Valheim – A Guide

Introduction

Guide Version 1.0 
 
This guide is a guide for Valheim at all of the major stages that are currently implemented: from the Stone Age to the final age in the game. I currently plan to update it sporadically as the game is, or if I feel something new needs to be talked about in more depth. The information within is meant to help you tackle the different challenges in the game efficiently, and to help you make sure you don’t skip out on required resources when you need them. 
 
Valheim is a game with a lot of grinding in it, even if you’re playing it well. For most of the game in its current state, you’re going to be mining, hunting, gathering, and growing stuff to advance. The challenge in Valheim isn’t so much in any one encounter. Death isn’t that punishing, at most being an annoyance, and that’s a good thing; if death were more punishing, this game could not support its grind. 
 
This guide doesn’t tell you exactly how to do very specific things. A lot of the fun in Valheim is in figuring out how you want to build your house and your base, whether or not you want to bother taming animals and how to build the pen if you want to, and the level of risk you personally want to take in a situation. While I do cover some important considerations for things like that, I try to leave the moment to moment decision making to you guys, because the game is simply more fun that way. Keep in mind that my suggestions are also just suggestions. If you decide you want to take a different approach, then more power to you. 
 
With all that being said, let’s get on to the guide proper. We’ll be starting with the general mindset for success in Valheim, and then getting into the many sections of the game, which I will refer to as the different ages. They’re all named after metals except for the final age in the game. This guide will contain spoilers for pretty much everything, so if you don’t want to be spoiled on something yet, it may be best to come back later. 
 
 
 

The Valheim Mindset

In Valheim, a lot of the gameplay can be summed up into a simple gameplay loop that gains depth in how the player chooses to execute it. You buff up, run out into the wilderness and grab a bunch of resources you need, and jog it or ship it back to be refined into better equipment. This core gameplay loop will basically stay the same up until the plains, where you’ll be expected to do a few other things to upgrade your equipment, and where mining falls off. Even then this ‘raiding’ mindset still applies to many of the things you need. 
 
The gameplay loop of this game more or less revolves around its buff mechanics, especially the well rested buff. Whenever you eat you’ll buff up your stamina, health, and health regen, with the effects of the food slowly ticking away as time goes on, until you need to eat again. You can replace a food buff (with the same buff or another one) early when its icon begins flashing, or you can wait for the effects to wear off entirely. You can also never eat the same food more than once, unless you’re replacing the old food buff. You can have a maximum of three food buffs. 
 
Furthermore, When you sleep or hang out by a fire for a while you’ll get a buff called ‘well rested’. This buff doubles your stamina regeneration and multiplies your health regeneration by 1.5. The power of this buff never changes, but the length will increase based on the comfort in your immediate area, which is increased by adding furniture. That deerskin rug sounds like a better investment now, doesn’t it? The same furniture items won’t ‘stack’, so adding more than one table or banner or deer rug is only for aesthetic purposes. In areas like the swamp and early in the mountains you’ll also need to rely on mead buffs (namely poison and frost resistance) to survive, and these have timers attached to them too. At night if you’re outside you’ll also get the cold debuff (unless you’re in frost resistant armor or swallow the aforementioned mead anyway), which reduces health and stamina regeneration. Being wet does the same thing to a lesser extent, but you typically have less control over being wet. 
 
Your inventory is also very limited. Besides the limited slots, a third to half of which will likely be taken by your armor and weapons, food, and other necessities, you’re also limited based on weight. You can only carry up to 300 pounds, or 450 if you have a special item you can buy from the merchant (incidentally, this item should be your first purchase the moment you find him, and you should be doing your best to find him). Ore in particular weighs a lot, and even with the special item you’ll usually only be able to carry a stack and change at a time. Metal also, importantly, can’t be brought through portals, meaning you have to transport it. The only way around this on land is by using a cart… which you don’t want to do with large quantities of metal especially for long distances, unless you’re going downhill or just like suffering. 
 
What the well rested mechanic, the weight mechanic, and to a lesser extent the food mechanic is trying to push you into once you get past the stone age (during which you’re mainly just gathering flint and shooting animals with a crude bow) is a raiding-based mindset. You want to be able to get a big well rested buff, eat to buff up your stats, and then get in, gather the materials you want, and get out, before replenishing the buff. To this end you will usually want to establish a forward operating base, in the form of at least an encampment, to store your metal before you ship it back, and to allow easy movement between your main base and the area you’re trying to exploit. 
 
The best advice I can give you for Valheim is to always keep this mindset in mind. Don’t see a trip out as something you want to be long. Pick your battles. It’s not always about being able to win the immediate battle, it’s about keeping things moving. Having to trek through a swamp or over a mountain becomes much more dangerous, and much less efficient, when you’re cold and not well rested. Make outposts close to where you’ll be exploiting, when you get a boat park it there, and focus on maximizing the effectiveness of your buffs by minimizing travel times and knowing when and when not to fight. 
 
In the rest of this guide I’ll be talking about some concepts as well as the different ‘ages’ of the game that are currently implemented. This guide will be updated at least sporadically as the game is. I’ll also add some thoughts and suggestions about ways the game could be improved. I’ve sent most of these in via the in-game feed-back, but by sharing them here I can breed discussion and maybe lead to more people recommending the same or other ideas. 
 
 
 

The Stone Age

 
 
Ready for Anything 
 
Priorities: 
~Get a small shelter in which you can build a workbench and build a bow, arrows, and other basic implements 
~Shoot every deer and bird that you see once you have a bow (this rule is true for the whole game, unless you have stacks and stacks of meat or feathers already, or are doing something more important) 
~Kill every boar you see to get leather scraps. 
~Set up a real base in the meadows, with room to expand. Ideally one close to the coast and near a black forest. 
~Get your hands on a basic food supply, mostly by shooting the aforementioned animals. 
~Upgrade your Workbench and your gear. 
 
The Stone Age is the age that least follows the mindset of Valheim, and it’s easy to see why. You’re in a meadow, threats are very light. Other than Boars, necks, and the occasional Greyling, all of which are easily dispatched with the club or stone axe (which you can make quickly from your inventory screen), there really aren’t any threats here. 
 
The Stone Age essentially introduces you to the sandbox that is Valheim. The only goal set before you is to take out the first boss, which has conveniently been marked for you. To this end you only need 2 deer trophies, so if you wanted you could be fighting Eikthyr very soon. 
 
However, there are good reasons to get strong stone age implements. The next age is the Bronze age, and while bronze age implements are better, your logistics won’t be very well developed until you hit the iron age, making the bronze age potentially the grindiest age in the game, especially if you haven’t prepared for it. This doesn’t matter now because we only need stuff like leather and deerskin which doesn’t weigh very much and is readily available where you are. To that end we want to set ourselves up with upgraded leather gear very early into the bronze age so that we can ignore some of the things within the bronze age, and also allow the collection of the copper and tin we do need to be done more easily. 
 
Choosing a spot for a base and making some basic stuff with the workbench is the first real step. The ideal spot for this base (which I will presume will be your ‘main base’) is one that’s fairly near a biome called the Black Forest, and close to the coast. This isn’t so much for the Stone Age, but to make the next ages easier. If you happen to find a rock that the game identifies as a copper deposit, or tiny ones called tin deposits while on the fringes of the black forest, go ahead and mark it on your map. You can do this by opening it (M), clicking on the icon you want, double clicking where you want the mark to go, and then typing in the name of the ore that’s located there. You should also do this with your base and anything else you consider important. 
 
Once you’ve found a location, go ahead and build a house, using the hammer you can craft within your inventory. You may be tempted to make something small for now, but you may as well build something with a decent size. If you want to craft stuff faster then you can roof off a small building temporarily for the workbench. Besides that, material costs for wooden building parts are cheap so there’s not much need to be minimalist about building a house. If you’re not happy with it you can always deconstruct it for a full refund of the materials and build something else later. 
 
For now throw down a few boxes and a workbench inside: we’ll move these later if you want, but basic storage and a place to repair your basic tools is a must. You should also build a campfire inside, though you can’t put it on a wood floor if you built those. If you remove the floor you can put one down, and leave a small hole in the side of your roof to let smoke out (otherwise you will asphyxiate). A good minimalist way to do this is to turn the meeting roof piece sideways and put it on in a weird way, making sideways holes where the roof meets. If your roof is single direction you can just leave a hole in the upper wall on the high side as well. In either case smoke can then get out but the fire won’t get rained on. 
 
If you want you can make a little wooden fireplace area with a chimney, though this can be a bit awkward for cooking if the ground that you have to put the fireplace on is well below your floor. This is a more aesthetic choice, and will keep you from stepping on the fire accidentally. Slap a cooking station over it and grill up any meat you’ve happened to grab so far. Try to keep a full stack of cooked meat on your person when you get that much, but leave the rest of the meat raw until you need it, as raw meat is used in many recipes. If you’d like you can make more campfires and cooking stations outside to expedite the cooking process. Don’t forget to throw in a bed too, And feel free to build more than just the basic space now if you want to. If you plan for this to be your main base, then make it feel the way you want it to. You don’t need to worry about walling your zone off with stake walls for now; if you do you may find you want more room later, and there aren’t really any big raid threats to worry about for a long time. 
 
With all the basics out of the way, the goal of the early game is to build your base, assemble a simple food supply and beehives, and get a lot of leather. The first thing you want to make at the workbench if you haven’t already is a crude bow, which takes leather scraps (from boars), and wood. Take your wood and turn it into wooden arrows, and then begin shooting every single deer you see. Unlike boars and Necks, which will fight back thus making sneaking up on them unnecessary, deers have the sense to run away. The only way to get around this is to sneak up on them or shoot them. With the crude bow’s horrible range and firing arc and the slowness it launches arrows, you’ll have a lot of trouble hitting any deer that starts to run away. Hell, at first you’ll probably have trouble hitting a deer that’s standing still. 
 
With the leather from the boars we can make basic rags. If you’re feeling adventurous I’d recommend just heading into the black forest and finding some skeletons. They’re easily enough dispatched with a club and shield (more on combat in a later section), and their bone fragments will let you make actual leather armor when combined with deerskins. Other priorities are mainly the wooden shield (with which you can block and, importantly, parry; ideally you should make this before finding skeletons if you choose to bother with that). The bone fragments allow you to upgrade the club as well, and you’ll be spending a lot of time with it so you should definitely take the time to. If you want to hold off on bone fragments then a wooden shield, crude bow, club, and rags are plenty to get past the first boss. 
 
There is one other animal that runs away and that you should be shooting on sight. Birds. Birds drop feathers when shot. Feathers are used to make every kind of arrow other than wooden arrows, and are used in crafting some later bows and other important things. While not that important now, you’ll be happy you started collecting them now. 
 
Suggestion: Feathers should have a renewable source given how necessary they are for arrow making. Being able to make something like a birdhouse that essentially automatically produces feathers over time with fine wood would do the trick very nicely, and be a nice aesthetic addition. 
 
 
 

The Stone Age (Pt. 2)

The other material you’ll need a lot of in the stone age is flint. Flint shows up near the water and is picked up like any branch or stone. You can use it to make the flint axe, which will make woodcutting less of a pain and will double as a reliable enough weapon: slower than the club but dealing more damage to most enemies you’ll be seeing now. More importantly, flint is used to make the Chopping Block and Tanning Rack, which are upgrades to the workbench. What this allows you to do is upgrade your equipment, including your club and bow. The bow is the more important of these for now, and the club takes the aforementioned bone fragments for upgrading. You can also make flinthead arrows using flint, which will be the strongest regular arrows I recommend using until we get our hands on obsidian, as the arrows after this take metal which is a hard sell, especially for bronze. You don’t have to bother with them if you don’t want to yet though, wood arrows will do just fine. The knife is also an option. Knives are designed as stealth weapons (I’ll discuss this when discussing the equipment), but you can use a flint knife to fight boars and greylings and even the normal greydwarfs conventionally if you prefer its moveset over the club. 
 
Suggestion: I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, but make bronzehead arrows create 50 arrows, or make them copperhead arrows with the same stats. You expect me to turn an ingot that takes three ore into 20 arrows? Yeah right. I think ironhead arrows are a ripoff too, but at least they’re 20:1 in terms of ore, not 20:3. 
 
While you’re collecting this stuff and working on whatever you’re working on, make sure to grab every berry and mushroom you see. Try to avoid eating them, especially in large numbers. They’ll be important for meals and mead later; the berries more so than the mushrooms. For the same reason keep an eye and ear out for the sound of beehives: if destroyed (do so at a distance), they will usually drop the coveted Queen Bee, which is used to make your own beehives. These will make honey for you, producing some every 20 or so minutes and holding up to 4 at once. Honey is a food that doesn’t last very long, but gives a very strong regen effect, especially compared to the stats on all the other food you have available now. I’ll discuss Food in one of the next sections. Later on Honey is important for making Mead, which is basically necessary to progress in the game and, more importantly, necessary for getting drunk. You should have as many of these hives as you’ve found queen bees. 
 
As a side note, you can build a pen and try to start taming and breeding boars (normally you’d be better off using carrots but you can use mushrooms too). You do this by making them attack you and leading them into a pen, shutting the gate, throwing in a stack of mushrooms or carrots (maybe others, couldn’t tell you), and they will slowly tame and, if you keep them fed, breed. they can’t starve to death but will stop breeding if you don’t feed them. As cool and useful as this sounds, this will eat into your food supply and is pretty high effort. The return isn’t good enough to justify all the effort in my personal opinion, but I may be wrong on that. If you’re trying to upgrade everything you will be after a lot of leather scraps after all. You can do the same thing with wolves later and Loxes even later, but they tend to break things far more easily if you try to pen them in in the same way 
 
Suggestion: Make it so that deerskin can be downgraded at the workbench into leather scraps. Yeah, this is a common suggestion. It’s a common one because it’s a good one. Leather scraps can be a huge chore to gather in large quantities pre-swamp. Giving us the ability to convert deerskin into them would cut down on the need considerably. 
 
With all that being done, I’ll recommend one more structure before we handle Eikthyr. A storage Shed. You can technically work this into your house, but you don’t want to mess up your pretty house do you? You can make the walls taller and use floors as ‘shelves’ to place more boxes on. This will allow you to sort each type of item into its own box. Later on we’ll get bigger boxes (made with iron), but for now we’re stuck with the wooden ones. Place them sideways against the wall to maximize the room you have to put them. 
 
 
 

The First Boss

 
 
(Image taken from Wiki. I take a few other in game screenshots from the wiki, for bosses and enemies I didn’t have good screenshots for at the time of writing) 
 
Whenever you feel confident, you can take on Eikthyr. If you’ve been killing Deer and Necks diligently up to this point, you should have a good amount of grilled neck tail and cooked meat. If you’ve gotten the honey hive, your third food item can just be honey, otherwise any mushroom or berry is plenty fine. 
 
Eikthyr has a few ranged electric attacks and a melee attack. One is a forward electrical attack and the other one a circular AOE. The former will punish you if you don’t see it coming and aren’t moving, and the latter is meant to try and make space. Up close he has a head bash for a melee attack, which can easily be rolled or blocked. In any case, these attacks are all slow, and even if you get hit a few times it’s very difficult to die to Eikthyr if you’re well fed and decently equipped. 
 
Since he’s a deer, and we’ve established the maxim ‘shoot every damn deer you see’, you’ve probably already guessed that shooting him over and over is a good strategy. Melee isn’t that dangerous either. He’s easy and meant to break you into the game fairly comfortably. 
 
Once he’s dead the game hands you his head and a bunch of hard antlers, tells you to fashion a pickaxe, and to then start doing the thing you’ll be spending a lot of the rest of the game doing: mining. 
 
Once you’ve delivered the (very aesthetic) head to the stones, you’ll be able to access Eikthyr’s power. What this one does is let you run and jump with very little stamina cost for five minutes when activated. It’s on a 20 minute cooldown, which starts when activated, so effectively a 15 minute one. This ability is very useful for general labor. It can help with running away from combat, but your character has to do an invoking animation first, so you’ll need to make some distance before you start running. 
 
If you lose the hard antlers or your pickaxe, or just want to put his head on your wall, then you can kill Eikthyr again. You actually get enough antler to make more than one pickaxe. You should probably carry at least 2 on you for mining until you fashion a better pick as these ones break pretty fast considering how slowly they break through rock, or 3 if you luck into the merchant soon. This repeat reward rule goes for every boss fight, so if you lose or misplace something important, you can always get more by fighting the boss again. You will have to make the sacrifice again though. 
 
 
 

Combat

So you’ve made it through the Stone Age. Let’s step aside a bit to talk about combat, and then a few other things. Combat in Valheim is… fairly simple, and somewhat comparable to dark souls, just with none of the polish at the moment. Each weapon (including your fists: yes, unarmed is a skill) has its own simple moveset, typically a light attack combo and a heavy attack, and they fall into a few skill categories that are raised by just fighting with that weapon class. So far you may have mostly used the club, though you may have run with the flint axe or flint spear instead. No swords yet, though the sword’s moveset is pretty much the same as one handed clubs. You’ll also get two handed weapons later on, that let you play more at range, which is very useful in some fights. 
 
For most of the game and most of the fights within it, however, a simple one handed shield and a sword or mace will suffice. Why? It’s mostly because of the parry. When you block with your shield, for a very comfortable amount of time you will be in a parry state. If you block a hit in that state, provided the hit isn’t too powerful, your enemy will stagger back and will be open to retribution. This isn’t just a free hit, this is several free hits at much higher damage. The parry also, strangely, works on ranged attacks as well. If you ‘parry’ the skeleton archer’s arrow he will recoil in absolute shock, surprised that you hit the right click in time to avoid being impaled. Silliness aside, it’s not really until late game that you’re dealing with non-boss enemies that can crash through your block even when you properly timed the parry (boss enemies don’t usually crash through either, they just don’t stagger). The best way to deal with most single enemies is to simply parry their strike and then swing at them until they recover, rinse and repeat until dead, if you even have to repeat. Enemies will also go into the stagger animation if you hit them enough times/hard enough. It seems sort of like poise in dark souls 1, except jankier. 
 
As a result there are really two situations where enemies are difficult: they’re ‘overleveled’, meaning you went into for example the plains too early, or you’re fighting say a 2 star Fuling. In that case some enemies may be able to crush through your block, meaning you need to use maneuvering and range to out-fight them, or just run. The other case is hordes, and that’s normally what causes you issues in the earlier game, especially if you’re playing solo. One greydwarf isn’t a big deal. Nor is three. But when you’re fighting 5 greydwarfs, 2 brutes, a shaman, and a troll, then it can be very hard to deal with them if you aren’t one or two shotting them. In situations like that running is often a better option than trying to figure out how to win. It’s hard to parry and kill things when you’re being swung at from multiple angles. if you want to fight tanking some damage to gain a few kills is a good strategy, if you have the health to spare. Doing so will cull them to a more manageable number, making dealing with the remainder much easier. Enemies can’t hurt each other unless they’re enemies of each other, which usually happens when an enemy from one biome wanders into another one (usually suicidal greydwarfs), or skeletons just… well, they’re everywhere. 
 
So with strategy out of the way, let’s discuss enemies. Enemies tend to have resistances to some damage types while lacking them in other places. Stabbing a skeleton isn’t a good plan, so use your club. Clubbing a troll is a joke, so get out your sword or spear. It’s fairly simple, and you can usually tell by looking at something what damage types will be viable. 
 
If an enemy is too hard, or there’s too many, you can always run away and make distance (unless it’s a deathsquito anyway). Very few enemies can keep up with you, especially if there are obstacles in the way that you have to jump or zig zag past, and bow kiting absolutely works in a lot of fights. Keep in mind that Valheim isn’t usually just about winning a fight, it’s about preparing yourself best to be able to keep winning fights, and to avoid putting yourself in a bad position. Sure, you can kite that troll for 5 minutes to kill it, but that’s five minutes you just spent on one troll. Every second you spend in a fight lowers the chances of being able to do something productive or fight effectively without a pit stop, as your well rested buff ticks down, night time approaches, and you run through your stock of stuff. It can be worth taking a hit or two to just swing through enemies and kill them, even if you’re fighting level appropriate enemies. So long as you don’t die that health will come right back, but the time you waste by playing it super safe won’t. Your HP is a resource, spend it when it’s smart to do so to keep things moving. This hard rule only really changes much later in the game, what I usually just call the Linen Age, where you have to be fairly careful about getting hit too much by packs of Fulings in particular. 
 
Experiment with different weapons. See which weapons you like, and which you don’t. Sometimes having a two handed reach weapon is very useful. Expect a club and sword to be the bare minimum melee fighting mainstay once you get going. 
 
Suggestion: Spears. What is that attack animation (provided it hasn’t changed since I wrote this)? Your character seems angrier at the ground than anything else, and because of it a major advantage of a spear, the reach, is mostly squandered. 
 
Suggestion: Combat in general has a problem with even small inclines. Your character has a bad tendency to swipe the ground or swipe above the enemy, especially if it’s something short like a wolf or Fuling. Combat needs some reworking to better accommodate this kind of slope based fighting, as it’s common. Maybe the earlier sword swipes, for example, could have more of a diagonal movement rather than a purely horizontal one. Even the overhead downward slash tends to miss enemies standing on a ledge above you. Also some weapons have a tendency to make you strangely stand in place when swinging them. This might just be personal opinion but it feels unnatural to not shift your body at all, a little forward movement and momentum would be appreciated. 
 
 
 

The Bronze Age

 
 
Priorities: 
~Get Surtling Cores and valuables from Crypts, build 4 charcoal kilns and 5 smelters (less if you can’t find enough cores) 
~Scout for Ore, bring back enough to make the boat and axe (something like 24 copper and 12 tin, probably will take two trips) 
~Build a bronze axe, use the bronze axe to make the boat and a finewood bow by cutting down the trees that used to be too hard. 
~Get the Cultivator (it takes core wood as well as bronze, which comes from pine trees), and start growing Carrots from the seeds you find in the black forest. Replant them to make more seeds; aim for 45 carrots at a time, replanting 15 and keeping 30. If you tamed boars and want to breed them, make more than this. Use these to make Carrot Soup. 
~Collect Every Single Thistle you see (also applies for the whole game, unless you’ve gotten a ton already) 
~Mine the rest of the ore you need for anything else you want 
~Kill trolls for troll leather, which can be used to make troll leather armor. You can just use this and skip bronze armor if you want, which will save you a fair chunk of work 
~Find the merchant ASAP, use the valuables in the crypts to buy the Megingjord 
~Use greydwarf eyes and fine wood (from birch or oak) to build portals. Make your first portal go straight to the standing stones, where you deliver the bosses. This will make it much easier to switch out powers later. Set them up as needed throughout the game 
~Set up fermenters, and make MEAD! 
 
In the Bronze age we get into the meat of the game: the back and forth ore collecting fest. With your 3 new pickaxes you’re expected to mine copper and tin within the Black Forest, and combine this into Bronze. You need Bronze to make most of the important stuff in the age, as well as upgrade the furnace. The furnace takes copper to build, and is used to combine the tin and copper into Bronze, as well as make pretty much anything involving metal. 
 
Let me be clear up front: if there’s any age in the game that is worth trying to skimp on, it’s the Bronze age. Some people think this is because of the annoying rates to make Bronze, effectively taking 3 ore for one bronze ingot. Others think it’s because there’s little excitement to the mining in the black forest, because the area is generally not too threatening. However, neither of these are the crux of the issue. The bronze is overcosted for some things, especially upgrades, but if you look at the later ages, the ingot cost scales fairly sensibly considering that each ingot later on is 1 for 1. The area isn’t that hard but that’s fine, most areas aren’t that bad if you’re at an appropriate level; Valheim is a game that’s more about efficiency and risk management to keep the dangerous things from happening, not every fight being hard. 
 
No, the main problem is the logistics. This is why I recommended building your main base close enough to the black forest that the back and forth is very quick, rather than making an FOB. If it’s not within a reasonable walking distance, there are essentially two ways to transport large amounts of ore after bringing it back to an FOB. Over the ocean, with a boat, and over land, with a cart (if you choose to use the cart, build it on site.) Transporting large quantities of ore with a cart is like pulling teeth, as the cart cares about the weight within it. You fill that bad boy all the way up and it will be defeated by the first bump in the road. As a result you generally won’t be able to utilize all the slots unless you’re going straight down hill. So usually you want to set up an FOB near the coast and load it onto a boat, if you aren’t literally moving your whole base or making a new full base with each new age (you will have to do that in the linen age, but we’ll get to that later). 
 
The problem here is the new boat that you have access to, the karve, only has 4 storage slots. The longship, which you will get at the start of the iron age, has as much as a reinforced chest: 18 slots. 18 slots of ore is enough to make and upgrade literally everything you need, and have a bit left over. 4 slots definitely isn’t, and 5 boat trips isn’t exactly short, even if it’s a fairly reasonable boating trip. This makes the copper and tin logistics a massive pain in the butt if you haven’t actually set up your smelters and furnace in the forest. You can do that, that’s one solution. If you made your base very close to the black forest, then running it back and smelting it isn’t a problem at all. You can also do the second boss early, get the swamp key, get enough iron to make a longship, and use that. In any case, the bronze age is the hardest logistics wise due to the lack of a longship combined with a need for ore. 
 
Suggestion: Give the Karve a larger inventory. We do want to encourage the upgrade to the longship, but 4 slots is laughable. I think making it just 8 or 9, half of the longship, would be a nice balance. 
Suggestion: Please don’t make boats react to weight like carts, or if you do don’t go overboard with it. The way it works now encourages multiple playstyles: some people will want to move their main base and smelters and furnace over to the next area, others can maintain a main base with FOBs. If transporting ores with the longship was also a pain then it would be extremely limiting, and force everyone to play the same way. 
 
Despite its limitations, the karve is still worth making early. The boss fight will often be on another continent, as will the merchant, and the raft isn’t something you want to rely on. Typically the boss is far away enough that it’s worthy of its own FOB, which you can also collect copper from. If you’re feeling stylish use core wood (gotten from pine trees) to make a log cabin… just use regular wood and thatch for the floor and roofs. Core wood makes a really nice frame and stilts, as well as good walls if you want to go the log cabin route. 
 
 
 

The Bronze Age (Pt. 2)

Alright, with that out of the way, let’s talk about the bronze age proper. You’re looking for crypts in the black forest. They’re guarded by skeletons and generally stand out. These have surtling cores in them, an item that only becomes renewable once you’re going to the swamp. 5 cores will make a charcoal kiln or a smelter. Smelters smelt ore, kilns make coal out of wood to run those smelters. 
 
 
These crypts also have valuables. Amber, rubies, coins, etc. Coins are money for the merchant, and he will pay you for items like rubies with coins. The merchant sells a few important things. Most importantly, that means the Megingjord, a belt that will let you carry 1.5x as much weight. This means ~15 more ore per trip than you’d otherwise be able to carry, which is often close to double what you would otherwise. It also makes stuff like wood and stone collection more convenient. 
 
The skeletons in the crypt drop bone fragments, which is important for upgrading some early stuff, if you haven’t already. They fight like normal soldiers: with a weapon they swing at you with, or with a bow. Parrying works very well, so long as there aren’t too many at once. There are occasionally ghosts in the crypt too. 
 
P.S. if you see copper and tin while running around gathering cores and don’t want to take any with you, mark the location on the map. This core collection more or less doubles as scouting, so keep an eye out. Also, grab every thistle you see. They’re used to make a lot of the different kinds of mead and some important food items later. You’ll thank me later. 
 
Suggestion: Many of the hallways in these crypts honestly need to be a bit wider and taller. Not too much though, the player at this point should probably still be 1v1ing the skeletons after all, so we don’t want too many skeletons to be able to get to them at once in most areas in crypts. 
 
So, why was the priority 4 charcoal kilns and 5 smelters? Charcoal kilns accept 25 wood at once and produce that much coal. Smelters process, or are at least seemingly supposed to process, 10 ore per 20 coal. This means four kilns perfectly powers 5 smelters. You can scale that up in the same fashion if you want, though you probably never need more than 10 smelters and 8 kilns. More kilns than that and you will run into weight issues bringing back enough wood to fill them anyway. With 8 that’s still 400 pounds of wood to run them all. 
 
Suggestion: I think this isn’t intended, but smelters tend to only make 9 ingots with 20 coal, barely not finishing the last one which will be quickly finished when you add more coal. This small problem makes smelting a lot more annoying, and assuming it’s a bug should be fixed quickly. If it isn’t it should be changed anyway. The same problem is true for the later blast furnaces 
 
Even if all the smelters aren’t utilized now, you’ll probably be happy you had at least 5 later, when we start bringing back iron on a longship. If you can’t find enough cores then don’t worry too much about hitting exactly those numbers, some seeds suck and you can get them renewably in the swamp, or check out other black forests later. 
 
So with all that set up, before we get to business mining, let’s discuss agriculture. If you have smelted a bit of ore (collect some on your scouting trip with the weight you have left) to get your hands on a karve and bronze axe, and you’ve cut down trees to get core wood, you’ve probably been told about the cultivator. The cultivator lets you plant stuff, in this case carrot seeds that you’ve probably picked up in the forest. If you get carrots you can plant them for more seeds, eat them straight (don’t do this), use them to breed boars so that when you inevitably get attacked by drakes later more boars die, or, importantly, cook them into carrot soup with a cauldron (takes ten tin ingots), at 3 carrots and one red mushroom per soup. You can carry a stack of ten soups. If you’re not using them constantly or for something else, a crop of 45 carrots should suffice: 15 to be replanted for three seeds each, and 30 for making ten soups. The carrot soup is a food item that gives you 20 health and a massive 60 stamina, ticking down slowly over 1500 seconds. To really explain that in terms of value, let’s discuss food a little bit. 
 
 
 

Food

 
 
Not to be confused with Mead. Sadly you can’t survive just off Mead. 
 
Food, as discussed earlier, essentially works as a temporary stat buff. Without eating you have 25 max health, no health regen, and an amount of stamina that I don’t know, but that is very low. Needless to say you won’t survive long like that. So you eat. 
 
Each food item gives a certain amount of Max HP, Max Stamina, and HP Regen, for a certain amount of time. The effects of these ticks down over time after you’ve eaten. Eventually the icon will start flashing, meaning you can replace that food buff at that point with the same or another food buff, so long as the other food buff isn’t another one you already have, as you can never have the same food buff twice. Variety is the spice of life after all. You can also let the rest of the buff tick down, letting you get the full value from the meal, but also making you weaker than you otherwise could be. If it wears off completely the game will tell you you could eat another bite. When replacing the expiring food buffs with different foods it seems like the game chooses the ‘worst’ one to replace first, though I’m not sure exactly how. You can replace ticking down food buffs with food buffs that are worse than the current diminished effects of the food, so don’t chomp something like a mushroom if your meat pie just started flashing. 
 
I recommend you consider food mainly in terms of its total stat points, with some mind towards stat distribution and regen. The carrot soup up above gives a total of 80 stat points: 20 HP, and 60 stamina. This is a lot of points right now, but the distribution leaves something to be desired HP-wise. Cooked Meat gives 40 HP and 30 stamina: 10 less total points, but a more even distribution. The best foods in the game at the moment give a total of 160 stat points, 80 of both. You won’t be seeing those until you reach the plains and start harvesting barley or go off hunting serpents though. 
 
Generally when going into an area with the raiding mindset, we prefer stamina to HP, though we don’t want to completely neglect HP. More Stamina means more running, faster fights, more mining before we have to stop hitting the rock, and generally expedites everything. More Max HP means you can take more hits in a fight before you go down, which is mostly useful in areas that are doing good damage to you, so later game, or for tanking through blows to win fights quicker or simplify them. Most foods also scale up fairly predictably in duration to go with the higher numbers as well. 
 
Early in the game you don’t have the luxury to eat meat pies and blood pudding for breakfast, so you have to make do. Carrot soup is so good partly because it gives you so much stamina, when your other good foods, Grilled Neck Tail and Cooked Meat, focus collectively more on HP, and because it lasts so long. If you start using Queens Jam instead of neck tails (if you are feeling wild and free with your berries) it tips it more towards Stamina, but especially right now that’s a good thing. 
 
The only other stat from food is health regen. Generally we ignore this past the early game as we will have healing mead to help us quickly restore health when we need to, and if we don’t we’ll brew more. However, it is important to note that honey, an otherwise pretty bad pure food item at 40 total stats and an abysmal 300s duration, offers the highest health regen in the game at 5. Often at this point in the game, since we haven’t breached areas like the swamp yet, it’s common to run with just 2 food items if we aren’t doing something challenging: usually something like cooked meat and a yellow mushroom. If you have a slot open up and take some damage you can try and use the honey quickly as a way to heal faster temporarily. It’s not even close to as good as healing mead, but it is a niche worth mentioning, that at least lets you get back into fights sooner after you have a fight where you take damage. Later in the game the best foods get up to four health regen anyway, but right now when you’re stuck with ones and twos, having honey is a good option. Its short duration means you can switch it out very soon for another food item, when the regen isn’t needed. Just don’t overdo it though, you need that honey to get drunk later. 
 
 
 

The Copper Rush

Finding Copper and Tin is fairly simple. Copper is in large rocks with shiny metal veins on them. Tin is in small silvery rocks near the coast. If you don’t know what it looks like, the game will tell you it’s a deposit when you look at it. Tin is way easier to mine than copper as a result. With copper you have to sit there and mine for a while to get enough to warrant running back, not to mention all the rocks you have to throw out. One hunk of copper tends to have enough for an inventory, whereas it takes several rocks of tin to reach that point. But those small rocks are typically in clusters and you don’t have to go through a crap ton of rock to get them. 
 
Suggestion: allow us to set and unset items we don’t want to pick up. It’d make mining a lot smoother if we could tell our hoarder of a character to only grab the shiny rocks and not the normal ones, and would also allow us to stop picking up trophies when we don’t need them. I can only handle so many deer heads. 
 
If you collected surtling cores first you’ve probably scouted the area fairly well and marked down the copper and tin you found, and even brought back a little. If you haven’t, I recommend doing this first, as it will let you plan out which ores to mine first, potentially saving you a lot of time. In the case that you haven’t, bring back some ore with you after you scout to make some basic stuff, ideally the bronze axe first. Note that in future sections I’ll also recommend this, and this is mainly predicated on the idea that the first area you’ll scout when setting up for the age will be the one closest to your main base, so it will be in walking distance or a very short boat trip away. If you have to go halfway across the map to get to that new biome for some reason, you might be better off just making do. 
 
Also, make sure to get some finewood with the bronze axe and make the new furniture if you haven’t already. Doing so will increase the well rested buff duration from your house. Who knew tables and chairs could be so useful? The extra duration will be very useful with all the mining you have to do now. Plus, who doesn’t want a table? You only need a table and chair and banner, you don’t need to make the stool and the bench as well. In fact they give less comfort and don’t stack with each other, but if you have the chair and one of the others, you will get the lesser of the two. So you only want the chair. Also make sure to get the finewood bow as well if you haven’t. You’ll definitely feel much better having a bow that can shoot more than 10 feet reliably. 
 
The main other thing to note is the troll and its leather. Trolls are the hardest enemy in the black forest, easily hitting you for 30 or 40 damage. They can still be parried strangely enough, and a bronze buckler and bronze sword coupled with a finewood bow opening shot will make short enough work of them. If you don’t have those yet you can still reasonably handle them with lower tech weapons; not the club as trolls resist blunt damage, but the spear or at least axe. They have reasonably slow attacks; swings and pounds and, if they lack a tree to smack you with, a rock throw. If you find your shield isn’t good enough to parry them, rolling through their attacks is perfectly viable. 
 
Trolls drop troll leather. Troll leather makes troll leather gear. This gear has 6 armor per piece (besides the cape, all capes have 1 armor at level 1, and gain 1 per level), and gives you a stealth bonus if you wear all four pieces. Stealth isn’t really all that useful in the black forest aside from the aforementioned opening shot on the troll, and it’s normally easier just to shoot something at a distance than sneak up on it and jump it with the knife. The knife sneak attack will do more damage, but usually a sneak attack with the bow will kill or wound enough that it doesn’t matter, and will take less time. 
 
The main advantage to the troll leather set is that it’s an armor set almost as defensive as the bronze armor set and one that doesn’t require more mining. Plus it looks nice in my opinion. With the Adze, a workbench upgrade that requires a little bronze, and the other two workbench upgrades, you can upgrade the set to give as much armor as the base bronze set. This is perfectly usable until you have iron armor, since the main threat in the swamp is poison and the draugrs aren’t all that dangerous if fought properly. However, if you don’t want to skimp on armor the bronze set will allow you to have a sizable armor stat when upgraded and is perfectly usable in the swamp if you’ve done so. 
 
Lastly, I’d like to talk about brewing. With the cauldron and the ability to make fermenters with bronze, it’s time to get drunk. Using mainly honey, thistles, berries, and some random other crap, you can make a mead base. Throw that in a fermenter and wait and it will spit out 6 jugs of whichever mead you made. You’ll need poison resistance mead for the next area, so get to work on that, and also make some minor healing mead. You’ll soon replace it with medium healing mead, but a stack or two isn’t bad. I’ll be talking about the different meads soon, for now just know that making those two sooner rather than later is a good call. Make as many fermenters as you’ll think you’ll need. I have four and that’s been plenty for a single player’s needs. 
 
 
 

The Second Boss

 
Thankfully, he doesn’t summon his friends in, just roots. 
 
With all that being said, let’s close off the bronze age with The Elder, a giant hunk of tree. You’ll need 3 ancient seeds to summon him in via burning his own young… That’s uh… Are we sure we’re the good guys here? So far we’ve hunted deer just to spite nature and now we’ve killed something’s young? I mean they are just seeds but still. 
 
The Elder is a big walking tree. He has three attacks: a ranged attack where he extends a bunch of… roots(?) at you, which you can block, dodge, or avoid by hiding behind one of those stone pillars, a slow stomping attack if you’re near him, which you can easily roll, and a summon that summons a bunch of roots to attack you in an area that seems to center around your current location. The best strategy for dealing with him is actually just to get up close and roll his stomp over and over. It’s not hard to roll and you can smack the foot between stomps. He’ll still summon but won’t use his super annoying ranged attack this way. His summons aren’t actually all that dangerous, if one is too close to you you can quickly take it out and continue hitting his foot. The roots will disappear before he summons more so you don’t have to worry about being overwhelmed. In any case if you’re standing next to his foot the whole time there’s not much need for arrows, which don’t seem very effective against him anyway (Maybe fire arrows are? He’s a tree so that’s just an assumption, I haven’t tried them on him before). If you’re having trouble with him brew some minor healing mead to help you out. 
 
After causing him a great amount of foot pain, the elder will topple, leaving you with the swamp key, necessary for opening up the crypts in the swamp, which contain iron. His ability when delivered to the stones (and you did make a portal to teleport over there by now, didn’t you?) lets you… chop trees faster, apparently. Kind of a specific ability. You can teleport back to the stones when you need it for its purpose. I guess by chopping down a big living tree we learned to chop down trees that don’t fight back faster. 
 
 
 

Mead!

 
 
With this much mead, getting drunk in the freezing cold is a cinch. 
 
Before we talk about the iron age, we just have to talk about mead. By now you probably know how to make mead: take the components, usually ten honey, some berries and/or thistles, and some random other ingredient, cook it up, ferment it, and drink. So I’m just going to talk about the meads, what they do, and what’s useful. 
 
Minor and Medium Healing Mead: I’m lumping these two together because they basically do the same thing and if you use one you can’t use the other for the duration. Presumably a large healing mead will come one day as well, and this will apply to that as well. 
 
These are without a doubt the most universally useful meads in the game. They’re so useful I hotbar the medium healing mead pretty much any time I’m going out. When you drink one you can’t drink another for 2 minutes and you quickly (but not instantly) gain the health back. 50 for minor, 75 for medium. Sometimes you just make a big mistake, or tank a lot of hits to get damage in, or fall down a mountain near enemies, or you’ve for example just eaten but get attacked and your health hasn’t regen-ed to max yet. For these situations you can gain much or all of that back at the tap of a button. 
 
They won’t make you invincible though, and require some forethought. As stated you don’t get the health back instantly, just very quickly, so you can’t use this to tank a hit that’s about to hit you. The two minute lockout also keeps you from spamming them. Still, for all those tough but not lost situations, healing mead has your back. Falls off a bit when dealing with late game enemies who do around half of the medium healing mead’s heal in one hit, but is still quite useful. 
 
Poison Resistance Mead: What this does is increase poison resistance. Duh. In the Swamp when used against blobs it seems to more or less halve poison damage and then halve the duration of that same poison. Effectively this means all poison damage is cut by 75%, and you generally go from taking something like 60-70 damage to something more like 15-20 in the swamp. Therefore it is a necessity in the swamp. You can dodge leeches fairly reliably by keeping moving and avoiding deep water as much as you can and hitting them from outside their range, but blobs have a tendency to poison you whether you want them to or not. Use it before you fight something like a blob or leech to maximize its effective output if you expect them to get a poison off. Does NOT work on any poison you caught before you drank it, so use it preemptively. Lasts ten minutes. Does what it says on the tin and does it well. 
 
Frost resistance Mead: Lasts ten minutes. Keeps you from freezing to death in the mountain, keeps the cold of the night from affecting you, lowers damage from ice sources like drakes and Boss 4, and lowers the duration of the frost debuff. If you’re wet then this won’t help you with cold or freezing. I’m not sure if you can combine this with the frost resistant armor to still ignore freezing temperatures when wet or not. Being wet also would increase damage from those ice sources. Again, it’s essential when in an area, though unlike poison mead which you could technically ignore if you’re brave or stupid, this isn’t an option at first, unless you like lines of campfires anyway. However, once you get either the wolf chest armor or the wolf cape you don’t have to use this to go to the mountain anymore, so you generally don’t need as much. If combined with these the Boss 4 slow effect won’t last more than a second or two in that bossfight. If she actually manages to hit you with the frost attacks anyway. 
 
Minor and Medium Stamina Mead: Similar to the health meads, I’m lumping these together. They give you an amount of stamina, either 80 or 160, very rapidly. They’re more useful when you have stamina maluses like cold or wet and/or aren’t well rested. Good oh ♥♥♥♥ buttons in fights if you find yourself out of stamina but not done fighting in those cold, wet, and tired situations. Not as necessary as the healing meads, but still very useful to bring with you, especially if you plan to be out for a long enough time that you will run out of your well rested buff and deal with cold temperatures (provided you lack cold resistance or will get wet in the latter case). I find that normally with the well rested buff on you don’t need these. You can suck it down to keep moving quickly too, but I think that’s a bit wasteful in most cases. 
 
Tasty Mead: I’m not sure if this is how this is supposed to work or not. This currently gives you +300% stamina regeneration and -50% health regen for 10 seconds. That’d actually be a good buff, but since it only lasts 10 seconds I’m not sure what the point is. Is this a bug? Is it supposed to last ten minutes like the other timed meads? Is this how it’s supposed to work, and it’s just supposed to be fun to drink? I can’t really tell. If it *is* broken though, it should be fixed. Assuming it’s supposed to last 10 minutes, then in a form where it does last ten minutes it’d be very useful. If this is how it’s supposed to work, then I’m happy to just make it to get drunk. 
 
Fire Resistance… Wine?: Wine? WINE!?! What is this abomination? 
 
Fire isn’t all that common, aside from those goblin shamans, torch greenskins, Surtlings, and presumably the fifth boss. If all the other X resistance meads are anything to go by, this will also be very good at doing what it says it does. If we have to go to a volcano some day I guess this will be necessary. For now most of those fire sources aren’t dangerous enough to warrant it. 
 
Suggestion: Offensive Buff mead, and tradeoff mead. We have defensive mead in the form of frost, fire, and poison resistance. Give me a damage mead, or a real regen buff mead, or say a mead that greatly increases damage but restricts something like dodging or greatly increases stamina cost on attacks. Funny meads like ones that increase only unarmed damage so we can pick barfights would also be greatly appreciated. 
 
 
 

Equipment

 
 
Time for your performance review. 
 
At this point you’ve gotten most of the kinds of equipment that are available. Resources take effort to collect, so the question is should you really make that Bronze Atgeir or upgrade that iron armor? The best way to know would be to make it and try it yourself… but then you’ve already spent the resources on making it. Here I’ll discuss the generalist equipment you’ll tend to be using. 
 
I should talk about skills. Skills are listed in one of the menus that you can bring up after bringing up your inventory. If you’re wondering what they do, then just hover over a skill and it will tell you what they do. Generally they just boost damage with the weapon type they’re associated with, or decrease stamina cost with running. You raise these by just doing the thing associated with the skill. Run to raise running, hit things with swords to raise swords. 
 
Running and pickaxes will probably be your highest skills in the game. Unarmed the lowest. It’s worth noting that you can hit things like rocks and trees with your weapons to raise skills in them. If you pick up a new weapon type later in the game it might be worth spending some time doing this. You can also just do it while waiting for things to smelt or coal to get made, if you don’t have something else to do in the meantime. This system also means sticking to fewer weapon types rewards you with more damage with those weapons in the long term. 
 
Suggestion: Roll Spears and polearms into one skill. It’d make it easier to use the flint spear early if you want, preparing you for using Atgeirs later. I know they’re not the same, but it would be nice.  
 
Equipment is balanced so that max upgraded equipment is on par with the equipment you can make in the next age. Meaning if you have maxed out bronze armor, it will have the same defense as level 1 iron armor. This tends to make the transition very smooth, and tends to mean once you have max-ed out stuff for an area, you’re dumpstering it pretty hard. 
 
All non leather armor (aside from helmets) and one handed weapons and shields besides knives, gives you a 5% movement debuff. 2 handers give you a ten percent movement debuff (which is fair, it’s a two hander, so no shield), and tower shields give you a twenty percent one. These only apply when equipped, so remember to put the sword and shield away before you start sprinting cross country. Generally you leave your armor on anyway and deal with the 10% debuff when running, as it takes time to put on and you don’t want to get shot or surprised with no armor on. 
 
With that out of the way, let’s run through the common equipment. 
 
Armor: It reduces damage through some calculation that I do not know. Each upgrade to armor adds two more armor to it, and this 2 more armor does make an impact, especially when you’ve upgraded your armor multiple times. For example in the mountain biome I found the difference between maxxed out iron armor and maxxed out silver armor against wolves made them far less dangerous. I may test these numbers later on by stripping nak*d and letting small green men and mosquitos beat me up. Some armor also gives you resistance debuffs or other buffs. The most useful of these is frost resistance since it keeps the night air from making you cold and lets you go into the mountains without mead. 
 
Armor is also typically fairly reasonable to upgrade, and it’s worth doing so if you have the ore. If you feel like you’re taking too much damage in the new area and have to decide between armor and weapons (and you usually don’t), you should upgrade armor first rather than weapons. If you’re comfortable with the damage you’re taking, do weapons first, so you can kill things faster. Upgrading the armor all the way is still useful for entering into the next area in any case. With the ‘longship full of ore’ strategy you can make and upgrade everything in one fell swoop, or get very close, so this consideration is mainly for the Bronze Age. 
 
Shields and Tower shields: Both block, however the former tends to be much better than the latter, because they can parry, are cheaper to make, and the tower shields give you a massive 20% move speed hit when held. The tower shields have a higher block power, but generally speaking if you’re fighting something that hits hard enough to break your block, you should probably be rolling. Parrying is the easiest strategy for dealing with most singleton enemies. Blocking normally doesn’t really slow them down at all. 
 
The shield is often the first thing to make in a new age, to ensure you can still parry reliably and not spend too much stamina when blocking, and because its cheapness often means a scouting trip’s worth of metal is enough to make and fully upgrade it. 
 
Maces and Swords: I’m lumping these two together, because they have pretty much the same attack animations. One does blunt, the other slashing. Some enemies are better to mace, the others better to slash. So you carry both and a shield generally, unless you’re in an area that doesn’t need one or the other. the alt attacks are slow, hard hitting attacks, while the light attacks are a left, right, down combo. 
 
If you’re choosing between both usually the mace is the more universal pick. There’s some exceptions to the rule: frostner is the silver ‘mace’ but has a very strange stat line, making it worse against some enemies than the iron mace, which is a shame because it’s very cool looking. There’s a linen age mace that does piercing and blunt. Piercing does well against most enemies so it’s not that big of a deal that its damage is split like that. 
 
Atgeirs: Have far and away the best special attack in the game, and have more range than other weapons on their normals, since it’s a polearm. The main problem with the weapon is that its normal attacks have fiddly hitboxes, and it’s a two-hander. Useful for killing leeches from a safe distance, for crowd control with that windmill of death, and so on. Give you a ten percent movement debuff, which is the same as holding a sword and board, so that’s no big deal. 
 
Suggestion: Most weapons have issues hitting things when changes of elevation are involved. All of these need changes, but the stabby weapons need it the worst. They’re already useful but the very tight vertical hitboxes make them rather frustrating to use in situations where you’d want to use them.  
 
The Axe: It’s very slow as a battle weapon for a one hander. Swords generally perform much better than axes. However, they have some niche battle use in the bronze age and before; in the stone age the flint axe is your best slashing option, and in the bronze age you typically make the bronze axe first to cut down harder trees, allowing it to double as a weapon until you get a sword. Past this niche though, axes are better for cutting trees than cutting men. 
 
The Battle-Axe: I haven’t used it yet. You get it in the iron age, and you don’t get another kind later. As a result I don’t really see a reason to go make it: During its age you’d mainly just be using it on Draugrs who are generic enemies easily handled with a sword and shield. Things like blobs you want to hit with a mace. Maybe it’s good at hitting leeches at range too, but that’s a big iron cost for one niche. In the silver age the main enemies are wolves, who are easily handled with a sword and shield due to their hilariously long stagger animation, drakes, who fly and can’t reasonably be hit in melee, and stone golems, who are… made of rocks and have to be hit with a mace (or a pickaxe apparently?) to kill them at an even reasonable speed. So why would I dump iron on this weapon? At least with the Atgeirs I’m trading extra grind time for a reasonable amount of utility, and I probably wouldn’t touch those until the linen age anyway, where the ability to crowd control is very handy. 
 
 
 

Equipment (Pt. 2)

Bows: Used to shoot things. Pretty self explanatory. Get the newest one, upgrade it. It’s useful for taking out unaware enemies in every biome, and is necessary for the ‘shoot every deer and bird you see’ maxim. The draugr bow you get in the silver age lets you poison stuff with any arrow for a little extra damage, and is the best available so far in the game. 
 
Arrow selection is important, both when dealing with enemies and also smartly using resources. You get wood arrows at the start, and these are generally good enough up until you can make obsidian arrows. You can make flint arrows which are a bit better using flint and feathers along with wood, and that’s a fairly reasonable upgrade to take advantage of, especially if you’ve picked up a lot of extra flint. After that all the main arrows until Obsidian arrows are made with metal, and we need that so just sticking with wood and flint is usually a better option, then we make obsidian arrows and soon after needle arrows. Never make bronzehead arrows in particular, the cost is too steep. Ice arrows are very good against Boss 3, if you’re having trouble with him. Other kinds of specialist arrows are selectively useful. I haven’t really used them that often, as I’ve found normal arrows generally perform perfectly well when dealing with most enemies that I want to shoot. 
 
The game will automatically use the arrow closest to the top left slot (the first inventory slot), moving horizontally and then on to the next row. You can force equip a certain kind of arrow by right clicking it. If you want to conserve good arrows when shooting deer, bring wood ones too and swap to flint ones or whatever when you need them. I’ve never noticed arrow conservation to be a big deal though, unless you are using metal arrows that you’ve either found or, if you’re feeling rich, made. You’ll drown in obsidian and needles in the later areas, and if you’ve been shooting birds don’t generally have to worry about feathers. 
 
Stagbreaker: Big battle hammer. Accessed super early in the game. Can apparently be used in a cheese strat on Boss 3. Honestly it’s so easy to make this that you may as well try it out. It’ll give those deer heads you have so many of a use. Even if you don’t like it, it’s pretty cool on your wall. If you like it you can run with it for a while, though once you’re at the swamp you probably just want a normal bronze mace or better. 
 
Spears: Also one handed, can be used with a shield. Their attack animations are very awkward, so I don’t find them that useful. These tend to be cheap metal-wise though, so if you like them you’ll save some metal using them. You can equip yourself fairly decently with a fang spear in the silver age very quickly, which can be very useful if you’re running with a crew and therefore need to share resources. 
 
The Harpoon: Used in hunting sea serpents, mainly. Generally if you make a harpoon that’s what you’re trying to do. Takes Chitin, another Sea resource, taken from barnacles on a ‘’’rock’’’ that will run away after a little while when you start mining said barnacles. 
 
Pickaxes: Not really meant as a weapon, but they’re worth talking about here. They’re for mining or making fun of weak enemies. Are apparently good at killing stone golems, though I have never tried this. You should upgrade your pickaxe and make the better ones because then it takes longer to break and will mine through things faster. Given how much mining you do in this game, you can probably guess why that’s valuable. 
 
Knives: Quick attack rate, abysmal range and per hit damage. In normal circumstances, the knife isn’t very useful. That’s because the knife is designed as a stealth weapon. Your alt attack has you leap forward like some crazed knife killing maniac, plunging the knife downward. You jump really far when you do this. The idea is that you’re supposed to sneak into range and then launch yourself into a fight with this, ideally for a one hit kill. Usually the bow is a better option for stealth, because it’s ranged and its stealth damage is good enough, but on occasion it can be useful or just plain fun. The stealth in this game is pretty rudimentary, enemies have three modes: unaware, aware, and combat. They have different indicators for the latter two (a yellow sound icon and a red exclamation point), and if they’re unaware will have no indicator. Get them when they’re one of the former two and you’ll do extra damage. A ♥♥♥♥ ton of extra damage compared to a normal hit if you used the knife, but a good amount with other weapons. 
 
Stealth in this fashion is of questionable use because it’s a bit janky and it’s very slow. Crouch walking takes stamina, and it slows down your pace in a game where you generally want to be going quickly. So why do that when you can just shoot them with a bow when they’re unaware and get a pretty good damage bonus, one that often allows one shotting with some enemies? 
 
Suggestion: make the crouch walk faster or make it take no stamina. Ideally both. Knife-based stealth doesn’t fit into the flow of the game very well right now, and isn’t really an abusable mechanic even without the stamina cost and slow speed. If you make these two changes it’ll be easier to compare it to my other options and give it a real place in the hierarchy. Essentially, raise the efficiency of stealth, especially melee stealth, in regards to the flow of gameplay to make it a better gameplay option. 
 
 
 

The Ocean

 
 
Finally, before we talk about the iron age (after which it will be a pretty straight shot through the ages), since we’ve begun sailing at this point, let’s discuss the ocean. 
 
Essentially other than land you want to get to and an abundance of rocks to hit, the water has two things: sea serpents, which drop scales and sometimes their trophy if dragged to land and their meat in any case, and some sort of living thing that looks like a rock with barnacles to mine on it. 
 
Let’s discuss serpents first. They basically exist for two reasons. They keep you from sailing around the whole world in a raft, as someone on a raft is basically just going to get sunk by a serpent, especially if they have raft-level gear. This means that if you want to use a raft, and you don’t unless you have to, you don’t want to go on long boat trips because of the potential of running into a serpent. If you have a finewood bow and a karve you can generally handle a serpent by at least scaring it off. 
 
The other reason is for hunting. You can use its meat to make one of the best food items in the game, and you can use its scales to make a tower shield. The tower shield looks cool but it is still a tower shield. The food items are great but hunting serpents isn’t exactly an everyday thing like deer. Its head looks really cool on the wall though. I recommend going out and hunting serpents if you get bored and want a new head for your wall. 
 
The other thing out at sea is some giant living creature. You can only see the top of it. You’ll know it when you see it because it has barnacles on its shell. These drop Chitin, and the ‘’’rock’’’ will run away after you start mining it for a bit. The shaking will key you into this fact. You need 30 for a harpoon, and 20 for a knife. Normally if you have to choose between them you just want to make the harpoon since it’s unique. 
 
Serpents are frankly not the most dangerous thing at sea, especially when you have a longship. They won’t be able to sink you if you just keep shooting at them, and even if you did take a lot of damage, you could just pull to shore and repair. So then what is the most dangerous thing at sea? 
 
Rocks. Yeah, just normal rocks. Triply so when the weather limits visibility, which in my case seems to happen half the time. If you hit rocks at high speed you tend to take a good amount of damage to the boat. The last thing you want to do is sink it, though if you do and are at land you can collect the stuff and build another one. Longships are naturally harder to get between rocks, since they’re bigger. Usually the rocks you can see aren’t the dangerous ones, it’s the ones slightly under the water that you can still hit, or rocks during weather with rolling waves or storms, as the water will go up and down, potentially bringing you right into a rock that you couldn’t see before and dealing probably a good 100-200 damage to your boat. The longship has 1000 HP, so you do have to hit quite a few rocks to sink. 
 
If you die at sea and your boat gets smashed the game will make a floating headstone for you and floating cargo crates for the boat inventories, so you won’t lose hours worth of effort. I haven’t ever died at sea but I have lost the boat to some… ambitious and very sneaky greenskins, and the stuff inside the boat’s inventory (not the stuff used to make it) sits in crates floating on the water. This means you tend to lose the nails used to make the boat since they don’t float, and nothing else. So it’s good practice to have the iron stored to make another longship in case something goes very wrong, if it’s not a huge hassle to get a little extra metal to store for such an eventuality. 
 
 
 

The Iron Age

Priorities: 
 
~If you haven’t yet, make sure to make poison resistance mead before you traipse into the swamp. It’s simple enough to make if you did set up bee-hives. 
~Get Turnips and start growing those instead of (or along with) carrots. They allow you to make turnip soup, which is one of the best food items at this point in the game. 
~Harvest leeches for blood bags whenever you see them. You’ll be using blood-bags throughout the rest of the game. An easy way to deal with them is with an Atgeir, specifically by just using the alternate attack while within the swamp water. You’d think you could just stab them at range from the shore, but the hitbox is too tight to do that consistently. 
~Kill Draugrs for entrails (eww), used to make sausages, the other good new food type at this point. They don’t have further use so don’t worry about hoarding them. Also uses thistles. I hope you listened to me in the bronze age. 
~Find and mark Crypts, using a karve to find swamps and then run through them. Take the swamp key with you so the doors stay open. You should explore the swamps before you set up an FOB. You want probably around half a dozen or more crypts in one swamp ideally before planting one. It seems like the swamps that contain bone-mass tend to be the biggest. Thin swamps in particular don’t seem to like to generate crypts. Bring some iron back with you from the first crypt you find, so you can make the longship. 
~Make the longship, bring a portal over to your FOB spot, and set up shop, OR move your main base to the promising swamp. The goal is to fill the entire longship with stacks of iron (provided you get that much) if you don’t move your main base. This will be enough iron to make and max out everything you need, but you will need to get some extra either now, if you want some of the alternative weapons, or later, for the linen age. If you’re having trouble with the swamp you can split this load in half to make iron implements sooner. Make sure to wall up your harbor decently, or else something will swim out to slap your boat. You can set up on the coast of the swamp or in a biome right next to it. A house isn’t necessary with portals if it’s an FOB, but you can build one if you want. 
~Collect convenient guck. They’re the green sacks on some trees. Later on we’ll need this, so breaking any sacks near the ground now might save you some laddering later. You can use an axe or pickaxe or presumably any melee damage on the sacks. If you like the green torches or green banners then collect more. 22 guck is the ultimate goal otherwise. 
~Keep at least ten of those weird bones you get from mud piles. They’re used to summon the boss. 
~Furniture wise, we’ll have the stonecutter this age. Make sure to make and place the new furniture for the comfort buffs, especially the hearth. You can only place the hearth outside or on a stone floor (like the campfire). It can fit many cooking stations and a cauldron, and will increase comfort. 
~Overall the iron age is fairly straightforward. Raid crypts, get iron, make iron stuff, fight boss 3. 
 
You’ve chopped down the elder and hopefully not misplaced the key. If you did then as usual you can just fight him again to get more swamp keys. As the key makes clear, your next target is the swamp. 
 
The swamp is easily the hardest area so far, and this isn’t really because of raw damage. The draugrs will do more damage than grey-dwarfs, but with even a decent meal and decent armor it shouldn’t be too bad. The main damage dealer in the swamp is poison. Leeches poison you, but generally they won’t catch you if you stay mobile and pick good places to cross water. You can use the cattails to get a general idea of where the water is more shallow. 
 
The main source of poison comes from the blobs. There’s two versions. The brown one splits into the smaller green ones when killed, and the green ones just die. Sometimes they’re just going to poison you. Either because they jumped on your head, or they’re behind a mud pile in the crypt, or they just used the mist before you could kill them, they will poison you. This poison will do around 60-70 damage without poison resistance mead, which is a ton right now. In fact it’s more total damage than almost any enemy in the game can hit you for if you’re wearing level appropriate armor. The leech poison will do either the exact same or close to it. 
 
Naturally, the best way to deal with this problem is by using poison resistance mead. Don’t swallow it the moment you go into the swamp, use it before you’re going to end up in a situation where you’ll expect to be poisoned. This mead will halve the damage and duration of the poison inflicted by the blobs, turning that big 60 into a much more manageable 15. Healing mead is also very useful if you get poisoned when you haven’t used mead yet, as poison resistance mead does not work on poison you already caught. Poison luckily doesn’t stack, only resetting the poison clock if you get poisoned again. Once you swallow the poison resistance mead it will last a full ten minutes, which is a long time. 
 
With that out of the way, make a point of killing leeches where you can. You’ll tend to see them biting harmlessly at the ground when you’re on land, because enemies seem to be programmed to swing at you if they can’t reach you. Leeches drop blood-bags. Blood-bags are used to make medium healing mead, which is very useful. They are also used to make frost resistance mead, which is necessary later, and blood pudding, a very strong food item in the linen age that’s very easy to make if you’ve been collecting bloodbags and thistles. It’s worth collecting as much of this as you can whenever you’re in the swamp; even when you don’t need it for mead anymore, a strong supply of the stuff will result in a payoff later in the game. 
 
The best way to deal with leeches is to take advantage of their short range and our AOE with a weapon like the Atgeir. Leeches tend to bunch up, but swinging a close range weapon can make it hard to space your attacks in a way that will result in not getting hit. The Alternate attack on the Atgeirs is a windmill of doom that will make it fairly easy to deal with leeches. If you don’t have one then a sword will handle them just fine, just be careful or make sure to use poison resistance mead if you’re not comfortable spacing them. 
 
 
 
A Tree with Guck 
 
Before we talk about the raiding strategy and sunken crypts, let’s talk about guck. Presumably a combination of the word gunk and yuck, this stuff is attainable from guck sacks that you see on trees. You can’t cut these trees down, so if you want the guck sacks higher up you have to actually plop down a workbench and build ladders and floors up there. For now, unless you want a lot of it for the green torches and green banner because you like them, just focus on gathering the guck that you can get to on the ground. In the silver age we will need some guck to make and upgrade a bow. You will eventually need 22 total if this is your only goal for the stuff, so getting the easy to get guck now will help with that. You can also just gather it all up early via laddering while you’re here if you’re so inclined. The bigger guck sacks seem to be higher on the tree, so it isn’t as painful as it sounds. 
 
Finally, turnip seeds are in swamps, and make turnip stew. Entrails come from draugrs and are used to make sausages. Both use meat, the sausages also use thistles. The turnip rate is the same as the carrot rate for stew making, so you can use a similar growing strategy. These are the two best foods up until the linen age, as both total at 100 stat points: 50/50 and 60/40. Combine them with something simple like cooked meat or, if you’re growing both, carrot soup, and you’ll feel very powerful. Getting your hands on both will make the iron and silver age much smoother. 
 
 
 

The Iron Age (Pt. 2)

Let’s talk iron and you. After your scouting trip into a swamp, or a few swamps depending on how lucky you are, you’ve probably found a good spot to set up shop. Half a dozen crypts or more is usually a good amount, and ideally it’ll be on the same swamp as the third boss so you don’t have to move to go fight him. Less than this and you’re more likely to have to go find other swamps and crypts to get you the iron you need. Provided you aren’t literally bringing your base over there, which is always an option, you can either build a small encampment with a portal and some chests, creating a safe haven for you and your boat to teleport to and from, or a full house for the same purpose. It doesn’t matter which you choose; in the end you’ll be able to teleport most stuff to your main stockpile via portal, and only need to worry about holding 18 stacks of iron at a time in chests. 
 
Raiding in the swamp is simple as an idea. If you’ve opened the doors while scouting, you simply buff and gear up, run to the crypts killing leeches and anything in the way on the way, gather metal, and go back to your haven when you hit your weight limit. The danger in the swamp is mainly that it’s designed to waste your time. There’s water you have to tread through, it’s always raining (at least in my game for whatever reason, not sure if this is universal) so even if you do avoid deep water you’ll be wet, and if you’re wet you can’t avoid being cold at night and your regens go down. In crypts you have to smash through piles and piles of mud to get iron and find chests that, ideally, have more iron in them (as well as chains, which you will need for a few things). 
 
Suggestion: we should be able to craft chains with iron. Sometimes you just get ♥♥♥♥ luck and don’t get many chains, which sucks because you need them for a forge upgrade, a brazier, and some other important things. Being able to turn iron into them would fix that problem. What do you expect me to do, farm wraiths? I’ve seen like two of those in my entire playtime. I didn’t even know they existed until I was well into the silver age.  
 
What’s more is that you’re on several timers. Along with food timers, the time of day, and your well rested buff timer (which is at least shooting up), you’re now virtually on a poison resistance mead timer. You can drink more but that’s cutting into your supply, meaning you have to brew more. The swamp is trying to bleed you out, which is appropriate given poison is the main threat in the swamp. 
 
Above all, when in the swamp, focus on being efficient. The swamp doesn’t kill you in a single fight like a place like the plains or mountain could, it kills you by wasting your time long enough to put you outside in the damp cold. Get to the crypt, get iron until your weight caps out, bring it back to the FOB/base, rinse and repeat. Load up the longship and sail it back. Try to collect bloodbags, entrails, and more thistles as convenient while doing these things. 
 
If you lose the boat on the ride back then as stated in the ocean section, your cargo will float in the ocean waiting for you. It will remain there until you literally empty the boxes, so don’t feel like you’re in a rush or anything. Your headstone will also be above water. Just make another boat and get your stuff back. It’s worth considering keeping a few iron stashed back home from the scouting trip or two just in case you need to replace the boat. I’ve never actually lost a boat at sea though so don’t worry too much; the main cause of boat destruction tends to be mobs getting close enough to aggro to it and swimming past your walls. 
 
By the way, as a side note, you might be wondering about walling your base off at this point if you haven’t already. It isn’t truly necessary until you’re building in the plains, but it will make the occasional raid easier to manage. You should absolutely wall off your harbors as best you can though. Mobs will walk over there and smash your boat when you’re doing something else if you don’t, and at this point the meadows will start spawning enemies like greydwarf brutes that can’t kill you but can kill your boat at a reasonable speed. 
 
Funnily enough, the first raid I got after taking the time to wall off my main base were drakes. Needless to say walls don’t stop drakes. They killed all my boars as I dealt with them. Truth be told I wasn’t using them for anything, but I felt really bad afterwards. 
 
Since we’re talking about bases, before we discuss Boss 3 let’s discuss the Stonecutter. The stonecutter lets you make stone walls and floors, as well as a material used to make a forge crafting upgrade. It takes a little iron to make it but once you’re done with it you can always just deconstruct it to get it back. Stone walls are ugly and don’t snap very well. Stone floors are nice but also cause weird situations when snapping walls onto them, including wooden walls. You should invest in stone floors, since you can put the hearth and other fires on them. Past that and the crafting table upgrade though, it’s up to you if you want to build with stone in other places. The stairs, arches, and so on are fine, but I’d seriously consider skipping the walls. Presumably you could also make stone walls on your perimeter, so if you like them consider walling your base off with them instead of stake walls. This is more labor intensive though. 
 
 
 

The Third Boss

 
 
I’ve noticed some people saying BoneMass is the hardest boss in the game. Presumably these people didn’t make a mace and didn’t make poison resistance mead. Bonemass is a boss that’s meant to test your understanding of the game. The hint is in his name: BoneMass. What have we been beating skeletons and blobs with up until now? A club or a mace. These weapons will be the most effective at dealing damage against him. You’d literally be better off fighting him with the upgraded basic club than with a sword, if you haven’t made maces. Frost arrows, and only frost arrows not other kinds of arrows (pierce damage sucks against him too), will also do very well provided you have them. If you’re really having trouble with this boss, then a short trip to the mountain combined with some drake murder can make it easier. But frankly if you can handle that I don’t think you’ll have much trouble with BoneMass. 
 
BoneMass has three attacks. A hand swipe that does decent damage itself and inflicts poison. A throwing attack sort of like the troll boulder throw that spawns mobs (Blobs and skeletons) upon impact with the ground. He doesn’t seem to aim it at you, and I’ve never been hit by his ♥♥♥♥ throw so I don’t know how much damage it does if it does or if it poisons you. I’m going to assume that it does damage and does poison you though given he’s throwing ♥♥♥♥. The third attack is a poison mist AOE centered on himself. He won’t ever use this move in succession, and it will eventually dissipate. It can poison you multiple times (meaning it will constantly reset the poison ticker), and for a poison effect it’s fairly strong, so don’t stick around in it even with poison resistance mead on. 
 
The boss fight is pretty simple. Roll his hand swipes and hit him with the mace. Back up when he does his AOE, then let him approach you. If any mobs land near you or gets close enough to you smash them quickly, especially if you can’t hit Bonemass during that time. (with a fully upgraded iron mace you will one or two shot the blobs and skeletons). Rinse and repeat the hit and run strategy until you win. If you’re properly equipped, play smart, and have poison resistance and some medium healing mead this fight will be a no-brainer, just stay aware of your surroundings and terrain so you don’t end up in deep water or something; you are still in the swamp after all. If you have ice arrows you can basically turn this fight off by using them, since range will neuter his AOE and melee attacks. As with any boss rolling is generally better than blocking and parrying since you can’t parry a boss and the roll stamina cost is lower than blocking their attacks. 
 
Once you’ve bashed the mass into submission, he will leave you his… head(?) And a wishbone. Using his head you can get your hands on his power, which let’s you decrase all physical sorts of damage for 5 minutes. Pretty generically good, though the invoking animation means you have to think ahead when you want to use it. Congratulations, the silver age awaits you. 
 
 
 

The Silver Age

Priorities: 
~Make frost resistance mead if you haven’t already. 
~Scout mountains, find one with at good number of silver veins (again, half a dozen or more is a pretty good amount). You’ll need to use the wishbone to do this. Don’t mine more than a little out at first, just mark the spots that react to get an idea of whether the mountain is rich or not. 
~Set up a portal ON the mountain. You can appropriate one of the log shacks with some rebuilding fairly easily and use it. As usual chests and a portal are the necessities here. The mountain is typically far from the water, so we want somewhere on the mountain to store our ore before we bring it to the boat, so we don’t have to run up and down it repeatedly. You should have your boat somewhere near the mountain as well. You don’t necessarily need a portal and harbor there this time, but it won’t hurt either. 
~Get your hands on either enough silver and pelts to make the chestpiece, or a wolf trophy, a little silver, and some wolf pelts to make the wolf cape. Either of these will let you traipse around the mountain without using frost resistance mead. 
~Gather Obsidian where you see it to make Obsidian arrows and the tool shelf. Obsidian Arrows will be your go-to until you are using needle arrows. Combined with the max level iron bow you will normally be two shotting drakes rather than three shotting with wood/flint arrows. Unlike the metal arrows, obsidian isn’t an ore, so you can teleport it back to make those arrows, and don’t need it to make everything else. 
~Start collecting silver. Dowse with the wishbone and dig it up. Each vein seems to have multiple trips worth of silver. You can swap to the belt after you reveal the silver vein to retain your 450 pound limit. The wishbone for some reason takes up the same slot as the belt 
~Make sure to get your hands on 3 dragon eggs. They’re needed for summoning the boss. They are the heaviest item in the game and also can’t be teleported. You can’t even carry three without being weighed down even if you were stark nak*d with only the belt on, so this isn’t a one trip deal. 
~Use a cart to get the ore down the mountain. The cart is far less annoying with a full set of ore going downhill, which is basically the whole trip. You may have to encumbered walk it some distance. Naturally, build the cart on-site so you don’t have to lug it up. 
~This age is reasonably skippable if you want, though I’d at least invest in the armor that allows you to deal with the cold and the arrows, though even if you skip the latter you’ll actually get another option in the linen age (the lox cape). There’s no necessary use for silver, but it will make the earlier parts of the linen age easier if you have upgraded armor and weapons. The silver age isn’t very bad despite what you may expect with the whole dowsing mechanic. 
 
The Silver age is pretty straightforward. Silver is used for weapons and armor, but not for the tools like the pickaxe and the axe. There’s not a whole lot new added in this age aside from the new enemies and wishbone. So let’s discuss the wishbone. You’ve probably tried it out by now. It plays a noise and makes an effect when you get into range of a buried thing. You can use it to dowse for chests in the meadows, more scrap piles in the swamp, and silver in the mountains. The frequency of the effects will go up as you get closer. Once it’s frequent enough you dig down and find the thing, and then the wishbone will stop. 
 
Suggestion: The wishbone should not take the same accessory slot as the belt. It doesn’t actually create any huge problems that it does, but it does make things just generally a bit more annoying when dowsing 
 
What’s important about this is we can locate silver ore before digging it up and mark it by finding the spot where the dinging is fast and setting a marker there. So your first step in the mountain is to scout it out and figure out how much silver there is and where it is. Then if you’re satisfied with the haul and distance you can set up in a shack near the edge of the mountain. We want to be near the edge to make it easy to get the cart down (or to encumbrance walk down), while avoiding setting an FOB at the base of the mountain to skip the time consuming climb. Like last time this building can be as simple as a fixed up shack with a portal and some chests in it. 
 
However, as you probably noticed, the mountain is cold. And not just your average night time stamina sapping cold, this is a deadly cold. If you don’t have frost resistance mead or armor that resists frost, and aren’t near a fire, you’ll take damage so long as you’re on the mountain. Bring some for your scouting trip, and bring back a little silver, a wolf trophy, and some pelts to make the wolf cape, allowing you to go to the mountain without worrying about the mead. If you brought back enough a silver shield isn’t a bad investment either. You might get bad luck with the wolf heads, but you should have enough mead in reserve to not worry about it too much. Shoot any drakes you see; you’ll need two drake trophies to make the helm, and these have a very low drop rate. Get ahead of the curve by starting now. They’ll tend to attack you anyway so you’ll probably kill a lot of them regardless. 
 
So with the shack set up and the silver identified, it’s just a short trip back and forth as you mine the veins out. We are aiming for a full longship’s worth of silver again. If you haven’t found it while scouting, keep an eye out for a location rune for the boss, or the location itself (it’s a big circular platform with slots for eggs). In my experience she’s harder to find the location of than the other bosses so far. Also make sure to keep an eye out for eggs and to grab them on an off trip: these weigh 200 pounds but three are needed for the boss. There are usually some eggs on the same mountain as the boss so don’t stress too much, but keeping note of them will make them easier to collect later. Mark them on your map if you don’t want to collect them now. 
 
The enemies in the area hit hard but aren’t too bad if you aren’t surprised by them. Keep your ears open when in your inevitable hole mining for silver. Golems are very loud both when forming up and walking, and are the most dangerous, hitting very hard and being very tanky. I find parrying the ones that swipe and rolling the ones that slam tends to work out the best. Don’t use a sword, it’s made of rocks after all. Next are wolves. They tend to come in packs. They have the longest stagger animation in the game when parried or poise broken, and it doesn’t take a lot to poise break them. So long as you don’t let them sneak up on you or mob you and don’t fight them on annoying inclines, they aren’t much of a threat. 
 
 
Third are the drakes. You have to shoot them with the bow because they fly. They spit ice at you and generally do low damage. They aren’t really much of a threat. The last of the enemies is the fenring. They’re werewolves. I’ve never been hit by one, so I don’t know how hard they hit. They have a normal swipe attack and a jumping lunge attack that is reminiscent of the knife’s special attack. They only come out at night and are alone. I kind of assume they’re supposed to sneak up on you, or I would if they didn’t also howl at the moon constantly. They are easily beaten in one on one combat if not caught unawares, just parry their normal attack (it has a fast-ish recovery to parries but it’s still effective) or step out of the way of the really slow lunge and punish them. 
 
 
 

The Silver Age (Pt. 2)

Once you’ve gathered up enough silver, it’s time to engage the cart, or walk down the mountain while encumbered. If your cart hits a bump, which is impossible to conquer if it’s full of metal, you can use your pickaxe to flatten it out, or empty the cart, throw the stuff on the ground, and move it to a better spot. The latter also applies if you manage to flip the cart. Be prepared to have to move the boat closer to the cart or encumbrance walk the silver through some black forest to get it to the boat. It’s not like the greydwarfs are a threat now. Enjoy letting gravity take control of a cart with 3 million dollars of silver on it. If the side of the mountain literally slopes into the water and you decide to use a cart on that slope, you might want to build something to catch it so it doesn’t end up underwater, or try and bring the cart down someplace else. Carts also drop their crates when destroyed like boats, so it’s not the end of the world if it gets smashed. 
 
The mountain is probably the second best biome to move your main base to because of the often high or at least medium distance from the water necessitating more robust logistics for getting your silver back home. Plus it’s cool putting the base on a mountain. The problem is you’ll almost certainly have to move it immediately again in the next age. The cart transportation isn’t as annoying when gravity is on your side. Carts take bronze nails and wood. Thankfully bronze nails can be brought through the portal. Use Eikthyr’s power to help as well. 
 
(Note: The reason moving bases is harder isn’t because of smelters and charcoal kins, it’s because of the forge. Since the forge takes metal we can’t transport a forge through a portal like everything else. That’s why if you want to move your base you do have to plan ahead and pack up the items to make the forge in the boat before you go, like you would for portal materials. If we don’t move the forge, even if we smelt it on site we still have to ship it back). 
 
The silver age is simple, and you can reasonably skip it if you feel confident fighting greenskins in iron. There aren’t any new plants to get or any other big missables in this age, aside from obsidian arrows and silver. As we’ll see in the next section, Boss 4 is perfectly manageable as a boss as well. If you’re excited for windmills and bread and linen, you can reasonably cut this age short, especially since Linen age armor takes iron, meaning you only have to fight a few greenskins that are guarding flax. I’d recommend you at least get the cape or chestpiece though. 
 
If you collected the guck, that will be used for this age’s bow, which is the current best in the game, so I wouldn’t skip that either. The new mace, frostner, is really cool looking but is more of a sidegrade than an upgrade to the iron mace, as it trades a lot of blunt damage for frost damage and spirit damage (spirit damage is something all silver weapons have, it is utilized against undead enemies. There aren’t any of those past the iron age aside from boss 5 so it really just lets you dunk on draugrs and skeletons more readily). The silver sword is a straight upgrade as usual, as is the armor. If you want to make all the silver stuff though a full longship of silver will again be sufficient. This may sound like a lot of work but it’s actually much swifter and more hassle free than all the crypt raiding in the swamp, since unlike the swamp it’s not designed to slow you down. 
 
 
 

The Fourth Boss

 
 
If you sacrifice three eggs on the altar you’ll summon Moder… We’re killing unborn baby drakes to lure out Moder? Once again I can’t help but wonder if we’re in the right here. 
 
Moder is a big a*s drake. Unlike the other drakes she will actually occasionally land. On land she has a few melee attacks for when you’re close to her with her claws, and a frost breath attack. The claw attack can be rolled or blocked easily enough. The frost breath attack shouldn’t really be something you get hit by, since when she’s on the ground you should get close to her to lay down punishment as soon as you can, and it’s a ranged attack that hits in front of her. If it does hit you you’ll get frosted, just like the flying attack we will discuss next. 
 
In the air you’ll need to use a bow to hit her, and she’ll basically just use a bigger version of the drake’s attack. These will do damage to you and hit you with frost if they directly hit you, which is a debuff that slows you down, the same way frostner will slow down other non-frost resistant enemies that survive being hit by it. If you’ve drunk frost resistance mead and are carrying the frost resistance armor (assuming they stack, otherwise one or the other. When using all of them the debuff only lasted for one or two seconds when I was hit by the ranged attack), this debuff won’t last long enough for her to follow up. If it misses you it will lay down crystals. I have no idea if these do anything other than get in your way. Within the fight they never caused me any damage and only got in the way. She’ll tend to destroy them on her own with her next volley. 
 
The way to beat her is to simply switch up your attack style to counter what she’s doing. When she’s flying, use your bow to shoot her with obsidian arrows and keep on the move to dodge her frost bolts. When on the ground close the distance and force her into melee combat, blocking or rolling her melee attacks and punishing her if she ever decides to use her frost breath. 
 
When you defeat her she will drop ten dragon tears, proving that you did in fact do a horrible thing when you burned her unborn babies. Two of these are used to make a new workstation, the artisan table, meaning you can have five at once with one kill. This table lets you make the windmill, the blast furnace, and the spinning wheel (none of which require dragon tears), all necessary items for the next age in the game; the linen age (or the black metal age if you want to keep naming them after metals). 
 
Her power gives you a guaranteed tailwind for 5 minutes. Very useful for sailing, so swap to it before you take a boat trip. 
 
Let that pickaxe rest, brave miner, because besides getting some more iron, you won’t be needing it in the linen age. 
 
 
 

The Linen Age

 
 
Majestic 
 
Priorities: 
~Scout out a plains biome. The ideal plains is a decent size and has a swamp with untapped crypts near it, since we will be needing some more iron for the armor and for the three new buildings. 
~Build a new main base in the plains, moving your smelters and kilns over via portal. Make sure you have room for agriculture, because you will need it. Wall it off well, or angry green midgets will come smash your boat and your crops. 
~Take your ideally well upgraded silver age items and carefully raid a camp owned by the greenskins. You’re looking for plants in their fields: barley, used to make flour which will let you make the most powerful food items in the game and fire resistance wine, and flax, used to make linen, necessary for the weapons and armor of the age. 
~Plant these willingly borrowed crops as soon as you can. Upgrade the cultivator if you haven’t to save you repairs mid-planting; you do tend to plant a lot of stuff this era, and it’s a cheap couple of upgrades. 
~Build up your infrastructure. 2 of each new building is enough for solo play. To go even with this number of spinning wheels and barley, you will have to plant a minimum of 100 barley and 80 flax per harvest, allowing you to fill these buildings and replant the same amount. More gives you a margin and some wine. If you want to use regular bread you will want more windmills and barley. 
~If you have to choose between both, prioritize barley first, as it’s easier to get an upgrade in the form of better food at first than better weapons and armor. 
~Kill a lot of loxes. I’d say ‘every’ lox but they take a few combos to kill and it’s inconvenient. The meat is good on its own, but we’re looking to cook it into meat pies as well. You do have to grill it before making those though, so don’t worry about cooking it up front. 
~Grab a good amount of cloud-berries. They’re used in many things. If you grab all of them though they’ll soon need their own box. 
~When well fed, begin your plains-wide campaign of midget genocide. The Fulings (who I will from now on only call greenskins or midgets) drop black metal scraps. It’s like they’re particularly mean boars or something. These are refined into black-metal bars in the blast furnace. 
~Also gather their totems to summon the boss. You need 5. 
~Lastly, remember to kill the deathsquitoes to keep a good supply of needles, for arrows and the Porcupine mace. They tend to volunteer themselves for death So this tends to happen pretty naturally. 
 
So now we go to the last implemented biome in the game for now, the plains. The plains is the prettiest biome by far. Rolling grass, cloud berries, hordes of angry green skinned midgets, giant mosquitoes. What’s not to love? 
 
The plains feels like it’s designed to be the transitional point for Valheim. You’re expected to move your main base, you get much better food items, and you fight enemies that are a good deal tougher than what you’ve been dealing with in the form of Fulings. 
 
Your upgrade path isn’t just ‘go mine’ anymore. You have to develop culture. Engage in renaissance thinking. And, most importantly, grow assloads of flax and barley. Which you get at first by murdering the local inhabitants and then pillaging their fields. Finally, we get to play as a true viking. 
 
So move it we shall. Try to pick a main base location close to a swamp that has untapped potential. We need iron to make our new armor, make our fancy new machines, and make a really, really spiky mace. We don’t need a ton like we did last time, but we will need to dust off the old pick a few times during the age. We still want it near the coast so we can bring our boat near the base. 
 
Walls are of the utmost importance now. After you get a basic structure down, make walls, leaving yourself enough room to grow things. This isn’t because the greenskins will burn down your house or break your doors, it’s because they’ll run in and smash your boat or kill your crops when you’re not looking if you don’t have a wall. Either that or they spawn in and do it. I’m not sure if the workbenches or the presence of a closed wall prevents spawns (probably the former), but one of them or something like that does. If it’s the former we could make spawn dead zones by slapping down a workbench and surrounding it with walls so that enemies won’t beat it up. You may be afraid of decay ruining this idea, but decay doesn’t seem to be able to actually destroy stuff on its own. 
 
After that move your smelters over; you need them here for the aforementioned iron smelting. The kilns too, just to save teleporting back and forth to make coal. I’d also recommend making time to plant a forest of beech trees outside your walls, so you can have a source of renewable wood close by. You’ve probably got a ton of beech seeds sitting in storage that you’ve been saving up, promising yourself you would eventually be environmentally conscious. Now’s the time. 
 
With the infrastructure set up, let’s talk about the new buildings. Windmills take barley and turn it into flour. The speed at which it does this seems dependent on the weather, or random, or I’m crazy. Spinning wheels turn flax into linen and work off magic and not the wind, which begs the question: why don’t we just have a mill that works off magic too? But I digress, the last of these is the blast furnace, which also doesn’t work off magic. It takes coal, like normal smelters. It only smelts black metal into ingots, nothing else. Black metal is used for all the weapons in the age, but not the armor, with the exception of porcupine, which takes normal metal. All of these take linen from the spinning wheel, which is the reason why you can’t sequence break to get access to the porcupine early by yeeting some deathsquitos. Since this is the last set of stuff in the game so far, you may as well make all of it. 
 
Suggestion: Blast furnaces should smelt all kinds of metal, and smelt older metal more efficiently and faster. It’s kind of weird having to set them up next to normal smelters at the same time, and takes up a lot of space. They work the same way so where’s the harm in it? 
 
So we know what we need, how do we get it? We get the barley and flax by growing it. One of the big reasons we set up a new main base here is because we have to grow flax and barley in the plains. It won’t grow elsewhere. Barley and Flax can be… borrowed from the local indigenous populations, when duress is applied liberally. The duress may or may not come at the end of a stick. 
 
When the locals have (forcefully) accepted the ways of Odin, we can gather up their flax and barley and then plant it directly in our own fields. Each one planted will result in two at the end. So you double your supply with each cycle. Barley makes barley flour, which makes bread, meat pies, and blood pudding. The exchange rate for bread, which is itself only as good total stat point-wise as grilled lox meat which you get five of from one lox, is ten barley flour (which means ten barley) per loaf. That’s far too high to warrant baking unless you have an excessive amount of flour. The meat pie and blood pudding, however, each take four flour, and some other ingredients, and have very strong effects. Barley processing is more important than flax at first so that you can get your hands on these foods. You’d only need 80 flour to make a stack of each food type, but since the windmills take 50 barley each, we may as well play around their max input. 
 
Suggestion: Lower the cost on bread. 10 flour is excessive given what it gives you. Make it four flour a loaf, maybe even less. That’s how much the other foods take, and those foods take some other items on top of it.  
 
 
 

The Linen Age (Pt. 2)

 
 
The local indigenous populations make nice fixtures on your wall.  
 
Once your agriculture has been developed and you have a good income of flax, now’s the time to get your hands on the new armors and porcupine if you haven’t already. These take more iron which is easily gotten at this point in the game. If you are having trouble finding good crypts nearby you can use the wishbone to dig up piles in the swamp as well. This isn’t really worth the trouble unless you only need a small amount however. 
 
With our new conversion stick, the next phase of the plains involves the conversion of the indigenous populations to our cause. By applying the several sharp ends of our conversion stick to the faces of the greenskins, we will be able to convert their lives into black metal scraps. These final flickers of Fuling life are used to create new weapons. The Atgeir, the Sword, the Shield, the knife, and the axe. The tower shield as well… you know, if you use those. 
 
When out converting the native population, keep an eye out for their blasphemous idols. If we manage to gather five of these we will be able to flex on their god. They don’t weigh 200 pounds and just show up in some of their outposts and bases. 
 
In terms of enemies, it’s actually not just the greenskins. There’s the deathsquitoes, which used to be absolutely lethal, but now hit you for about twenty damage and give you a near heart attack when they sneak up on you. Just block/parry them and hit them. If you want to show off you can shoot them when they’re flying around you. You can shoot them when they don’t notice you as well. They drop needles on death, which are used mainly for arrows. You’ll get tons of them so needle arrows will be your new regular arrow for the rest of the game. 
 
The other non green enemy is the Lox. They only aggro if you get very close to them, scaring them like the other animals. They hit pretty hard, but are very predictable. With a good shield, like the maxed out black metal shield, you can parry both of their attacks and hit them with a full combo. They seem weakest to pierce damage. An upgraded porcupine with a parrying shield makes short work of them. Presumably a good spear would too. You can get an easy surprise attack with arrows as well given their low awareness. They drop their meat, necessary for cooking meat pies and also just for eating by itself, and their skins. Their skins aren’t as needed as other skins, but do make a very large carpet and a new cape. 
 
And finally, the greenskins. There are basically two variants of midget. There are the melee midgets, using either torches, clubs, or swords. The torch ones set you on fire but do less on-hit damage than the other two. They are easily parry killed by themselves, but in a group they’re hard to stop without taking at least some damage. Being aggressive and willing to get hit will tend to work out well when fighting them, so long as you have the HP to back it up and there aren’t way too many or too many 1 or 2 star Fulings. 2 star greenskins are lethal and can hit you for ninety damage. do not let them hit you. They swing so hard you can’t even parry them with a maxed out dark metal shield (or if you can it’s at a higher block skill level than I have). The one star ones hit pretty hard but are manageable and parry-able. In general playing with a weapon like the Atgeir can help you deal with crowd control, but if you aren’t careful some can slip past your windmill to hit you. The spear throwers are the same story, though they seem to throw spears annoyingly often. It’s hard to swing at anything and not catch a spear in the a*s. Focus them first if you can, and if you sneak up on a group shoot the spear throwers first before they notice you. By themselves spear throwers are easily parried and killed, but as is the theme here, in a group you’ll be running for the hills if you aren’t careful. In their camps there are throwers on little towers, meant to provide ranged support to their comrades. This is a good thing, as it means that they won’t join the horde. 
 
There are two other greenskin enemies. The Greenskin brute and the greenskin shaman. The brute is the only greenskin with tall genes. He carries a big a*s club and hits you for about 100 damage. His sideways swings aren’t parry-able with a dark metal shield (at least last time I tried doing so, block skill increases block power so presumably with more block skill these ‘unblockable’ attacks will become blockable with a normal shield.), but his downward swings are. Either roll everything or roll the sideways swings and parry the overheads. He takes his sweet time getting to you, roaring before coming closer. We don’t believe in chivalry here, so take full advantage of his slowness to fill him with arrows. 
 
The shaman is a magic greenskin. He makes a barrier around himself that blocks all damage for a few hits, and can cast fire at you. If he does anything else I’ve never seen it. He’s actually not that dangerous, he tends to only get to you after you’ve dealt with the horde because of his shielding animation (and maybe even walk speed) and just ends up a sitting duck that can’t do a lot on his own. 
 
These last two enemies only show up as far as I’ve seen in the major greenskin settlements the first time you clear them out. You’re mainly dealing with the normal hordes and they are tough enough on their own just through sheer numbers combined with their high damage. Despite the danger, genocide them you will, if you want black metal items. 
 
That about sums up the workings of the linen age. By now, with the whole game behind you, you probably have a comfort 17 room (the current max), nice armor and weapons, a hatred of all things green and a paranoia around buzzing sounds. The last thing we have to talk about is the fifth boss. 
 
Sadly, I haven’t fought him yet. I’ve yet to find his summon altar. I’ll make a section on him when I’ve done so. I assume he’s a skeleton given the picture at the stones and that he uses fire given we can suddenly make fire resistance mea- err, wine, and given enemies are using fire now. I’ll try and add his section soon. 
 
 
 

The Fifth Boss (placeholder)

Will write and include pictures when I find and kill it. For now all I know is that you use totems to summon the guy, and that he probably uses fire in some form given the sudden presence of fire resistance wine. 
 
 
 

Conclusion

Valheim was not a game I thought I’d like once I hit the bronze age. It was a grind and a slog, especially since I hadn’t figured out proper logistics yet, but I’m really happy I stuck with it. I hope this guide helps you guys handle all that the game has to offer to the best of your ability, and entertains at least a little. I could go way more in depth about a lot of these topics, but in many places Valheim is more fun when left to your own devices. If I sat here and told you exactly how to do things like build your base, this guide would be even longer and wouldn’t do much to help you enjoy Valheim. So I hope this guide does more to guide you into good habits and to help you if you get stuck on any one thing or are confused about something. 
 
When all is said and done, figure out what works for you, and how you want to build up and play the game. I like playing with FOBs and a few main bases, but you might like having a ton of really nice main bases, or you might like moving one around all the time. I just hope that whichever method you choose to use, the information in this guide was useful. Also, my entire experience was done solo. I have been told enemies scale in multiplayer, so in a large group you might find that some enemies feel tougher, or tankier, or maybe they can hit through blocks more easily. 
 
If there’s any section or information you want me to add to this guide, feel free to comment below. You can copy this guide to use it or host it in other places, so long as you link to the original guide and give me credit for writing it. I’ll likely make some quick changes if I find some small mistakes in the guide, either in information or just writing. I’ve tried to proofread and double check stuff, but there may still be small mistakes. 
 
Happy Hunting, Warriors of Odin! 
 

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