Yesterday was my birthday!

While I did get a copy of Monster Hunter Rise (I hope to get into that this week), my request to Syn was to continue our adventures in Valheim. When we last left off, we’d sailed around an entire island and discovered most of the shore was covered with swamp. Our goal was to find more crypts in order to bring back more scrap iron.

During our last play session, we struck out through the long stretch of swamp on the north part of the island and looped around northwest until we reached about halfway down the side of the island, opposite of our little makeshift base. During that time, we ran across a couple shacks, but no more crypts.

This play session, we decided to go the opposite way, to the south and the west, to meet with the point we left off at in the previous session.

It wasn’t long before we found a crypt! However, upon entering, we were disappointed that it was small and only contained a couple of nodes to mine from. Not even any monsters inside!

We took our resources back and upgraded from the bronze pieces that we could. Then, reinforced, headed back into the swamp.

At that point, I didn’t know if a swamp could have more than one crypt – like the Black Forest does – or not. But we still had a pretty good chunk to explore, so it didn’t hurt to look.

It wasn’t very long before we ran across a second crypt – confirming swamps can have more than one. Not only was this a much larger and more dangerous crypt, but it contained a rune stone that gave us the location of the next boss!

We cleared that crypt (with surprisingly no deaths this time) and I was feeling like we had a pretty lucrative session already. We took the iron back, continued to upgrade gear and our forge – we now both had a full set of iron gear, mostly upgraded to the second level.

Feeling even more confident about making our way through the swamp, we set out to clear the last chunk we’d not explored yet. What a big difference it was – from cowering and avoiding creatures to openly, eagerly hunting leeches and draugr for their resources!

Much to my excitement, uncovering the rest of the south swamp revealed more crypts than I could have hoped for!

We started clearing the southernmost crypt since we finished uncovering everything to the south and were moving back north. This turned out to be quite a large one. We haven’t quite finished it yet, so there’s still more resources to bring back from that and the other two we haven’t entered yet.

To add to it, Syn’s begun to expand and reinforce our original main base with stone structures now that we have the ability to do so.

I’m hoping those additional crypts are large ones with lots of resources to bring back. We haven’t begun upgrading our gathering tools yet since weapons and armor are more important. But if we can bring back enough iron to continue upgrading our gear, we may be able to turn our eyes towards the next boss a lot sooner than I thought possible.

We’re not in any rush, though, and have plenty more swamp out there on other nearby islands if we need them. I also have a feeling the area around the next boss may be swampy as well.

We’ll just have to find out!