Valheim: How To Connect Portals

If there’s one thing you’ll be doing a lot in Valheim, it’s travelling. The procedurally-generated world is mammoth in size, and in the initial stages of the game you’ll be spending a lot of your time running backwards and forwards while gathering. As you grow and develop, you’ll gain access to new tools and abilities, one of these tools is the portal. Portals enable players to set their own fast travel points in the world, meaning you can zip between two points of interest with ease without the need for travel by foot or boat.

Read More: How to Farm Silver

Building a Portal

In order to build a portal, you will first need to have a workbench within range. Next you must equip your hammer, open the crafting menu and find portals in the ‘miscellaneous’ items section.

You’ll require the following items for a portal:

• 20 fine wood - use bronze axe on birch
• 2 surtling cores - burial chambers in the Black Forest
• 10 graydwarf eyes - Kill Greydwarfs in the Black Forest

20 fine wood is the easiest to collect, and simply requires that you have a bronze axe which can be acquired after beating Valheim’s first boss, Eikthyr. With the bronze axe equipped, you’ll be able to chop down the many birch trees scattered across the island, providing you with the fine wood you need for the portal.

Surtling cores are a little trickier, as players must travel into the Black Forest in order to find them. While in the Black Forest, you’ll want to look for heavily guarded burial chambers filled to the brim with skeletons. With your enemies vanquished, you’ll want to look for the surtling cores, which are sat atop wooden spikes in the treasure rooms.

Greydwarfs can also be found within the black forest and killing them will provide you with the last item you need to make a portal, the greydwarf eye. Be careful though, as greydwarfs are stronger than the typical greylings and can put up quite a fight if you are not careful.

How to Use a Portal

To use a portal in Valheim, place one near your home and the other in a location you’d like to warp to. For example, if you wanted to warp to the Ashlands, you’d place a portal there and give it the same tag as the portal you placed at home. This enables you to warp between the two portals. Be careful though, as portal tags are case sensitive, and any paired portals will need exactly the same tag to work. 

If you want to be really optimal, you can use only one portal at your home, and change the tag each time you use it to the corresponding portal you wish to warp to. 

What Can't You Take With You?

Remember how we said there were caveats to using the portals? Unfortunately, players can’t take certain metals through the portal. This is likely to limit players from obtaining materials too easily and breaking the game’s economy / crafting meta. Below is a list of current metals which can’t be warped with.

• Black metal scrap
• Silver ore land silver
• Iron ore and iron
• Bronze
• Copper ore and copper
• Tin and tin ore

Portals are still an incredibly useful tool, which makes travelling throughout Valheim much easier. So now you’ve got your portals at the ready, purgatory should be just a little easier to survive, hopefully.

Valheim is the next Viking title to take Steam by storm, there are plenty of plans for the future with the 2021 roadmap. You can even set up a dedicated server and play with your friends in coop!