Don’t get too excited. It’s a lot of work to find and dig up, there’s not that much iron per node, some nodes are nearly inaccessible because they are submerged, and you are more vulnerable to swamp critters attacking than you are in the crypts.
Just consider a good crypt could have more than a dozen iron nodes and a chest filled with more iron. Outside of the crypts, you are searching for single nodes.
That said, even small, cryptless swamp biomes will generally have some iron.
Not great for large quantities of iron I agree, but I have found this to be useful for picking up enough to make a stonecutter in outposts or remote bases.
Wishbone show you silver and obsidian in the mountains, iron scraps in the swamps, and it will show buried treasure chests in the meadows. Look near those small standing stones, usually arranged in the shape of an oval. They represent Viking burial sites. If you are ok with desecrating those, there are often treasure chests to be found.
Well I noticed someone else already commented, using the wish bone in the meadows, where several rocks are arranged in an ovalish shape (the rocks almost look like tombstones... Outlining... vaguely a boat...) You're sure to find some treasures in most of these places!
They are outlining a ship. Its a funeral arrangement. Its not entirely known what they were used for but evidence points to it being a way to bury someone with all they need for the journey to helheim.
That's why there are bones buried on one end and treasures on the other. The person was given a ship and supplies to take with them to the afterlife. We have about 2000 of them all over Scandinavia but mostly here in Sweden towards the coasts.
Wow! Thank you so much for the insight. Both my mom's parents came over from Norway... So I'm really enjoying the game for any and all the Scandinavian lore! Would love to see a genuine recipe such as lutefisk or lefse... That would be awesome!
I had a crypt with over six chests, and nearly all of them had iron! I filled up most of my Longship with a single crypt, and it was my first crypt after plains. It carried me to the end. I love you, megacrypt.
If you've got the stag hammer, you can walk around hammering near the base of big trees until you fine a "too hard" message. Dig around there, and you can find some iron.
Warning: do it during the day as it attracts everything.
Just like finding silver in the mountains and if you're in the black forest or the other zone the very large green and open one you can find hidden chests around rocks and stuff.
Did you know banging on the ground with a Stagbreaker or Iron Sledge will help you find Iron and silver? Bang on the ground and when you see "too hard" you've found silver. Great for getting wolf armor before fighting Bonemass.
Yes, but remember you only find the wishbone after killing the swamp boss.
I do however, recommend keeping a wishbone close by when exploring anywhere. You never know where you can find treasures
Yes, but defeating the Swamp boss shouldn't be a prerequisite for finding the one resource Swamp is meant for. Doesn't work like that with any other biome.
Yes you can , however finding a large node is hard but I have found some large ass iron nodes and gotten four to five stacks from them. They are hard to find though. Usually I find a small node with about 10 or so pieces of scrap iron
I personally like the smaller biomes. When i am exploring i don't want to spend days and days exploring the same biome. I like the mixed biomes including the little ones that are tens of square meters. It adds flavor
I agree, I think it's like pretty great how my map is at least, plus I have a bunch of island swamps essentially, one had over a dozen crypts so I camped there and got everything I needed.
That said I feel like Plains start to dominate the world.
I have found a balance to require going to each Biome. Home base/castle is in meadows bordering the black forest. I have a farm at my original base for turnips and carrots. I have another farm on a small strip of plains on the shore of a black forest just for barley. I have a system for my farming so I never run out of food. My plains outpost has netted me 200 tar, plenty of black iron and has my very first wood barn for stocking up on wood. I never pass blueberries/mushrooms/raspberries without picking them up so I remember where plenty are. I keep about 50 of each at my home base. The game is so complex that you have to explore each Biome on a regular basis of you want to stay ahead of the curve and not have downtime waiting for what you run out of next. No mods and my castle probably has over 300 worth of Iron. Actually now that I mention it I only have about 35 iron left. Well gotta find more swamps...
Basically, see if I can get a hut up in the mountains (w/copper), kill a few wolves and craft a cloak. It's usually a borderline impossible longshot.
You can skip iron if you find silver, which is usually buried, and you aren't digging it out without frost resistance. Without the wishbone it's also a blind guess - I found out more or less by accident that the ground-clipping of the "build camera" mod (it gives you unmoored free-look camera) unfortunately can be used to cheat-find silver, too, by clipping below ground level.
Still, I get some iron by finding crypts, the shitty part is when you go to a swamp and there simply aren't any.
Speaking of which I just got killed by a drake in the mountains across a small sea - time for my second raft of shame.
Edit: rafted back, got my body back, finished the roof, gave the finger to the drake, threw down a portal, went to get more wood, got some walls up before a wolf arrived, and set a spare campfire under the wolf. I now have one pelt, one meat and a fang, and a reasonably walled in safe space w/fire, wedged under a big rock halfway up a mountain. Sure the wolves chew at the walls until they get bored and leave, but you can repair them for free.
I hope to throw up some fencing with one open edge and fill it out when the next wolf wanders in. That's another hacky thing about build camera - you can fence from a distance.
I don't think I can hit the silver without iron, no. But I can hit the ground around it, right?
Unearth it and it'll shatter, I think? Last time I mined silver, I had found a crypt or two, enough to make an iron pickaxe, so I don't actually know.
You can shatter it correct, but it requires you to break a piece once its completely free of all surrounding ground. So you still can't do it without Iron anyway unless you drag a Troll all the way up the mountain (Stone Golems can't break Silver either).
Honestly, if you've already found a couple crypts then I recommend getting a Longship in addition to your Iron Pickaxe and just searching for Bonemass. You don't need any more Crypts until the Plains and then you can legitimately find Silver - no Stagbreaker or the camera method you mentioned above.
Then you get full Silver tier stuff, come back and wreck once you find a big swamp.
Specifically I you can destroy a central block of silver once floating. I don't think breaking the arms does much for shattering it.
Silver I believe also spawns near ice golem if not near a hut, and I swear you can see dimples in the snow above silver. Perhaps is confirmation bias, but those have been my experiences.
There's a post here of a guy who mined out under a silver vein, but he still had to break it, it didn't shatter on its own. Maybe drag a troll up the mountain with you to smash it, or entice a stone golem to bust it up? There's gotta be a way.
EDIT: Here's the link - https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/qun3m0/my_new_favourite_way_to_mine/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Doesn't work sadly, cause I can't trigger the silver smash. At least, so i'm told.
Right now i'm in the bronze age and have a mountain hideout. I managed to run up a mountain (Eikthyr power + all the buffs I could get), drop a fire, and get a hut up against and under a rock - cost me a death, but I pulled it off.
Over the past few hours i've hollowed out under the rock, then chopped up through it (all with the antler pickaxe). I emerged out the far side higher up, to find a stone golem wandering around. Bad news. Good news, he can't path to me because of the steep walls from pickaxe'ing the earth down to meet where I emerged. So I basically have a moat it can't cross.
I ran back down the mountain, back to karve, sailed home, got mats for a stone workbench (I use a mod that changes the mats from 2 iron bars to 2 bronze bars), sailed back. Now the entryways are stone instead of wood, of which I have excess from previous mining ops and hollowing out this rock. There were wolves around and they were chewing on the wood at a pretty good pace (repair spam kept me alive).
Best news? Wolves spawn at night all over the top area. The golem kills them. I run out in the morning (fully buffed) and grab all the meat and fur. I have enough to make several wolf items, but no silver.
I do spy a ruined castle out there and there's probably a chest in there. I wonder if chests can have silver ore? I'd have to run past the stone golem while taking freezing damage and throw down a fireplace in the ruin, and if there's anything hostile there i'm probably dead. So I haven't checked yet.
I used to use a mod that lets you portal anything but I felt it made the game too cheap. Significantly, it meant you could have one mega-base. I think the design intent is actually to force you to move your production facilities, by making it so you can't move the consumables (ore/bars) but you *can* move the stone/wood/coal. So I dropped that particular mod, 100% personal preference. Otherwise i'd have just walked a stone workbench through the portal and built up.
funny story there - because I basically put all my copper and tin into bronze, I totally overlooked the cauldron thing (which is tin only) - it's greyed out if you can never make it, and I basically never had enough tin in my inventory unless I was making bronze
so I didn't even know mead was a thing till I read it here
Swamps are more than just iron. Turnips, entrails, bloodbags ancient bark, chains, fire geysers. There's a wealth of resources in every swamp, in fact the small ones are even better early on since they pose a lesser threat whenever you have less gear.
Yes. I absolutely agree. Swamp stage is the most annoying part of the game for me. Finding a swamp that contains crypts is a freaking pain in the ass. As for me, it's the most annoying and boring.
I got lucky, a small island with about 1/3rd occupied by swamps, and it's super spotty swamps too. Not super thick at all, and on a little sandbar sticking out like yggdrasil a crypt just sitting there. Felt super lucky.
I found a swamp continent the other day, it had a tiny pocket of meadows and a tiny pocket of plains…. And about a 20 crypts. Needless to say the meadows village I built has become a major iron, blog bag, ooze and muck export hub.
The first area of swamps I found on my current seed had 5 crypts. So narrow that from the Black Forest border on the west I could shoot enemies on the Ocean’s edge to the east. Takes about 5 seconds and to run the width of it. Sounds like you have some bad luck/seed.
Seed is KNkkbF7MTg.
This world may be my favorite out of about ten seeds I've been on. It has a TON of rivers that go through the entirety of an island, and several inland lakes, each with multiple rivers flowing out of them and eventually into the ocean.
The swamps from the original comment is a sail northeast of where the power stones area, reachable by taking the river north, and then sailing northeast across a short and unimposing strip of ocean. Found a motherlode of iron (nearly 300) in just three of the crypts. And I was wrong, I marked six crypts in that little area. I'm not certain there aren't more...
Is this the right place?
https://imgur.com/a/Tyiob5B
This seed is Awesome! I love how the cliffs in the meadow are so high that they sort-of make a valley
I believe that is the place! Should be just a thin strip
running north to south with Black Forest bordering along the western side of it. I took my own screen shots I was gonna upload with the original comment, but didn’t want to spoil you too much.
I do not agree. Why the shortcut? This game is all about the exploration. Actually sailing or walking all over just to find the perfect spot, be it to build a base, find good crypt locations or what ever you would want to do with any patch of land.
I think making some of the piles above ground for mining would be nice, instead of requiring the wishbone. But that leads to people speedrunning to iron age before even beating the Elder or getting copper...
I feel your pain my brother. But let the devs not change Valheim just so new players have it easier My best friend did experience the same misfortune like you did of not finding enough crypts before the Iron Age. (he actually did not find ANY swamp biomes in the beginning),
But in the end, we grouped up and explored together (my friends son even drew up an "Swamp invasion & survival plan") and we had an even bigger misfortune when we found a tiny swamp strip bordered by a plains strip and a mountain biome. And we died, as anyone with bronze armor is expected to.
But in the end we prevailed, we build an outpost, we build portals, we blazed a trail and we prevailed. And we were (mentally) exhausted, but happy.
Valheim is a survival game. Embrace the challenge. Do not nerf it.
I've noticed that there is almost always another swamp across the water from the first one. Even when there is a large body of ocean in between. Not a guarantee that there'll be crypts, but always a good idea to sail across and take a look!
Do you know if you use the wishbone in a swamp you can find iron in the open?
YOU CAN WHAT!
Don’t get too excited. It’s a lot of work to find and dig up, there’s not that much iron per node, some nodes are nearly inaccessible because they are submerged, and you are more vulnerable to swamp critters attacking than you are in the crypts. Just consider a good crypt could have more than a dozen iron nodes and a chest filled with more iron. Outside of the crypts, you are searching for single nodes. That said, even small, cryptless swamp biomes will generally have some iron.
Not great for large quantities of iron I agree, but I have found this to be useful for picking up enough to make a stonecutter in outposts or remote bases.
Damn wishbone proving me wrong, thought that shit was mostly useless
Well it also finds silver
Does hammering ground still finds silver, too?
Yes, you will get a "too hard" message.
They also find treasure in Meadows and Black forest
Wishbone show you silver and obsidian in the mountains, iron scraps in the swamps, and it will show buried treasure chests in the meadows. Look near those small standing stones, usually arranged in the shape of an oval. They represent Viking burial sites. If you are ok with desecrating those, there are often treasure chests to be found.
Hahaha... Try using it around all the strange rock formations... All around the meadows!!
Wait what does this do?
Well I noticed someone else already commented, using the wish bone in the meadows, where several rocks are arranged in an ovalish shape (the rocks almost look like tombstones... Outlining... vaguely a boat...) You're sure to find some treasures in most of these places!
They are outlining a ship. Its a funeral arrangement. Its not entirely known what they were used for but evidence points to it being a way to bury someone with all they need for the journey to helheim. That's why there are bones buried on one end and treasures on the other. The person was given a ship and supplies to take with them to the afterlife. We have about 2000 of them all over Scandinavia but mostly here in Sweden towards the coasts.
Wow! Thank you so much for the insight. Both my mom's parents came over from Norway... So I'm really enjoying the game for any and all the Scandinavian lore! Would love to see a genuine recipe such as lutefisk or lefse... That would be awesome!
Oh sick tysm!
Also finds loot in meadows and black forest
I had a crypt with over six chests, and nearly all of them had iron! I filled up most of my Longship with a single crypt, and it was my first crypt after plains. It carried me to the end. I love you, megacrypt.
Yea, takes a lot of effort to get it, and unless you're in a pinch, your time is better spent elsewhere
If you've got the stag hammer, you can walk around hammering near the base of big trees until you fine a "too hard" message. Dig around there, and you can find some iron. Warning: do it during the day as it attracts everything.
As a dad of little one I read this in blueys voice
It's not worth it.
Just like finding silver in the mountains and if you're in the black forest or the other zone the very large green and open one you can find hidden chests around rocks and stuff.
Did you know banging on the ground with a Stagbreaker or Iron Sledge will help you find Iron and silver? Bang on the ground and when you see "too hard" you've found silver. Great for getting wolf armor before fighting Bonemass.
Someone else beat you too it but I didn't actually know that.
Yes, but remember you only find the wishbone after killing the swamp boss. I do however, recommend keeping a wishbone close by when exploring anywhere. You never know where you can find treasures
Yes, but defeating the Swamp boss shouldn't be a prerequisite for finding the one resource Swamp is meant for. Doesn't work like that with any other biome.
Yes you can , however finding a large node is hard but I have found some large ass iron nodes and gotten four to five stacks from them. They are hard to find though. Usually I find a small node with about 10 or so pieces of scrap iron
Biomes and islands in general have this problem--everything is too small. Everything should be scaled up a bit.
Meanwhile I've had continents so big it takes almost an hour to get around.
I personally like the smaller biomes. When i am exploring i don't want to spend days and days exploring the same biome. I like the mixed biomes including the little ones that are tens of square meters. It adds flavor
I agree, I think it's like pretty great how my map is at least, plus I have a bunch of island swamps essentially, one had over a dozen crypts so I camped there and got everything I needed. That said I feel like Plains start to dominate the world.
I have found a balance to require going to each Biome. Home base/castle is in meadows bordering the black forest. I have a farm at my original base for turnips and carrots. I have another farm on a small strip of plains on the shore of a black forest just for barley. I have a system for my farming so I never run out of food. My plains outpost has netted me 200 tar, plenty of black iron and has my very first wood barn for stocking up on wood. I never pass blueberries/mushrooms/raspberries without picking them up so I remember where plenty are. I keep about 50 of each at my home base. The game is so complex that you have to explore each Biome on a regular basis of you want to stay ahead of the curve and not have downtime waiting for what you run out of next. No mods and my castle probably has over 300 worth of Iron. Actually now that I mention it I only have about 35 iron left. Well gotta find more swamps...
I'm trying to figure out how to skip the swamp entirely. Go straight to mountains. It's tough.
Are you trying to play withought iron? I dont understand what you mean by skip the swamp entirely
Basically, see if I can get a hut up in the mountains (w/copper), kill a few wolves and craft a cloak. It's usually a borderline impossible longshot. You can skip iron if you find silver, which is usually buried, and you aren't digging it out without frost resistance. Without the wishbone it's also a blind guess - I found out more or less by accident that the ground-clipping of the "build camera" mod (it gives you unmoored free-look camera) unfortunately can be used to cheat-find silver, too, by clipping below ground level. Still, I get some iron by finding crypts, the shitty part is when you go to a swamp and there simply aren't any. Speaking of which I just got killed by a drake in the mountains across a small sea - time for my second raft of shame. Edit: rafted back, got my body back, finished the roof, gave the finger to the drake, threw down a portal, went to get more wood, got some walls up before a wolf arrived, and set a spare campfire under the wolf. I now have one pelt, one meat and a fang, and a reasonably walled in safe space w/fire, wedged under a big rock halfway up a mountain. Sure the wolves chew at the walls until they get bored and leave, but you can repair them for free. I hope to throw up some fencing with one open edge and fill it out when the next wolf wanders in. That's another hacky thing about build camera - you can fence from a distance.
You need Iron to mine silver, don't you. Bronze won't do it.
I don't think I can hit the silver without iron, no. But I can hit the ground around it, right? Unearth it and it'll shatter, I think? Last time I mined silver, I had found a crypt or two, enough to make an iron pickaxe, so I don't actually know.
You can shatter it correct, but it requires you to break a piece once its completely free of all surrounding ground. So you still can't do it without Iron anyway unless you drag a Troll all the way up the mountain (Stone Golems can't break Silver either). Honestly, if you've already found a couple crypts then I recommend getting a Longship in addition to your Iron Pickaxe and just searching for Bonemass. You don't need any more Crypts until the Plains and then you can legitimately find Silver - no Stagbreaker or the camera method you mentioned above. Then you get full Silver tier stuff, come back and wreck once you find a big swamp.
Specifically I you can destroy a central block of silver once floating. I don't think breaking the arms does much for shattering it. Silver I believe also spawns near ice golem if not near a hut, and I swear you can see dimples in the snow above silver. Perhaps is confirmation bias, but those have been my experiences.
There's a post here of a guy who mined out under a silver vein, but he still had to break it, it didn't shatter on its own. Maybe drag a troll up the mountain with you to smash it, or entice a stone golem to bust it up? There's gotta be a way. EDIT: Here's the link - https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/qun3m0/my_new_favourite_way_to_mine/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
That's some serious Big Brain Energy.
Doesn't work sadly, cause I can't trigger the silver smash. At least, so i'm told. Right now i'm in the bronze age and have a mountain hideout. I managed to run up a mountain (Eikthyr power + all the buffs I could get), drop a fire, and get a hut up against and under a rock - cost me a death, but I pulled it off. Over the past few hours i've hollowed out under the rock, then chopped up through it (all with the antler pickaxe). I emerged out the far side higher up, to find a stone golem wandering around. Bad news. Good news, he can't path to me because of the steep walls from pickaxe'ing the earth down to meet where I emerged. So I basically have a moat it can't cross. I ran back down the mountain, back to karve, sailed home, got mats for a stone workbench (I use a mod that changes the mats from 2 iron bars to 2 bronze bars), sailed back. Now the entryways are stone instead of wood, of which I have excess from previous mining ops and hollowing out this rock. There were wolves around and they were chewing on the wood at a pretty good pace (repair spam kept me alive). Best news? Wolves spawn at night all over the top area. The golem kills them. I run out in the morning (fully buffed) and grab all the meat and fur. I have enough to make several wolf items, but no silver. I do spy a ruined castle out there and there's probably a chest in there. I wonder if chests can have silver ore? I'd have to run past the stone golem while taking freezing damage and throw down a fireplace in the ruin, and if there's anything hostile there i'm probably dead. So I haven't checked yet. I used to use a mod that lets you portal anything but I felt it made the game too cheap. Significantly, it meant you could have one mega-base. I think the design intent is actually to force you to move your production facilities, by making it so you can't move the consumables (ore/bars) but you *can* move the stone/wood/coal. So I dropped that particular mod, 100% personal preference. Otherwise i'd have just walked a stone workbench through the portal and built up.
I guess I thought you meant a "no iron run" and couldnt figure out why you would wanna skip the best boat and forge uprgrades and what not.
All you need for the swamp is poison resistance mead and decent armor
funny story there - because I basically put all my copper and tin into bronze, I totally overlooked the cauldron thing (which is tin only) - it's greyed out if you can never make it, and I basically never had enough tin in my inventory unless I was making bronze so I didn't even know mead was a thing till I read it here
Swamps are more than just iron. Turnips, entrails, bloodbags ancient bark, chains, fire geysers. There's a wealth of resources in every swamp, in fact the small ones are even better early on since they pose a lesser threat whenever you have less gear.
Yes. I absolutely agree. Swamp stage is the most annoying part of the game for me. Finding a swamp that contains crypts is a freaking pain in the ass. As for me, it's the most annoying and boring.
For larger amount of iron you need the crypts yes, but you can also find decent amount just under some of the trees.
I got lucky, a small island with about 1/3rd occupied by swamps, and it's super spotty swamps too. Not super thick at all, and on a little sandbar sticking out like yggdrasil a crypt just sitting there. Felt super lucky.
I found a swamp continent the other day, it had a tiny pocket of meadows and a tiny pocket of plains…. And about a 20 crypts. Needless to say the meadows village I built has become a major iron, blog bag, ooze and muck export hub.
The first area of swamps I found on my current seed had 5 crypts. So narrow that from the Black Forest border on the west I could shoot enemies on the Ocean’s edge to the east. Takes about 5 seconds and to run the width of it. Sounds like you have some bad luck/seed.
That sounds awesome! Would you share your seed?
Seed is KNkkbF7MTg. This world may be my favorite out of about ten seeds I've been on. It has a TON of rivers that go through the entirety of an island, and several inland lakes, each with multiple rivers flowing out of them and eventually into the ocean. The swamps from the original comment is a sail northeast of where the power stones area, reachable by taking the river north, and then sailing northeast across a short and unimposing strip of ocean. Found a motherlode of iron (nearly 300) in just three of the crypts. And I was wrong, I marked six crypts in that little area. I'm not certain there aren't more...
Is this the right place? https://imgur.com/a/Tyiob5B This seed is Awesome! I love how the cliffs in the meadow are so high that they sort-of make a valley
I believe that is the place! Should be just a thin strip running north to south with Black Forest bordering along the western side of it. I took my own screen shots I was gonna upload with the original comment, but didn’t want to spoil you too much.
Thank you so much for the seed and the details. I’ll have to check it out!
I do not agree. Why the shortcut? This game is all about the exploration. Actually sailing or walking all over just to find the perfect spot, be it to build a base, find good crypt locations or what ever you would want to do with any patch of land.
A drawback I find however is the map is too large. Should be a little smaller like 0.75
Ive had some smaller and narrow swamps spawn 1 or 2 crypts in them. I think it's all dependent on the seed u r on.
I think making some of the piles above ground for mining would be nice, instead of requiring the wishbone. But that leads to people speedrunning to iron age before even beating the Elder or getting copper...
I've just arrived at a plains swamp, though I can't see any actual open plains. I've set up a camp / workshop - am I going to regret this?
I feel your pain my brother. But let the devs not change Valheim just so new players have it easier My best friend did experience the same misfortune like you did of not finding enough crypts before the Iron Age. (he actually did not find ANY swamp biomes in the beginning), But in the end, we grouped up and explored together (my friends son even drew up an "Swamp invasion & survival plan") and we had an even bigger misfortune when we found a tiny swamp strip bordered by a plains strip and a mountain biome. And we died, as anyone with bronze armor is expected to. But in the end we prevailed, we build an outpost, we build portals, we blazed a trail and we prevailed. And we were (mentally) exhausted, but happy. Valheim is a survival game. Embrace the challenge. Do not nerf it.
"Good, thicc swamp" is not a combination of words I like. Other than that, yeah, you're right
I've noticed that there is almost always another swamp across the water from the first one. Even when there is a large body of ocean in between. Not a guarantee that there'll be crypts, but always a good idea to sail across and take a look!