They don’t unless you leave one of the glowing bone pile things alive. They are spawners. Might be useful for fast skelly parts early, but you’ll always get more if you explore. You always get more (insert anything here) if you explore in Valheim it seems!
That’s great! Those little guys are fast too.
A very few are also used in crafting. You may want to look it up before tossing. But almost all can be tossed if not wanted for decorating. I have a rock by the sea that is just for mostly trophy tossing.
So I think I’m done with this. I summoned Moder and sparred with it a bit to see how much damage I could do. And in trying to decide whether I wanted to grind the fight with my current equipment or grind to upgrade what I’ve got I realized I didn’t have much interest in doing either.
As a few other people have mentioned, its still an open question for me why this game is so successful. Its not a genre that is starved of titles. I cant even claim this is a really good example of the genre. Yet I’ve enjoyed it more than most I’ve played, its like it has some indefinable magic about it.
I’m still engaged and interested. Grind is usually not enough to kill my enjoyment in this kind of game. It’s running out of goals that usually does it, for me.
Pretty much mastered the Swamp, and defeated the Elder. Now I’m setting up a smallish outpost in a Black Forest area right on the edge of a Mountain biome and near but not too near a Plains biome (I’ve seen those little guys roam outside of their biome). Hoping to use this location to ferry silver back to main base, prior to invading the new biomes.
Here’s the area I’m setting up in. Base with dock to the right, cart shed further inland, toward the mountain. No idea yet how I’ll actually begin tackling the mountain itself, but hopefully I’m off to a decent start.
I searched the small Mountain are near our base but couldn’t find any silver with the wishbone. I believe we will have to hit the high seas and look for a bigger mountain area.
The Longship is so much faster than the Karve and I do feel more like a Viking when riding in it though with only two of us in it it does seem a bit silly. I looked up how many used to ride in the ships when raiding and the internets state about 120 warriors.
This game does make me research some history as I play. More than any of the variuos shows ever did.
I find it is easiest to just build a cart at the top of the mountain instead of trying to pull one up there. You can just destroy it with a weapon to get your materials back when you’ve dropped off the ore.
I haven’t had a ton of time to play lately, mostly just 20-30 minutes here and there, so I have simply been doing copper/tin runs, exploring a lot more of the map around my home, delving into burial chambers for cores and loot, and harvesting my carrots, honey and other ingredients to make health, stamina and poison resist potions.
You would think that would be boring, basically grinding just to collect materials and stockpile bronze, potions, food and treasure…but it’s really not. Somehow even the grind in this game feels relaxing and rewarding. I am going to set aside a night this week where I have at least an hour and go finally take down The Elder so I can move forward in the biome progression. Of course I haven’t found any swamps yet, so maybe I should locate one before moving forward…
I wasn’t sure where the plains were on my map, and didn’t really feel like sailing around for hours and hours hoping to find it, so I used one of the map viewers to find a decent place to land at some meadows with plains nearby.
I nearly died a couple times, but did manage to take out each of the new creature types, and clear out a village. The unfortunate thing was I had a pile of the new metal in my inventory and forgot when you throw an item it goes in the direction your character is facing, and not where your camera is facing. I consequently threw a full stack of metal into the deep deep water off the rock where my ship was docked. It is out of pick up range so I am a little bummed about that! Maybe I can terraform some to get it or something. Ugh! I didn’t attempt the mountain boss yet, though, so will be stalled out on progress until I sail to and attempt that anyway.
I am still really enjoying this when I have time to play. Glad to hear they will still be adding some new content too.
Beat the third boss yesterday, and finally finished up enough of my business in the swamp biome to leave it behind for a while. I appreciate the biome and think it’s well designed, but man is it depressing to spend a lot of time in.
The mountain, on the other hand, is super interesting and its challenges are very different. Just two silver veins required 20 or so frost resistance brews, and drakes and golems were constantly harassing and interrupting me. The drakes are relatively easy to deal with once you figure them out, but dealing with golems is not at all straight-forward, even when you figure out how to fight them.
Then you have the transportation problem. Bringing a full cart all the way back to my longboat was incredibly harrowing as I had to dodge drakes, wolves, and eventually a troll who seemed to like the path back to my dock that I’d set up. And of course just as my dock was finally in sight my outpost was hit by a Skeleton Surprise, which I hadn’t experienced yet.
I second this as useful, in many ways. You can do it with a karve too, as long as you are careful to disassemble in shallow water as illustrated above by the ore issue.
I decided against serious roads into my mountains as I had three smaller areas and the road to ore ratio was low. I was hand carrying it out, then I had enough for the cart trick. a couple of runs.
Feel the same way. The swamp was fine and a good challenge, but I enjoyed the mountain more. I’m surprised it took ~20 frost resistance potions for 2 silver veins, though. Each silver vein should take about 1 game day (unless there’s a lot more beneath the star?), and each potion lasts for close to half a day. Unless you died a lot, in which case sorry for pouring salt on the wound.
Sadly that’s probably the way to go. On my first mountain I spent 6 game days building a road and 2 days mining ore and transporting it. The second mountain was 10 days for roads and 3 days for ore. I don’t necessarily regret it, but not sure I’d do it again. Especially after I had a cart tumble down the mountain once and found that it survived with only half damage. Maybe I’ll just throw carts down the side in the future.
I’m sure if I were to use just the brews when I eventually go back for more silver, I’d use fewer because I know more now than I did the first time. I wasted a fair amount of time learning about finding silver veins, needlessly creating a rudimentary path, and learning about the locals and how to deal with them. It was a fun learning experience, though.
Ah, that makes sense, sorry for misunderstanding. It took me 3-4 mountains before I found one with any silver ore at all, so there definitely can be a bit of a startup cost.
I finally found some swamp biome! The good news is that it’s still a part of my original “continent”, the bad news is that it is way way way far to the north of my current home. It looks like I am going to need to use my karve to scout the coastline and make sure this section of swamp is large enough to at least get started on next level stuff (iron, etc.), then I am going to have to build a heavily fortified forward operating base with kiln, smelter, forge, etc. somewhere nearby, preferably in a meadows area along the coastline.
I was exploring the huge area of Black Forest that surrounds the Elder summoning alter closest to my home and found lots more copper and burial chambers, but I think I have all the bronze I need for now and enough coins already that I can’t even spend them all. It was night, and I was trying to move past a troll I didn’t want to fight in the dense forest so I could explore some new territory to the north, when suddenly I saw what looked like meadow through the trees, including a couple of buildings. I made straight for it, but stopped up short when I realized there were log palisades around the buildings, not something I’d ever seen previously in abandoned villages. Then I saw the Draugr shuffling around between the buildings and noped the hell out of there before they spotted me. Thankfully they were distracted by some hapless boars that had wandered too close to their village, as I could hear the death screams of the boars as I retreated silently back into the Black Forest.
Time to set up a portal, scout the region, and if it appears large enough, finally kill the Elder and begin my first foray into the Swamp.
I am getting close to getting enough bronze to get an axe, but copper is extremely hard to find in my Black Forest! Also had a MAYOR crash in a burial chamber: pc froze up, and after restart, it was still acting up. Happened again in the same burial chamber, but not in another, so hopefully this bug is contained to that specific chamber!
Build me a new house as well, only it is too big: the double fire only warms one half of the house. Much to learn…
