Last time I left off in my Valheim posts, Syn and I had reached the mountains and were making good progress on upgrading our gear. I was enjoying my time in the mountains, which I said was far easier than the swamp had been.

I’ve learned since then that this is only true during the day. At night, things get real. We’d already run across the Fenring that comes out at night in the previous play sessions, so that didn’t take us by surprise. It’s really the wandering wolf packs of 5-6 wolves, often with a one star wolf, that did me in.

Unless you can make yourself a cozy cave hideout – or you have a safe base in the mountains – staying overnight isn’t usually a good idea. Wood cabins don’t hold out against drakes or wolve packs for long.

That’s not to say I like the mountains any less. I just wish… the mountains would finally give up their secrets. That is to say, after searching for hours high and low in mountain range after mountain range, we still haven’t found the runestone that uncovers the location to the next boss.

See that picture at the top? That’s a Maypole.

There’s a toss-up if this structure even appears in a world at all. But I found it in our game… of all things. And yet, I still haven’t found the location for Moder.

Note: A new patch has added the Maypole as a craftable object so it is no longer a rare find. Back when I discovered it, however, it was still very rare!

This is slowly becoming an issue. Syn has upgraded all of her silver gear as high as it will go, and I’m getting very close to be fully upgraded. Not finding the next boss location is stopping our progress hard at this point.

See this?

In between mountain ranges as we were searching for Moder’s rune we find…

A rune that points to the Yagluth boss instead! I’m assuming that’s the next boss beyond Moder, and while it’s very nice to have this already on our map, it’s crazy that we’ve spent hours in the mountains only to stumble on the next boss location before we have found our current boss location.

Of course, this forces us out into the world to explore, especially since we’ve already exhausted all of the mountain biomes we’re aware of. Even this huge mountain biome below gave us nothing but silver, snow and my night wolf-pack death.

We also ran face to face with another Serpent in our travels. This time, armed with poison arrows and Draugr Fangs, we were able to kill it. It was still a close call as one more strike would have taken our little Karve out from under us.

In the meantime, the main base has continued to expand and thrive. We did end up building a more distant wolf pen to help with the constant howling sounds that started to drive me nuts. But then, we had so many wolves that they were somehow making it out of the pen by stacking on top of each other to do so (when they got riled up over a monster being outside).

Syn began to form wolf packs that she takes out and about for the fun of it since we have so many wolves… and after hunting through so many mountains, we don’t really need extra wolf parts anymore.

While exploring the world is fun (we even joked that we’re going to go to the north pole!), finding the next boss location would be even more fun. Eventually, we do want to explore more of the world, but it would be really nice to be able to finally break into the plains and have a wider access to whatever Moder will unlock for us first.

Until then, we keep searching!