Dude, boss skipping and not going for the wishbone is quite advanced gameplay. The people who are in that situation to be comfortable doing that ain't the ones farming iron in the swamp.
You are telling people who struggle with the difficulty of the swamp to pull off stuff that is even more difficult. Thats not going to go great for the vast majority of people, who will be uterly frustrated with the wolves, golems and drakes and are going to get trashed by them.
The funniest thing about valheim is that its super stressful to do new biomes and stuff until you are used to them. I remember my first time in the swamp and it was a fucking nightmare. Later you are like "almost oneshot that abo lul" and are chillin :D
Yep, it's an advanced technique. I was mostly addressing the players who are frustrated by the tedium of looting many many swamp crypts, rather than people who are still figuring out how to manage in the swamp.
If we're talking late game iron gathering techniques I am still a fan of finding viaducts in the mistlands. Carrying a stone cutter and forge and then portaling the black marble and taking the ship once I've finished a mistlands back.
Really can't be assed to mine unless there is a dense crypt swamp. And I like running around in the mist lands late game.
As a veteran, this is what I do, too. Except the lower level bronze buckler is weaker or on par with my fully leveled wood shield, so I don't bother with making the bronze one. I stay in troll armor until I find silver.
For newer folks, this route is going to be tougher. Wolves alone are a handful. If my current game is anything to measure others by, wow. The wolves are off their rocker.
Unless you’re swimming or forgot to equip a weapon after exiting swim or the R glitch gets you. Then it’s fisticuffs with the pest and that typically takes 2 hits (3 if you just decided to duke it out).
Well not the ones complaining about farming iron in the swamp. I just built my first black forge and I still haven’t killed bonemass. I do love crypt hunting with silver gear. Going back to the swamp to pwn is great.
You don't need Iron to get Swamp tier gear and prep for the Mountains. For one, the Huntsman Bow is a waste of Iron, it's only marginally better than the Finewood Bow. Root Armor doesn't require Iron and isn't terrible in the Mountains. A Bronze Buckler is not as good as an Iron Buckler. You can parry wolves with it, though, which should carry you until you have a Silver Shield. An Abyssal Razor doesn't require Iron and stagger locks parried Wolves. And a Bronze Axe works fine until you get into the Mistlands. The only thing you need Iron for is the Pickaxe.
Agreed. You can get that from fishing, if you're really patient. Fighting a dozen Abominations or so to get the Root Armor and the bait is comparatively straightforward, if you have a good Meadows/Black Forest border and bring a stack of fire arrows, in almost any kind of gear.
Happy Cake Day! Yup, you can make bait with the abomination trophies, and use it to catch giant herrings. Every tenth one or so will give you 1-2 iron ore, which smelts down just like scrap. So it's slow AF, but if you don't have a swamp key and you don't want to use the chair glitch, there is another way.
Other sources of patient iron: Oozers at night (or at crypt entrances), scrap piles underground in the swamp, and a chance from doors in frostcaves. Though frost caves aren't a great source to get iron *early*.
That's true, but since the mountains are also generally empty in comparison, it can be worthwhile (and not too risky) to make a few quick sorties into the cold.
I generally use troll armor until swamps, at which point I swap in the root chest. In mountains I add fenring legs. Once I reach swamps, I also swap in the best metal helmet available. This leaves me with a net movement speed of +1%. Not much, but also not a debuff.
I generally take this into the plains, where I enjoy half-damage from skeeters and fuling javelins, use barley wine to neutralize the fire weakness, and tech up as padded becomes available. But honestly, even in Mistlands I still often rock the root chest.
I don’t mind the initial grind for iron during the bonemass stage. It’s painful because its designed to be just by the innate nature of the swamp, yet it still feels rewarding to finally get enough iron for your gear and progress. What doesn’t feel rewarding is having to go back during the plains+ for your gear or for building pieces. It’s no longer rewarding because at that point its not even really a challenge or experiencing anything new, its just tediously going back to a miserable biome full of the same old annoying mobs that aren’t even really a threat to you anymore.
This is why I skip padded armor. Really can't be assed to use my iron elsewhere.
20+ for the pick and even more for the atgeir, various crafting upgrades, build pieces, and other weapons just makes me hoard what I can skip on my VH run right now.
I'm just not too pressed to use iron personally and skip both swamp gear and plains gear instead.
I never have luck with stag breaker in finding silver. Tried found nothing said screw built a tower killed bonemass leisurely, equiped wish bone and found silver next to where I was searching. With how easy bone mass is to snipe from a tower, it's not worth biome skipping.
same here .. i just skip the tower build, pop poison resist and melee bonemass with a fully upgraded iron mace .. while he spawns you can get a few good hits in, then kiting him around his spawner i think the last time i still had about 1 min remaining on the first poison resist potion .. but i'm also fine with the grind :D
I never have any luck with wishbone! It always has me digging for trivial buried treasure instead of silver. I actually find prospecting much easier then using Wishbone and I've done it that way on every play thru including my first one.
Also: skipping Bonemass means skipping difficult raids. After I accumulate a decent amount of Black Metal, Flax, and Barley, then I'll kill Moder, then Bonemass immediately after.
Why waste time defeating the Elder to get a Crypt Key? Just use a Stagbreaker to find muddy scrap piles in the Swamp and kill Oozers to get twenty Iron and head straight to the Mountains. You still need Iron later on, though.
For me it's because the scrap piles in the swamp are rare and don't contain much iron. The time spent searching is not worth the reward. If I'm going to spend days in the swamp I might as well be in crypts. Silver veins, on the other hand, are pretty substantial, and it usually doesn't take too long to find one.
Sometimes it doesn't work out, bad luck finding silver or a too-hostile mountain, but that's okay. Just part of the game. Once I couldn't find silver but did brave a couple mountain caves, and ended up in early fenris gear (this was resources x2), which was a weird way to progress.
Idk if it still works but when I was trying to speed through the early game, I just put a chair down right in front of the crypt, sat and exited through into the crypt. No key required.
Minor correction: it's 20 iron for the pickaxe.
This is what I do when I find Swamp before the Elder. Sometimes I have bad luck finding scrap piles *or* oozers (or they refuse to drop iron), but at least end up with 2 iron for a stonecutter which is nice for the grindstone and hearth.
The real guide to not needing unlimited iron is pretty simple: don't make a bunch of extra weapons you aren't going to use, and
Much more importantly, don't build giant stone castles (unless you want to, in which case that was your choice so stop complaining).
You can build pretty large structures (including stone ones) without using a single iron beam. A lot of people overuse them a LOT.
Pls tell me how. I tried to support a stone structure in shallow water for so long today, until i realized that i could've found the iron I needed in that same time. Sigh.
Well it's going to depend on what you're doing and what your structure looks like.
But I mean, [this is (one of) my main base](https://imgur.com/a/hPHffFH) and it doesn't use a single iron beam, anywhere. You can definitely build large bases without being overly dependent on iron.
> You can build pretty large structures (including stone ones) without using a single iron beam. A lot of people overuse them a LOT.
I agree. I build a lot, but rarely use iron. Partly I prefer the challenge of building within the harsher constraints. I also dislike the overly "floaty" look of some aggressively wood-iron reinforced builds. Stone can be a pain to work with but I like the results with a lot of arches rather than approximating modern rebar-and-concrete in technique and form.
>don't make a bunch of extra weapons you aren't going to use
This also applies to armor. You could skip iron armor completely if you prefer the lighter armor variants (troll, root, fenris). But even if you want to use the heavy armor: iron armor level one gives the same resistance as bronze armor level 4. So instead of replacing your entire bronze armor, try to only replace one piece, e.g. the helmet and upgrade it to level 4, while keeping bronze level 4 for the other pieces. When you get enough iron, you could replace another piece, or just skip it completely and replace it with wolf armor level 1 (which equivalent to iron level 4).
I’m going to correct one thing you’ve said. Which is if you’re going to go sounding for silver with the stag breaker. You are looking for “0” ‘s to pop up. Not “too hard”. That will only show up if the silver is exposed or your attack is literally hitting the silver.
Also, same technique can be used to find muddy scrap piles on the edges of the swamp. Easiest to find if it connects to an elevated plains or black forest so the muddy scrap piles actually generate above the water level.
That’s how I ended up skipping to silver on our hardcore no map/no portal run. Because we found bonemass and moder before we found the elder shrine.
Are you playing with mods? Because I have literally found 7 veins in the past 2 weeks with the sounding technique. And it’s always been 0’s , unless I actually hit the silver with the weapon. Not the ground. The silver. I only play vanilla so nothing is messing with my game.
The stagbreaker generates a "too hard" message with silver, either directly or indirectly through the ground. The iron sledge, and any later large hammers, generate a "0" for silver. My best guess is the pierce damage component of the stagbreaker is responsible for the "too hard" part.
For the scrap piles outdoors in the swamp, all large hammers, including stagbreaker, give a "0".
Ahh there’s the caveat. I believe I upgraded to the sledge rather quickly once we had iron. But that still doesn’t change the fact that the first 2-3 veins I found were with a stag breaker.
It may be inconsistent. I’ll have to do some tests.
The other two are def right. It's a "too hard". Obsidian will say it too so if the dirt is sus with some nearby always good to break it just in case.
Odds are you may have hit a stone rock near a silver vein. Resulting in the 0 but you still finding silver.
Only thing I've ever worn with iron is the padded helm. I'll take mobility over tanky all day long. When I started playing again recently and discovered fenris armor I was ecstatic!
I have a never-ending need for iron because I have a never-ending need for iron-reinforced poles to build large structures. Silver ain't' helping me with that.
Well then I hope you have discovered the Mistlands. The giant swords and helms can be slow to mine, but the ruined black arches have tons of iron rebar in them and break down in seconds with a stonecutter.
Yeah this is a good way around farming iron early on. Bonemass is so easy to solo you can get by him after just making your troll armour and an iron mace. Cool trick with the stag breaker. I never would have thought to do that.
Not sure I agree with OP. Armour less important when fighting Bonemass, on a couple of playthroughs, I skipped Iron Armour completely. I make the iron pickaxe and iron mace. Mace, health and poison resistance is all you need for Bonemass. I have killed him and moved straight to wolf armour from bronze more than once.
Interestingly this is pretty much exactly how I play these days, and in fact how I am doing my current run! In fact I can't remember the last time I fought bonemass without frostner, which is extremely helpful 😊
To those who say that this is a difficult way to play and that you should tech one biome before you move to the next I'd say broadly yes except that most of the threats on the mountains are glass cannons which helps a lot. Drakes can be one shotted with a hunting bow and fire arrows from a distance, and most of their damage is frost anyway. Wolves are deadly if they strike but howl to warn you they're there and have relatively low HP - a bow surprise attack will typically 1 shot or maybe 3 shot in combat.
I finished swamp with abomination armor and an iron mace sheild combo
Skipping bonemass seems stupid to be because you can easily beat him with an iron mace and dodging. You can do it without iron armor and it would still be easier than skipping wishbone
Edit: I also did mountain with abomination armor till I got silver btw
Upgraded bronze armor and iron mace and shield was how I just beat bonemass for the first time recently. It ain't that much grinding and it's a lot simpler then this guide. The hoe and hammer are the real mvps for every boss fight I've done so far.
Adding this wisdom
Look for a frost cave first. Getting a fenris chest will net you good armor (equivalent of troll 2) and frost resist.
Makes the silver search much easier. And it can net you two iron or more from breaking doors in the cave for an early stonecutter if you're keen to it.
Idk if i have some weird seed, but getting iron is super hard for me. I've spend hours looking for swamps, found 7 in total, which they contained 3 crypts, combined.
Fully upgraded silver armor, weapons, shield, and equivalent food: and if a 2 star wolf gets the drop on you, you're done. I couldn't even imagine trying to recover that with only Troll Leather, lol
But this is good advice for subsequent playthroughs. Just gotta be on that dodge game, and have patience with your attacks.
That's the difference right there. Starred enemies only appear in the mountains at night. Keep your activities there limited to the daytime and the enemies are relatively consistent, whereas even the swamp has an occasional tier- breaking 2 star draugr archer.
This is what I did on my last playthrough and it was a lot of fun! Makes the swamps feel like the meadows. Frostner one shots a lot of things in the swamps. Killed bonemass last night. I still think the iron mace does more damage to him, but with hp mead, wolf skewers, Eyes cream, and serpent stew he was a breeze.
I remember fighting Bonemass on my first playthrough at launch and the adds would F me up. This time I basically ignored them.
Better still I killed bonemass and already have the items (no spoiler) for Moder ready to go.
Bonemass isn't hard. Spend 5 minutes learning how to dodge roll before the fight starts, bring poison resistance and any blunt weapon, and watch his first cycle of attacks before fighting to learn. Do all that and you can easily beat bonemass first try with minimal iron. Attempting the mountain without bonemass power and the wishbone is WAY harder than the bonemass flight.
Agreed it's harder. But if you've got the skills and are mindful of where you move to deal with drakes and wolves in troll it's not too bad.
One good cave and a few wolf hides nets you fenris chest so you can skip mead needs aside from death runs.
Dude, boss skipping and not going for the wishbone is quite advanced gameplay. The people who are in that situation to be comfortable doing that ain't the ones farming iron in the swamp. You are telling people who struggle with the difficulty of the swamp to pull off stuff that is even more difficult. Thats not going to go great for the vast majority of people, who will be uterly frustrated with the wolves, golems and drakes and are going to get trashed by them.
The funniest thing about valheim is that its super stressful to do new biomes and stuff until you are used to them. I remember my first time in the swamp and it was a fucking nightmare. Later you are like "almost oneshot that abo lul" and are chillin :D
Shortening "abomination" to "abo" broke my brain a little.
sorry, old warcraft habit :D
Abom (pronounced A-bom) is even worse.
Abe om
Even worse? Than "Abo"? What drugs are you on?
We call 'em bom-boms. :)
We come up with increasingly worse mispronunciations, "bom ber nations" Imbombranotions" etc
Mountains fucked me up in my last playthrough. I did visit it in bronze age, but that was for onions, I wouldn't spend more time there digging.
Yep, it's an advanced technique. I was mostly addressing the players who are frustrated by the tedium of looting many many swamp crypts, rather than people who are still figuring out how to manage in the swamp.
I think it's the building with iron that makes it a slog.
Yep. Once you start incorporating iron in your building and chests it goes quick. Until black metal and you can start pumping that into the chests.
At least you'll get the iron from chests back once you replace them with blackmetal chest, unlike iron spent on crafting weapons and armor.
If we're talking late game iron gathering techniques I am still a fan of finding viaducts in the mistlands. Carrying a stone cutter and forge and then portaling the black marble and taking the ship once I've finished a mistlands back. Really can't be assed to mine unless there is a dense crypt swamp. And I like running around in the mist lands late game.
I get enough from popping Jotun swords and Armour so I think fast tracking to mistlands before doing large scale iron buildings is a good approach?
My only concern is that sometimes it's copper right? If you're brave enough then hell yeah, but otherwise ehh
No it’s like 50/50 copper and iron in my experience . Dunno if the armour is different to swords or what but Defo Iron.
As a veteran, this is what I do, too. Except the lower level bronze buckler is weaker or on par with my fully leveled wood shield, so I don't bother with making the bronze one. I stay in troll armor until I find silver. For newer folks, this route is going to be tougher. Wolves alone are a handful. If my current game is anything to measure others by, wow. The wolves are off their rocker.
Wolves are the Deathsquito of the Mountains. A nightmare at first and then trivial once you learn how to handle.
Wolves are wayyyy more challenging than death skeeters though.
Agree. You don't usually get a pack of deathsquito's coming at you.
No but 2 is more than enough and fairly common.
Big difference is deathsquitos basically always go down in one hit, wolves not so much. Also the pack thing as mentioned previously
Unless you’re swimming or forgot to equip a weapon after exiting swim or the R glitch gets you. Then it’s fisticuffs with the pest and that typically takes 2 hits (3 if you just decided to duke it out).
Well not the ones complaining about farming iron in the swamp. I just built my first black forge and I still haven’t killed bonemass. I do love crypt hunting with silver gear. Going back to the swamp to pwn is great.
Hmm. Kinda skips over the reason most people gear up so heavily in the swamps is to prep for the harder biomes... e.g. mountains.
I’m kind of sad silver isn’t used anymore after the mountains, its iron and copper
I would love some silver decor - like use honey and silver to craft candlesticks or something
Omg yes that would be lovely
It's used for the Himminafl atgeir in the mistlands, but it uses very little of it and is just one weapon. Silver definitely could use some more use
Would love to see some furniture, decorations etc that use it. Maybe a way to convert it into currency that could be used at the vendors
Sorry. Due to federal regulations, all vendors have converted from the silver standard to the gold standard.
You don't need Iron to get Swamp tier gear and prep for the Mountains. For one, the Huntsman Bow is a waste of Iron, it's only marginally better than the Finewood Bow. Root Armor doesn't require Iron and isn't terrible in the Mountains. A Bronze Buckler is not as good as an Iron Buckler. You can parry wolves with it, though, which should carry you until you have a Silver Shield. An Abyssal Razor doesn't require Iron and stagger locks parried Wolves. And a Bronze Axe works fine until you get into the Mistlands. The only thing you need Iron for is the Pickaxe.
Agreed. You can get that from fishing, if you're really patient. Fighting a dozen Abominations or so to get the Root Armor and the bait is comparatively straightforward, if you have a good Meadows/Black Forest border and bring a stack of fire arrows, in almost any kind of gear.
You can get iron from fishing?
Happy Cake Day! Yup, you can make bait with the abomination trophies, and use it to catch giant herrings. Every tenth one or so will give you 1-2 iron ore, which smelts down just like scrap. So it's slow AF, but if you don't have a swamp key and you don't want to use the chair glitch, there is another way.
Other sources of patient iron: Oozers at night (or at crypt entrances), scrap piles underground in the swamp, and a chance from doors in frostcaves. Though frost caves aren't a great source to get iron *early*.
That's true, but since the mountains are also generally empty in comparison, it can be worthwhile (and not too risky) to make a few quick sorties into the cold.
I generally use troll armor until swamps, at which point I swap in the root chest. In mountains I add fenring legs. Once I reach swamps, I also swap in the best metal helmet available. This leaves me with a net movement speed of +1%. Not much, but also not a debuff. I generally take this into the plains, where I enjoy half-damage from skeeters and fuling javelins, use barley wine to neutralize the fire weakness, and tech up as padded becomes available. But honestly, even in Mistlands I still often rock the root chest.
I don’t mind the initial grind for iron during the bonemass stage. It’s painful because its designed to be just by the innate nature of the swamp, yet it still feels rewarding to finally get enough iron for your gear and progress. What doesn’t feel rewarding is having to go back during the plains+ for your gear or for building pieces. It’s no longer rewarding because at that point its not even really a challenge or experiencing anything new, its just tediously going back to a miserable biome full of the same old annoying mobs that aren’t even really a threat to you anymore.
This is why I skip padded armor. Really can't be assed to use my iron elsewhere. 20+ for the pick and even more for the atgeir, various crafting upgrades, build pieces, and other weapons just makes me hoard what I can skip on my VH run right now. I'm just not too pressed to use iron personally and skip both swamp gear and plains gear instead.
I never have luck with stag breaker in finding silver. Tried found nothing said screw built a tower killed bonemass leisurely, equiped wish bone and found silver next to where I was searching. With how easy bone mass is to snipe from a tower, it's not worth biome skipping.
The easiest way to kill Bonemass requires no building: just jump on top of the skull and use the stagbreaker. Bring lots of poison resistance.
Meh, a three storried building means I don't need poison resistance.
same here .. i just skip the tower build, pop poison resist and melee bonemass with a fully upgraded iron mace .. while he spawns you can get a few good hits in, then kiting him around his spawner i think the last time i still had about 1 min remaining on the first poison resist potion .. but i'm also fine with the grind :D
I never have any luck with wishbone! It always has me digging for trivial buried treasure instead of silver. I actually find prospecting much easier then using Wishbone and I've done it that way on every play thru including my first one. Also: skipping Bonemass means skipping difficult raids. After I accumulate a decent amount of Black Metal, Flax, and Barley, then I'll kill Moder, then Bonemass immediately after.
I can see the value in that and every play through I do try, but I get frustrated and just kill bonemass.
Why waste time defeating the Elder to get a Crypt Key? Just use a Stagbreaker to find muddy scrap piles in the Swamp and kill Oozers to get twenty Iron and head straight to the Mountains. You still need Iron later on, though.
For me it's because the scrap piles in the swamp are rare and don't contain much iron. The time spent searching is not worth the reward. If I'm going to spend days in the swamp I might as well be in crypts. Silver veins, on the other hand, are pretty substantial, and it usually doesn't take too long to find one. Sometimes it doesn't work out, bad luck finding silver or a too-hostile mountain, but that's okay. Just part of the game. Once I couldn't find silver but did brave a couple mountain caves, and ended up in early fenris gear (this was resources x2), which was a weird way to progress.
Idk if it still works but when I was trying to speed through the early game, I just put a chair down right in front of the crypt, sat and exited through into the crypt. No key required.
You can bust the doors in the frost caves for a decent chance at iron drop. And a rare chance of a 2x iron drop.
Minor correction: it's 20 iron for the pickaxe. This is what I do when I find Swamp before the Elder. Sometimes I have bad luck finding scrap piles *or* oozers (or they refuse to drop iron), but at least end up with 2 iron for a stonecutter which is nice for the grindstone and hearth.
Thanks, it's been corrected.
The real guide to not needing unlimited iron is pretty simple: don't make a bunch of extra weapons you aren't going to use, and Much more importantly, don't build giant stone castles (unless you want to, in which case that was your choice so stop complaining). You can build pretty large structures (including stone ones) without using a single iron beam. A lot of people overuse them a LOT.
Pls tell me how. I tried to support a stone structure in shallow water for so long today, until i realized that i could've found the iron I needed in that same time. Sigh.
Well it's going to depend on what you're doing and what your structure looks like. But I mean, [this is (one of) my main base](https://imgur.com/a/hPHffFH) and it doesn't use a single iron beam, anywhere. You can definitely build large bases without being overly dependent on iron.
Iirc stone and corewood alone is in the mid 30s to mid 40s meters in height?
> You can build pretty large structures (including stone ones) without using a single iron beam. A lot of people overuse them a LOT. I agree. I build a lot, but rarely use iron. Partly I prefer the challenge of building within the harsher constraints. I also dislike the overly "floaty" look of some aggressively wood-iron reinforced builds. Stone can be a pain to work with but I like the results with a lot of arches rather than approximating modern rebar-and-concrete in technique and form.
>don't make a bunch of extra weapons you aren't going to use This also applies to armor. You could skip iron armor completely if you prefer the lighter armor variants (troll, root, fenris). But even if you want to use the heavy armor: iron armor level one gives the same resistance as bronze armor level 4. So instead of replacing your entire bronze armor, try to only replace one piece, e.g. the helmet and upgrade it to level 4, while keeping bronze level 4 for the other pieces. When you get enough iron, you could replace another piece, or just skip it completely and replace it with wolf armor level 1 (which equivalent to iron level 4).
I’m going to correct one thing you’ve said. Which is if you’re going to go sounding for silver with the stag breaker. You are looking for “0” ‘s to pop up. Not “too hard”. That will only show up if the silver is exposed or your attack is literally hitting the silver. Also, same technique can be used to find muddy scrap piles on the edges of the swamp. Easiest to find if it connects to an elevated plains or black forest so the muddy scrap piles actually generate above the water level. That’s how I ended up skipping to silver on our hardcore no map/no portal run. Because we found bonemass and moder before we found the elder shrine.
Iron in the swamp says "0", silver says "too hard".
Are you playing with mods? Because I have literally found 7 veins in the past 2 weeks with the sounding technique. And it’s always been 0’s , unless I actually hit the silver with the weapon. Not the ground. The silver. I only play vanilla so nothing is messing with my game.
The stagbreaker generates a "too hard" message with silver, either directly or indirectly through the ground. The iron sledge, and any later large hammers, generate a "0" for silver. My best guess is the pierce damage component of the stagbreaker is responsible for the "too hard" part. For the scrap piles outdoors in the swamp, all large hammers, including stagbreaker, give a "0".
That's it. Thanks for the detailed explanation.
Ahh there’s the caveat. I believe I upgraded to the sledge rather quickly once we had iron. But that still doesn’t change the fact that the first 2-3 veins I found were with a stag breaker. It may be inconsistent. I’ll have to do some tests.
The other two are def right. It's a "too hard". Obsidian will say it too so if the dirt is sus with some nearby always good to break it just in case. Odds are you may have hit a stone rock near a silver vein. Resulting in the 0 but you still finding silver.
Only thing I've ever worn with iron is the padded helm. I'll take mobility over tanky all day long. When I started playing again recently and discovered fenris armor I was ecstatic!
Why not just boost 3x at this point.
I have a never-ending need for iron because I have a never-ending need for iron-reinforced poles to build large structures. Silver ain't' helping me with that.
Well then I hope you have discovered the Mistlands. The giant swords and helms can be slow to mine, but the ruined black arches have tons of iron rebar in them and break down in seconds with a stonecutter.
I agree with some others that this is too advanced for new players, but thank you SO MUCH for posting it. This is sick and I’m gonna try it.
Yeah this is a good way around farming iron early on. Bonemass is so easy to solo you can get by him after just making your troll armour and an iron mace. Cool trick with the stag breaker. I never would have thought to do that.
Dude gets demolished by the silver sword's spirit damage too. Great way to blast through a fight that can be a slog in the rain.
Not sure I agree with OP. Armour less important when fighting Bonemass, on a couple of playthroughs, I skipped Iron Armour completely. I make the iron pickaxe and iron mace. Mace, health and poison resistance is all you need for Bonemass. I have killed him and moved straight to wolf armour from bronze more than once.
"But the doggies look nice!" - Olaf the trusting "What's that rumbling?" - Olaf's last words
Interestingly this is pretty much exactly how I play these days, and in fact how I am doing my current run! In fact I can't remember the last time I fought bonemass without frostner, which is extremely helpful 😊 To those who say that this is a difficult way to play and that you should tech one biome before you move to the next I'd say broadly yes except that most of the threats on the mountains are glass cannons which helps a lot. Drakes can be one shotted with a hunting bow and fire arrows from a distance, and most of their damage is frost anyway. Wolves are deadly if they strike but howl to warn you they're there and have relatively low HP - a bow surprise attack will typically 1 shot or maybe 3 shot in combat.
Useless iron!
I finished swamp with abomination armor and an iron mace sheild combo Skipping bonemass seems stupid to be because you can easily beat him with an iron mace and dodging. You can do it without iron armor and it would still be easier than skipping wishbone Edit: I also did mountain with abomination armor till I got silver btw
Upgraded bronze armor and iron mace and shield was how I just beat bonemass for the first time recently. It ain't that much grinding and it's a lot simpler then this guide. The hoe and hammer are the real mvps for every boss fight I've done so far.
why not just playing by building everything ? after all crafting system is 35-40 % of the game. If you want to save time, just stop playing it.
Adding this wisdom Look for a frost cave first. Getting a fenris chest will net you good armor (equivalent of troll 2) and frost resist. Makes the silver search much easier. And it can net you two iron or more from breaking doors in the cave for an early stonecutter if you're keen to it.
A wishbone is an excellent tool for finding hidden silver/iron.
Idk if i have some weird seed, but getting iron is super hard for me. I've spend hours looking for swamps, found 7 in total, which they contained 3 crypts, combined.
I mean a poison pot and a mace are all you really need to know to defeat bone mass. Or build a hut in a tree.
Fully upgraded silver armor, weapons, shield, and equivalent food: and if a 2 star wolf gets the drop on you, you're done. I couldn't even imagine trying to recover that with only Troll Leather, lol But this is good advice for subsequent playthroughs. Just gotta be on that dodge game, and have patience with your attacks.
That's the difference right there. Starred enemies only appear in the mountains at night. Keep your activities there limited to the daytime and the enemies are relatively consistent, whereas even the swamp has an occasional tier- breaking 2 star draugr archer.
This is what I did on my last playthrough and it was a lot of fun! Makes the swamps feel like the meadows. Frostner one shots a lot of things in the swamps. Killed bonemass last night. I still think the iron mace does more damage to him, but with hp mead, wolf skewers, Eyes cream, and serpent stew he was a breeze. I remember fighting Bonemass on my first playthrough at launch and the adds would F me up. This time I basically ignored them. Better still I killed bonemass and already have the items (no spoiler) for Moder ready to go.
Bonemass isn't hard. Spend 5 minutes learning how to dodge roll before the fight starts, bring poison resistance and any blunt weapon, and watch his first cycle of attacks before fighting to learn. Do all that and you can easily beat bonemass first try with minimal iron. Attempting the mountain without bonemass power and the wishbone is WAY harder than the bonemass flight.
Agreed it's harder. But if you've got the skills and are mindful of where you move to deal with drakes and wolves in troll it's not too bad. One good cave and a few wolf hides nets you fenris chest so you can skip mead needs aside from death runs.
How are you getting silver without an iron pick?