Valheim progresses in terms of materials that you have access to. Each of these materials is generally found in a different biome, and requires more and more advanced technology to retrieve. This guide will describe the Bronze Age, how to reach it, and what to do when you are in it.
Advancing to the Bronze Age
The Bronze Age describes the period of the game in which Bronze is your best material for tool and weapon forging. Bronze is made of copper and tin, both of which are found in the Black Forest. They can be found easily enough but you will need to craft a specific tool before you can mine it. Note that it is possible to obtain these metals beforehand by having Trolls destroy them for you, but this isn’t a particularly sustainable way of mining.
The tool you will need is the Antler Pick. To make this you will need to defeat Eikthyr and obtain his hardened antlers. Once you make the Antler Pick you can mine as much copper ore and tin ore as you need.
You will also need to build a smelter before you can convert the raw ores into useful metals. This requires Surtling Cores. These Surtling Cores can be most easily found in Burial Chambers in the Black Forest. You will need to be prepared with a decent weapon, and probably a torch. A flinthead axe is the easy choice at this stage, or possibly a club. To find the burial chambers you will need to search the Black Forest. They are fairly plentiful and easy to find, although beware of larger chambers which are actually Troll Caves!
When you find one enter and explore the three passageways. They may split off numerous times before reaching dead ends. On the way you will encounter skeletons, ghosts, rancid remains, and sometimes bone piles. The bone piles will spawn more skeletons, so destroy those as soon as you see them. The others aren’t too bad to fight, but try to keep them in front of you and practice blocking techniques to keep your health up.
You should come across rooms in most burial chambers which contain chests – check these out for valuables – and surtling cores. These are the glowing red objects mounted on sticks. You will also find rubies, amber, amber pearls, and coins. These are all useful for trading with Haldor. You will probably need to search several burial chambers to find enough surtling cores. You will need 10 of them in total. Once you find these you are on the final stretch to the Bronze Age.
Guide to Smelting Bronze
Your copper ore and tin ore need to be smelted in a smelter in order to be useful. The smelter requires coal to keep it running, which can be made in bulk in the charcoal kiln. You will need to build a smelter and charcoal kiln before you can smelt your metals. Each of them requires 5 surtling cores and 20 stone to build. They will both produce smoke, so be careful of placing them inside without an opening in the roof above.
Once you have built your charcoal kiln you will need to feed it wood. It can hold 25 pieces at one time and will slowly produce 25 pieces of coal from them. This coal is then fed into the smelter at one side, while the copper ore or tin ore (or both) are placed in at the other. After a short while you will be rewarded with a copper or tin ingot. You can have a mixture of ores in the hopper at one time, up to a maximum of 10 items. Each one requires 2 coal to smelt.
Next you will need to build a Forge. This is the next step up from the Workbench, and you will forge metal-based items here instead. The Forge requires 4x stone, 4x coal, 10x wood and 6x copper to build. You will need to have smelted 6 of your copper ores before you can build this. Place the forge in a largish area as you will build up an array of objects surrounding it to level it up.
With the forge, some copper ingots and tin ingots, you can create Bronze. Use the forge to combine 2x copper and 1x tin into 1x bronze. You can now forge Bronze tools from the resulting Bronze Ingots!
Where to Find Copper and Tin
Both copper and tin ores are found in the Black Forest. This can cause problems, particularly at night, as greydwarves, brutes and shamans can be quite tricky at this level. Trolls can also become a real problem. Copper deposits are large green/grey boulders which can be easily identified as they say ‘copper deposit’ when you look at them. It may be useful to mark these deposits on your map for future use if they are close to your base.
Tin ore is found on the coast in small dark-grey deposits. Each deposit can provide up to a few pieces of tin ore. They are numerous along coasts and rivers in the Black Forest. Both ores are mined with a pickaxe of some sort.
Transportation of ores can be difficult. You won’t have used portals yet, as these require surtling cores as well, but if you find that your nearest copper and tin deposits are a long way away, you may be tempted to use portals to get your materials back. You will find that ores cannot be transported through a portal, and that they are also very heavy. Copper ore weighs 10kg, and Tin ore weighs 8kg. You need 2x copper ore and 1x tin ore for each bronze ingot, so that’s 28kg for every ingot. Every piece of ore needs to be carried back to you base on foot, so it pays to have deposits close by.
There is some help with transport. Firstly, one of the most useful items that Haldor sells is the Megingjord. This belt allows you to carry an additional 150kg of weight. Secondly, you can now build the cart. This requires bronze nails to build, but you can load it up with a huge amount of ore and then pull it back to your base. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, as it can be difficult to haul the cart up hills and around the obstacles you find in the Black Forest, but it may be useful for transferring across meadows. Finally, the Karve has a small hold which you can fill up with ores, so you might find it handy sailing around Black Forest coasts in search of tin ore, placing it in the Karve as you mine it.
Bronze Age Tool Guide
Now that you are in the Bronze Age, you will be able to take advantage and upgrade your tools. Gone are the stone and flint tools. Gone is the crude bow. Your deer hide tunic can be hung out to dry, and you can develop real weapons. Although it will take time to accrue as much bronze as you will need, eventually you will reap the benefits with much greater abilities in Valheim.
The first things you might want to look into are the Bronze Pickaxe and Bronze Axe. The former will speed up copper and tin mining significantly, and is the Bronze Age variant of the Antler Pick. The latter will speed up tree-felling, but it will also allow you to chop down Birch trees. This is important as these are your primary source of Fine Wood. The bronze axe is also a much better weapon than any of the stone age tools.
Following this, and depending on your playstyle, you may want to check out a better melee weapon. Our Bronze Age weapon guide can help you here. You have options of sword, atgeir, mace and spear. With the fine wood you can also craft a Finewood Bow. This is a much more powerful bow and will last much longer than the crude bow. Bronze arrows are also an option, although they can prove expensive in both bronze and feathers.
Armour progresses to the Bronze Plate Cuirass, Leggings, and Helmet. Check out our guide on armour for more information on these.
Finally, you will unlock the Cultivator. This is a farming tool required to plant crops, which greatly increases your food choices.
Sailing
Now that you have Bronze you can forge Bronze Nails. These in turn make it possible to build a larger ship – the Karve. This is a major advance for explorers as it is far superior to the raft in every way. It also makes it feasible to take on a Sea Serpent for its flesh without certain death.
Resources in the Bronze Age
Food is a major aspect of Valheim. You should always be looking for the best food available in order to maintain your edge against some of the tougher opponents. Before you enter the Bronze Age you will probably be looking at cooked meat and grilled neck tail, as well as foraging berries and honey. With Bronze, and the advent of farming, you should be growing carrots and turnips. These will give you carrot soup and turnip stew, which give you better health and stamina. Your initial carrot and turnip seeds can be found in the Black Forest if you keep a lookout for them. Make sure that you re-plant some of the vegetables for more seeds instead of eating all of your first crop though!
You may be lucky enough to kill a serpent, which will give you a superb food for this level – serpent stew.
In order to cook each of the foods above, however, you will need to create a cauldron. This is made from 10x Tin Ingots. You need to place the cauldron on top of an active fire. Select the cauldron to bring up a list of recipes. This list will grow as you discover new ingredients.
You can forge Bronze Nails now, which gives you access to the Karve, the cart, and item stands. You can also build the Fermenter, which is the prerequisite for brewing meads. With this you will be able to obtain stamina meads, healing potions, poison resistance mead, and tasty mead. These will be very useful in progressing further into the Iron Age!
Bronze Age Challenges
Your first challenge in the Bronze Age is surviving in the Black Forest. This is an essential biome to get to grips with if you are to produce enough Bronze to move forward further. You will learn to cope with the more advanced Greydwarf Brutes and Shamans (preferably one at a time, and with a group of players), and the danger of staying out at night. You may also start to struggle with meat resources, and you may want to start breeding boars for meat. This is made more effective by the ability to farm carrots and turnips, which can be fed to the boars to breed them.
Later on you will want to take on the second boss, the Elder. Preparation for this is closely linked to the Bronze Age progression, so take your time and you’ll be fine. If you are successful you will be given a Swamp Key, which allows you access to the Sunken Crypts in the Swamp.
Next Step: Iron Age
Finally, you will become strong enough that you want to progress beyond the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age. The main step for this is finding Iron Scraps, which can be found in the Swamp. To do this you will need to defeat the Elder and obtain his Swamp Keys. The Swamp is found slightly further away from the spawn point than the Black Forest, so you may want to explore a little first. Good luck!
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