Valheim Journal 7Jun2021

Since the last journal seemed to result in good discussion, I am gong to put down another installment. Link to the previous journal entry is at the end.

It turns out my chunky swamp had 29 crypts on it. One was blocked. By blocked I mean you try to enter it, and it kicks you back out saying it is blocked. I looked up the cure for it, which involved a server reset, which did not work. Those 29 crypts yielded around 44 stacks of iron. I need not do another crypt as I have boxes of iron now.

Between this chunky continent and the other 2 crypt continent, I found 4 total surtling spawns. I used 26deg roof tiles off the ground with a jump to create a walkway up a unchoppable tree, to a platform with a portal and a chest. I would series link all of the portals and go through scooping loot. This did not work so well. The one on the small 2 crypt swamp hardly had anything in it at all. The ones on the chunky swamp were better, but only if I was doing a crypt near it. There seems to be a range beyond which you do not trigger spawns.

Yield though on the chunky surtling traps were good. I have a good 2 boxes of cores now, and I am ahead on coal. Digging it deeper so you have to swim , or digging the pool radius wider does not seem to prevent surtlings that spawn outside of the killing pool. Seems like eventually they spawn on a tree or somehting and live, turning off the farm.

With the Epic Loot mod, I got quite a few yellow and purple drops from the Surtling traps. Most of these I ground up for enchanting mats, but some were straight upgrades. I now have an indestructible axe and cultivator.

Once I had fully upgraded Iron armor, sledge, mace, shield and huntsman bow, the crypts were much less lethal. Instead of being 2 shot in bronze armor, I was now taking a good 4 hits or more. This altered my sledging through the partial muck mines tactics a bit to involve more shield rushing through the partial opening. The Draugr will run off out of range and at some point waiting for a melee close takes too long.

I ran poison resistance mead the whole time, and used medium health potions for when I forgot to refresh poison and got poisoned. Take those two potions if you are pushing difficulty.

I did do huntsman bow. Even though list doesn't seem that much of an upgrade from finewood bows, the huntsman bow hits harder in my experience and results in more stagger shots. This helps land a second shot more reliably. I did use strafing tactics with the bow….full draw behind cover, then strafe (left or right) and shoot that archer. You release before it draws, then you strafe back to cover. Its arrow hits the cover.

Bounties are going to require more exploration with boats. I still pick up any gold bounty I get, and it seems it spawns them further and further away from the uncompleted ones I have active.

I crafted a ring and enchanted it. Sadly rings take up the same belt slot, so I wound up using the STR belt, or more recently wishbone. Not sure what the inventory mods do about accessorizing, but ring, belt slots might be in order.

Base defenses are solid in my starting meadow base. Dirt wall and ditch plus discretely hidden benches have put the spawn outside the walls, and they do not break through.

Since Bonemass was on the chunky swamp, I just added portals to 3 nearby crypts in addition to the portal to a closer surtling farm. This established backup respawns if the fights went bad. I hoed a good 30m radius. Took maybe 4-5 stacks of stone to raise ground in the pools. Benched up the perimeter to suppress other adds.

I killed him once, solo, first try and have not been back as I am doing mountains now. I will likely craft silver armor and need to go farm Bonemass for keys to grind up for enchanting mats though.

I used a combination of fully upgraded iron sledge + iron mace/tower shield. When he would summon, I would swap the sledge and go to the summon point and sledge it dead. When he would puke poison, I would go to the other side of his spawn point to line of sight him on the spawner.

Then to apply damage it was either mace or sledge. If I was low on HP (around 60 or less with around 170hp max), I would sledge kite him around the spawner. This is mostly safe. Eventually health would tic, and I could swap to mace. I would wait for him to swing and miss, then move in and mace him 6x and dodge roll out of there. This would stop his melee attack.

The Bonemass I got was 1-star reflective. I started the fight around 2pm, and finished in the cold of night. The reflection damage was a bit painful, so the mace flurry would usually mean I had to get out of melee range for a bit. SIlver armor would likley make him much more farmable, although experience doing it solo means it will get easier over time asn I learn his patterns.

I had previously discovered a pretty decent mountain with mostly forest around it, and a splash of meadows. Mining silver is extremely difficult.

I started in the meadows below and hoed a path up to the mountain base. I dried off in a campfire, and took a frost res mead. Up the sheer hill I went, running out of stamina and backsliding a little. Finally I topped the hill.

I cut down a good 4 trees, hoed a 3×4 section base, and before I had it stakewalled drakes were on me. While wood arrows and the huntsman bow were good enough, I did make fire arrows to speed it up a bit. Shooting wyverns is about paitence and waiting for it to rise up to that fixed position before loosing. Tower shield and mace did deal with a regular wolf nicely. I got the rest of the stakewall up, set up a portal, and then began to search for silver.

Almost immediately I found a lode. Before I had cleared even 2m of the dirt around it, a drake and wolf jumped me. I fared poorly, and the 2-star wolf killed me with low stamina. Runback was easy, I just ate food and a frost mead, and used the bonemass power to run to my corpse and get my stuff. I managed to use the pit to put the wolf on the other side, got a good 3 arrow shots in it, then safely held block until it bit, then countered for a single hit. Repeated that pattern a good 3x and it was dead.

I go back to the mine, and I discover a stone golem has spawned. 5 star splitter. The worst possible one. You kill it, more spawn of lower stars. I tried for kicks with the arrows, and it was just shrugging off the arrows. I started digging a pit, and underestimated the huge reach of the 5 star golem. That was another corpse run.

I decide to properly fortify my fort. I dig a 2m wide deep ditch a good 4m away from my stakewall, all the way around. I then raise the lip with raise ground, and hoe a path around. I put a log bridge below lip height , and that stymies the golem. He cant get me. I complete it, and go roaming again, and find out Mr. Golem has been busy, with lots of nice meat and yellow/purple items lying around. I still was stumped on the golem though…the current plan of running until something else got in a fight seemed to work OK, but I wanted a permanent solution.

So I started tinkering around. My plan was to put it in a pit. I dug out a rock partway as a start, trying to drag it across the rock and maybe have a missed swing make a larger hole that trapped the Golem. No luck.

Then I ported over rock and made a dirt wall extending outwards. I cut a spiraling trench. The idea…drag it to the end of the spiral, sprint jump up the trench, run back to the entrance, and dirt wall that up. More wolves and drakes and days passed, and I got to the end of the spiral.

And I found silver.

I noticed the spiral ditch made it hard for the golem to get to me. So I just undermined the silver. The golem was pissed off, swinging from the top. I was safe, and getting silver.

Then something happened. THe golem above me smashed a boulder, and fell down so It was standing on top of my silver vein. It was stuck. I stepped back, gauged its reach, and erected ladders to take out all the silver I could. It was pissed off and swinging but not getting free. I went back out the spiral, clearing silver, and dirt walled it closed in case it broke itself out…it would then be trapped in the end of the spiral. There would be no golem respawns as long as this one was stuck.

I pulled a good 2 stacks of silver from that, then found another silver vein on the other side of it where I got another 4 stacks. Now without the golem roaming around, wolves were again a problem. So I turned up the volume on the head set and listened for wolves. I did find one of those sunken stone round structures. I put a stakewall around with with a door and a portal and chests in the bottom.

3 star wolf blind sided me, and I was low. So I move towards the new structure. Wolf jams itself into the door, and hits me hard dropping me below 30HP. I drop down the stairs and port out and let health tick back. Before porting back I use the bonemass buff. I go back through my other portal and arrow the 3-star wolf a few times before finishing it with the block and counterstrike method.

I hoe a road from the upper silver vein to the fort at the edge of the mountain. I plant yellow mushrooms. Those work great, except as I did out the 2nd vein, they are floating in air. Weird. The mushroom path lights pay off in the next blizzard.

The golem in a pit between the two silver nodes is a nice scarecrow. A 3 star drake spawned, and I was not making much progress but getting hurt pretty bad from it. SO I ran around the golem to the other side, and that drake aggroed on the golem. They hate each other. They will stop chasing me and fight each other if they see each other. Neither is making any progress, but I run the silver back to my base fort with no problem.

I build a corewood log rail jutting out the back of my base fort from the ground, out over the ditch and hanging mid air. I put flooring in, and go until it is red. I am easily clearing the ditch now, so I build a cart. I encumber carry and load the cart, then shove it off, and jump after it down the mountain.

Carts like to get stuck and I had to break up mine and rebuild it once. I also had to hoe up a new road section to go back to the main path. Once there I have no problems loading the silver into my longboat. I sail home with no incident, and as I write this, the silver is smelting. I do not have a trophy yet for a wolf cape, but I can make a Draugr fang bow, and I will likely make silver pieces for the other slots so silver armor instead of iron starts dropping. I may farm Bonemass a few times to get enchants. I think there is more silver on that mountain though, and so far I have been pretty successful.

The first and previous version of the journal is here