Valheim is an elegant game, the ore teleport solution is not.

Nearly everything in this game makes logical and thematic sense. Everything execpt not being allowed to teleport ore, but before you freak out — it's not grind that bothers me; It's that it's not thematic, you can take the very gear you made from it though. What if there was a solution that accomplished the same thing as that limitation, namely gear gating and exporation, without it being the ore that can't go through?

A couple baseline things to consider my bias on this. One, I like the portals I think they are a fun way to move around after you have already explored an area. Two, I don't mind limitations on teleporting items. The dragon eggs for example make some thematic sense; maybe they have some magical properties that conflict with the portal and cannot be teleported. And Three, it's not the grind that bothers me, so a grindy solution is frankly fine imo.

Here's what I came up with. The world is currently populated with rune stones that aside from story and theme don't do anything mechanically. What if you could mine or harvest those runes and they could be used either for specific gear (like stagbreaker needs a meadows rune stone, or the draugr fang needs the draugr rune (also could explain why it glows)), or upgrading your forge, workbench etc. The runes could be specific to dungeons or biomes and potentially have rarity making certain ones harder to find forcing you to explore more and gating your progress in either gear or forge upgrades. The rune stones could function like dragon eggs in that they have some magical property that prevents them from being teleported forcing you to transport them.

Maybe this is somewhat symantic, but I think that you could spend the same amount of time chasing runes and exploring rather than transporting ore from the same area and still have a more thematic and cohesive experiance.

Just some thoughts on the matter… 🙂

TLDR; – I think you can gate progression and force exploration using a mechanic like harvesting rune stones or some other thematic element rather than saying ore can't teleport.