. So I was much more constrained to the biome-appropriate food, making stamina management much more important. Originally I went for a HP-optimized food strategy (i.e. 2 health foods and one stamina), but the mobs hit so hard I eventually just went back to a more balanced diet.
Prior to reaching the silver age, I found myself using an odd mix/match of gear. Iron leggings, root harnesk where I needed pierce resistance (e.g. for draugr archers, which can be a death sentence even normally, and now definitely are.), and so on.
Probably the most terrifying thing once unlocked is the "You are being hunted" wolf raids, which can happen anywhere in the mountains or plains. The two that I survived I was lucky and happened to be near a stone golem, which helped (though it didn't last long), and by running to a rock they couldn't get on to and just picking them off with fire arrows. Another time was when mining silver, and ... I just ran. Curiously the raid did eventually go away (i didn't know that could happen) so i was able to pick off the stragglers when I returned.
Because avoiding getting hit is so much of surviving in this mode, I found the atgeir to be even more useful than normal. When I was at risk of being surrounded by greydwarves, its special attack was good at keeping them at bay (and staggering them). Similarly, as mentioned above, it was the first weapon with any chance of killing trolls more quickly.

To sum up:

Don't get hit
Use every method possible to fortify your base
Mobs that were once annoyances (e.g. drakes) are now a mortal threat.


Common Myths


  Spoilers below!
I thought it might be worth listing a few things here that I hear constantly (by twitch streamers, in reddit posts, etc). They are minor/trivial so it's not worth mansplaining it's not true in those cases, but I thought I'd jot them down here:

"Boar runestones respawn boars." No they don't. Numerous people have looked into it and the wiki confirms that the boars spawned there are one-time. Any sighting of boars around an already-cleared runestone are just coincidence/RNG.
"Deer can smell you and startle if you are downwind, even if you are sneaking." They can't. It's a fun theory, but it's just RNG again. I can't find the source, but someone apparently decompiled enough code to see their detection is the same as anything else. The wiki confirms this as well.
"Copper nodes 'pop' just like silver nodes if you dig under them." This one gets a C- for being ... kindof true. The mechanics for things you mine popping is the same for everything in valheim (stone towers in plains, silver, copper, rocks in general, even brains/jotunn skeletons in the mistlands, etc). As long as no hitbox for any connected piece is in contact with the ground, it will all break at once. The hitboxes are bigger than they look though, so visual inspection is not a guarantee. HOWEVER, due to black forest geography, 99% of the time copper nodes are generated half buried into a slope or at least close enough that some part of it is still in contact. If you try to excavate around it fully and are expecting it to pop, you will be disappointed. The best strategy is to just excavate the sides, then pick the highest part of the ground slope (i.e. most in contact), and mine into the center of the node, and then clear out as much dirt/copper you can until visually nothing is in contact (though clearly one/some hitboxes still are), and then strategically break the lowest (closest to the ground) parts until eventually the whole thing (or more likely certain parts) pop at once, until the whole thing is gone.
"Wind/weather is RNG." While this is kinda true for practical purposes, it's actually not. Wind/weather follow the same pattern for every seed based on time. (Ever notice that the first morning of Day 2 is always foggy?). There are even sites that you can use to predict the weather on a given day.