Gaming and Geek Life Blog

This last post for the week will finally catch us up to the point we left off in the game the past weekend! Told you that we’d accomplished a lot!

Once the silver in the mountains started rolling in, we identified the bottleneck in materials to be the wolf parts. We knew that wolves were tamable – though we didn’t know that wolves followed when tame. So, we headed up to the small mountain biome near our base in search of wolves.

We found exactly two of them, and between Syn and I, we led the angry critters all the way back to our base. Looking back on it, if I’d known that tame wolves followed, I’d have done it differently. But what we did worked more or less. We just had to keep the stone walls of the pen we’d built reparied because wolves pack a punch!

In the middle of trying to tame the wolves, we got a new type of attack on our base – the smell of sulfur that indicates surtlings are on the rise.

Though these things move crazy fast in the open area (compared to the ones in the swamp), they weren’t all that difficult to fend off. I don’t know if their flames would have been bad news for things built out of wood, but we also didn’t experiment to find out.

Surtling cores are always welcome, so we didn’t mind this attack so much.

Finally, after appeasing our new wolf additions for a couple days, they became tame and began to produce cubs. I’m going to have a harder time using these wolves for what they were intended – parts for gear – simply because they do follow and stay and fight for you.

To help myself feel a little better about this situation, I picked out one wolf to be my pet and built him his own wolf house away from the others. Syn was gracious enough to let me take from our resources – and while it’s silly… I just want a wolf pet!

The only thing that’s annoying about having a wolf pack around the house is all the howling! I wish there was a way to lower the frequency of wolf sounds. We might eventually have to build a pen somewhere else so that we can sleep at night.

In the meantime, Syn had continued to cull the boar population until we had nothing left but two star boar stock. She also began to further extend the boar pens, eventually taking down the walls between the massive turnip gardens and the boars so they could roam free.

While she worked on her farming projects, I headed out to the mountains to mine silver, explore and take down monsters. I noted that I really could use an upgraded bow for the drakes – I was still only using the fine wood bow at the time. It got the job done, but butter is better.

So that started us on a mini-quest for guck, which is needed to craft the Draugr Fang bow. This led us back into the swamps for a short time, but it didn’t take too long to get what we needed to make a bow for each of us.

This was the first weapon that really made me go “wow” in this game. Just look at that glow!

Bringing back wolf parts from my expeditions – we haven’t started culling our tame wolves yet – we were also both able to create new wolf cloaks which look equal parts cool and somewhat disturbing with that wolf head on there…

That’s where we left off in last weekend’s playthrough. We still need to upgrade the gear we’ve made. We have lots of mountains to explore yet. I have found one dragon egg, and I know what it’s for.

Not a bad bit of progress for a long holiday weekend, indeed!

After taking down Bonemass and earning the wishbone item, we brewed up some frost resistance potions and headed out to the next biome – the mountains. Without the potion, the freezing effect will eventually whittle down your health, like poison does. Thankfully, the potions last quite a while and aren’t too difficult to make.

The only other thing you have to watch for is rain or water in general. Even with frost protection, if you try to go into the mountain biome while wet, you’re going to hurt! Of course, this means that Valheim had to storm just when we were going to set out to the mountains time and again…

There was a small mountain zone near our main base on our home island. So we decided to get our feet wet (well not really wet) and see how things worked. All we found here were a few wolves and no pings from the wishbone. This was okay, because this was actually something that would work in our favor on down the line.

We got our first wolf drops from fighting the wolves, got an idea of what the biome felt like and how difficult the creatures were there. After the big difficulty jump with the swamp, where we didn’t dare tread the area alone, I was expecting something just as challenging.

It turns out that mountains are my new favorite area. Not only is it really pretty up there, but the difficulty curve when first entering the biome is so much better tuned than the swamp was. Whereas the swamp was so oppressive and the death count was high – we almost quit the game from the frustration of the zone when it was new to us – I had no fear of walking into the mountains and exploring on my own after our first couple trips.

There was a larger mountain area near our trader, so we set out to explore there with our wishbones ready. Again, I really enjoy the treasure hunt mechanics, and I get so excited anytime the wishbone starts to ping!

Up on this mountain, we found our first silver vein.

I’d go on to find about four or five of these viens in this area. Silver has been far more plentiful than the iron was so far. In fact, we have so much silver that it’s really wolf parts that we’re missing when it comes to crafting new gear.

The very first thing we both went for was the new chest piece which has frost resistance built into it. Testing it somewhat warily at first, I confirmed that the gear did take the place of the frost potions – again as long as you’re not wet. There’s also a new wolf cloak that protects against the cold, and looks pretty cool as well!

I upgraded to a silver sword and we began working on getting a baseline of silver gear across the board. This has been helpful in taking on the new encounters – things such as drakes and golems.

At first, the golem was a bit intimidating, but once I figured out his patterns, I’ve been able to roam about the mountains solo whenever I wanted to. This is a huge step up from the swamp, again, where we were afraid to solo much (until now, of course).

While we haven’t totally dumped the frost potions (never know when you might need one), I’ve been much happier and feel much more free in the mountains. And as I already mentioned, it is really a pretty area and a nice change in scenery. I wouldn’t want to set up a base there, but it’s fun to explore.

Now, we just needed to get a whole lot of wolf parts for our gear and upgrades. That was not a problem at all, as it turns out. I’ll talk about that next time.

Due to Syn’s preference for the karve’s easier handling, I built a second karve at our boathouse. The nice thing about the boathouse is that it’s on the side of the island we’d need to launch from closest to Bonemass’ location.

So that’s what we did.

Not far into the expedition, we came upon an island. Since the map was still hidden from us, it was hard to tell if this was a small island next to the island that contained Bonemass or the island we needed to travel to. It was also hard to tell how far north and south this landmass extended.

Syn gave me the option – sail north or sail south.

I chose north. After sailing all the way around the island northward, I think I chose wrong.

However, that trip was not wasted. We found a good stretch of plains, for one. We also found a large mountain biome on the island as well. It will make for some good exploration in the future.

Not to mention, as we were sailing, I saw a strange island that contained what looked like barnacles at first glance. Syn and I had rarely stopped for anything in our expeditions, but I asked her to park the boat for this out of curiosity.

Mining the barnacles, I began to gather chitin. I also began to hear a strange whale-like sound, and took note that the island was rumbling – we became very suspicious that this island wasn’t an island at all. After mining three barnacles, the island suddenly submerged, leaving me in the water.

Thankfully, the Syn sent the boat my way and we were able to beat it out of there. After the run-in with the serpent, we didn’t know if this creature was going to come after us. Looking it up, I discovered this was not the case – it merely sinks. It was still a fun encounter and I marked the location in case it should rise up again.

Eventually, we came across to the west side and found some meadows to set up an outpost (we try not to make a base in the swamp). We were further away from the Bonemass location than I’d wanted to be. The last thing we needed was to die on the boss and have to try to make a long run through the swamp with bronze gear to get our corpses.

As we started to make our way northward, we discovered a thin strip of black forest that ran parallel to the swamp. So we decided to make a second outpost as close to Bonemass as we could, moving the portal to the new location.

Once that was complete, we set out into the swamp to take down the boss.

Bonemass was fairly manageable as a boss. I’m not sure if there were any tricks to him other than to keep a poison resistance potion up at all times. That, and constantly being wet, were the two things that hindered the fight – especially since you can’t use a new potion until your current potion wears off.

There was a point where we each had to take a step back from the fight to wait for the potion counter to time out before using a new potion. With the amount of poising flying around and the adds Bonemass summoned, I think it would have been a lot harder solo. It was good to have someone to juggle boss aggro with throughout the fight.

Once we defeated the boss, we got a new special item…

I immediately liked the idea behind the wishbone. I was also glad that Hugin gave us a lot of information about the kind of things the wishbone could find – including the next step up in crafting gear – silver.

Returning to main base, the Meadows didn’t have silver to offer, but I did run across some of those treasure chests! Once I got to play with it some, I really like the treasure hunting aspect of the wishbone just as much as I thought I would.

Meanwhile, back on the farming side of our base, Syn found and lead a two star boar into our tamed pig pens. Taming this boar would allow us to start breeding two star stock into our current one star boars.

She was also hard at work with the turnip crops – expanding our harvest from the few starting seeds to hundreds of turnips! The meat from the boars combined with the turnips make for fantastic stew that has become a staple of our food source, along with sausages.

We were already very self sufficient – and even able to fight off the troll invasion that rolled down on our base – but increasing the quality of boar stock could only make it better.

The next step in game progression was to head into the mountains. We knew from past experience that walking into the biome started to freeze you. But we also knew that there were frost resistance potions to make.

Armed with our potions and our wishbones, we were more than ready to leave the swamps behind.

This past weekend, Syn and I dove back into the world of Valheim. When we’d left off, we were hitting up some swamp crypts to bring back iron and upgrade as much of our gear and tools as we could.

We did a little bit more of this, too, but then our gaming sessions went wildly astray in many different directions. This was especially due to the fact that we had a TON of stone lying around and could now work at replacing our wood structures with sturdier stone.

Boar Loves You

I don’t think I ever blogged about my tamed boars.

Way back in the original gaming sessions, I somehow managed to pen up a couple wild boars in a small abandoned farm just over the hill from our base and tame them. It was close enough that we could keep going over to check on them but far enough that sometimes we forgot to feed and breed them.

One of the major base expansions that Syn started working on was really putting to use the open space we have in our meadow. She set up some nice farming blocks and a new and much more improved boar pen.

We then built what we called a “boar highway” that consisted of a fenced road from the old pen to the new pen, transporting about 5 adults and 1 piggy successfully. I wish I’d taken screens of that, but for some reason, Valheim decided to bug my screenshot button for a while. It fixed itself on its own, so I have no idea what cause that.

After that, Syn managed to capture a one star boar. She’s been breeding that into the old stock and now we have a group of one stars to provide a renewable source of meat to go with the radishes she’s been growing for stew.

Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

Since we have a lot of sailing ahead of us in the direction opposite of where our little karve resides, and we had the extra iron to do it, I decided to experiment with building our first longboat. But in order to do that, we needed a bigger dock out by the shiphouse.

These docks weren’t as frustrating to build as my original docks, nor did they take anywhere near as much time. While we’re not quite ready to sail off to the island where the next boss resides just yet, we now have a larger boat to make that journey on when we decide to explore!

Expanding the Main Base

Not only did we start restructuring the outer walls and garden area in stone, but Syn vastly expanded the area within the walls giving us much more room for portals and structures.

Then I took on a particular pet peeve of mine – the mish-mash of forge upgrades that were littered around the yard. When we first put down the forge, we had no idea that we’d need space near it for six or so other objects that further upgraded that forge. Same for the workbench to a lesser extent.

Since the forge was up against an outer wall, I’d started just throwing these things out in the yard as near to the wall as I could. And that became a cluttered mess.

So I set about tearing down the wood wall and expanding it out in stone so we could have a properly organized forge and workbench area. So much better!

Syn also reworked the layout of the entire house – reorganized our storage chests, upgraded the floor to stone, and added a nice big hearth.

Much, much better!

The Swamp Stinks

We’ve started to get the warning “A foul smell from the swamp” popping up lately. The first time this happened, we were at our little docking outpost that was actually near a swamp. So we thought that maybe we’d built a little too close to the swamp and were being attacked for it.

But no.

They’re attacking our main base now, too, despite the fact there’s no swamp on the island that we know of! We’ve had no problem fending them off between the stone wall and our upgraded gear. So that’s an encouraging thing!

Trying out Fishing

After raiding the crypts in the swamps, we’ve accumulated a big stack of gold and valuables. So, I decided to take it to the merchant, sell it off and invest in a fishing rod and bait. I know that the fishing system is pretty barebones right now, but I fish in any game that has fishing. Valheim is no exception!

I’d taken note that fish were around the longboat dock area when I was building there, so I settled in for a bit to see what fishing was like.

I learned that fishing is an active hobby in this game. It’s easy to lose bait (which costs gold – but we have plenty). You can also fish out an area quickly – I wish the spawn would last a little longer, to be honest.

It was fun to try, though I can’t really do anything effective with the raw fish I took from it. I know later you can make high quality food from it, but we don’t have all the materials for that just yet. So, for now, I’ll poke around at it here and there, but we have more important things to do!

Exploring the Plains

…Like exploring the plains!

Or, well, a little tiny bit of plains. Basically, now that we had some rank 4 iron gear, I wanted to see if we could take on deathsquitos. After being slaughtered by one due to accidentally stepping into the plains for just a moment, we’ve been avoiding the zone completely.

We’ve come a long way in terms of confidence in moving through the swamps now, so I was super curious to see how we’d fair in the plains.

Things we learned:

• Deathsquitos still hurt, but with good food, we can take them down easily
• There are huge scary beasts in the plains that can tear us up badly (I survived and ran away)
• There are small little creatures in the plains that can tear us up, but we can kill them

The area of the plains that we explored was very small, just a corner of the island. So we didn’t really discover anything of interest out there aside from some cloudberries.

It was getting late at that point, and we’d played more than our fill, so our adventures into the plains will have to hold off for a while longer yet. We still have more crypts to dig out and a boss to find!