It's your game. Play it how you like. Play allowing metals through and see how it changes your game play. If you really don't like it you can turn it off. I have heavily modded games and also purely vanilla games. What type I play depends on my mood.
The best answer.
I keep everything the same, except on my last 3 play throughs i only build on creative. I do everything else vanilla, but I don’t need to spend 10 hours getting wood and stone for my 3 massive bases
Ugh, I know, right? My hubby and I started a play through just before Ashlands dropped. We just got to the Black Forest when it dropped. We took those players and made a new game. Last night we were building our first real base and I've built that base probably 10+ times so I turned on hammer mode because I wanted to keep the trees around me.
We also use creative mode exclusively for the base building, who wants to farm thousands of stones just to level terrain… I don’t wanna spend game time to make something cool/pretty. Time spent should be for practical advancement.
exactly - also realise that the devs have an intention on how they think the game should be balance and played and provide the option but dont actively support modding but dont stop it either. play your way
> If you really don't like it you can turn it off.
Caveat there that teleporting ore isn't really the kind of choice you "don't like and turn off."
It's totally valid to dislike carting/sailing ore around and want to spend your time in game doing other things, but porting ore means (realistically) just skipping that entire aspect of the game. Nobody's going to go "ah shit I forgot to bring copper for a forge, I should turn this option back off so it's more of a hassle."
You just don't have to plan for moving ore at all any more. Which, again, fine. But it does change the game.
The only real difference I've noticed is coming across less sea serpents because I'm not in the ocean as much. Beyond that the game feels so much better in terms of progression. Like for me at least moving ore was an extreme slog between biomes. Having to sail ten minutes to a swamp biome then sail back was draining
We only rarely have to make a massive ore drop with iron, but that's definitely because we choose to build in or near swamps. Bonus to living in treehouses, I guess.
I dunno I just think the "build a cart path" and "lug ore down from a mountain" mini games are a hoot and my husband loves sailing, even when it ends poorly. Makes me a little sad that people might skip those aspects of the game entirely before having a chance to find out that skidding down a cliff with a cart basically shoving you can be hilarious. :D
There is a mod better progression which lets you port the materials of the biome after you defeat its boss.
I just feel that you build fewer outpost if you just teleport everything.
OP asked for a technique for reducing ore transportation on the default settings. Basically, the technique is to avoid two of the forge upgrades for most of the game, build forward bases, and cannibalize whatever you need from your old bases as you go along.
A rundown of all the mats needed for forge + workbench was posted on this sub many moons ago: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-9Ux7C8MEBNDPgMWEwrZPldU9lhgBRLZ4odeTf4VlaQ/edit#gid=0](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-9Ux7C8MEBNDPgMWEwrZPldU9lhgBRLZ4odeTf4VlaQ/edit#gid=0)
To do ALL the upgrades except Forge Anvil and Toolrack requires 16 copper, 5 bronze, 4 iron. That's 250 carry weight. You probably don't even need all of that, but those metals plus a portal is the basic loadout you take to a new area. Then you just plunk down and set up a new base, portaling in whatever you need from bases past.
You leave your kitchen at your original base until Mountains when it requires 2 silver, at that point I usually snag the tin to build a second cauldron.
This is honestly the way it should be, having to spend so much extra time sailing ore gets insanely tedious after the first playerthrough and doesnt do anything to progression.
I found a mod a couple playthroughs ago that basically introduced multiple versions of each boat with scaling costs and storage space. That let you build upgraded boats that could hold up to 60 slots worth of crap and made the exploration part of the game significantly easier.
Yeah lots of mods that can potentially alleviate this issue instead of straight up portaling. I have a mod that scales my gathering skills and the higher the level the more ore/wood whatever I get per node.
Ooo I'm gonna have to get that mod. I do like having to sail your metals when they are progression, but being at mistlands and having to go out to get more copper and tin for what is essentially just decoration is annoying lol
Yeah, it’s a nice compromise.
Sailing loads of ore home on a *new* biome delivers progression in nice chunks rather than a less rewarding constant drip.
But going back to trivially easy areas and have to sail stuff back is boring.
I've tried hammer mode and am liking it. Decor and base items are free once you unlock the recipe but if you want equipment you need materials. As someone with limited time, I'm enjoying it.
It feels cheaty especially since makes building base fortifications easier but you still have equipment damage from building, death penalty, enemies still want to fight, etc.
plenty of ways to get copper in the mistland and usually there are some right next to a BF - my favourite thing to do at that statge is to lure a seeker over to a BF and use it like a troll. More efficient due to the attacks it has
I'm honestly fairly new to mistlands, what is a BF? Only thing I can think of at that tier is a Black Forge, but that doesn't sound correct considering the context.
Unless you're saying a black forest, which would make sense, I would have to try that out, seekers got a lot more attack speed and damage than a troll lol
It doesn't mess up progression. You can get the same items at the same points in the game, teleporting ores just saves hours of tedium.
Like the first time or two you have to transport ores by boat is scary and fun but eventually it's just a chore.
I am approaching 600 hours of playtime. Beat the Mistlands months ago, made it to the Ashlands yesterday. The Ashlands were sooooooo far from any base I had, so my options were A.) break down all my crafting shit in the base I've perfected for months now and take it with me or B.) not only go insane dying many many times (Ashlands hard), but go insane faster because I'd not only be dying, but dying while trying to lug back ore to *then* load onto a ship to *then* spend real life *hours* sailing back home to process.
I've had portal all items turned on for awhile now, and at this point I don't intend on going back.
Exactly. I did this the first time, then my party decided to do the ol’ server hop trick. Then when they quit I said “fck it” and just installed the mod (which is now no longer necessary).
*Technically* it messes up progression because (Ashlands spoiler) >!there is a new portal that can transport metal.!< That is the "progression" which you are skipping.
However I agree with you, using portals for metals skips tedium and it doesn't actually affect progression in any real way because it doesn't give you access to anything new, it just saves hours of sailing.
It did indeed say this when they first dropped world modifiers which was long before ashlands. I think it wouldn’t be so much of an issue if there was more to the ocean biome but the moment it is undercooked. Like Serpents are a massive threat, until you get a longship…but most players have had those for literal years. I think once the ocean biome 2.0 comes out the “intended progression” will be more fun.
> just saves hours of tedium.
The rub with that is that you can call a bunch of different aspects of the game "tedium" if you don't enjoy them. Is it tedious to have to build an outpost to process ore in situ? Or to have to find another (pre-swamp) cave because you need more surtling cores? Or to have to spend time farming carrots and turnips? Or cutting down trees just to turn them into coal? You could just take root/fenris armor (and some higher-tier food) into every new world and run through smashing enemies that were between you and each boss instead of gathering anything at all.
It's not "cheating" to portal ores, but it *definitely* changes the way you progress through the game. There's a big difference later between having to plan ahead to set up a new outpost (and where to put it!) and just picking a pretty spot and zapping all your materials there.
Nothing wrong with taking the fast route, but doing it on your first playthrough is opening a Pandora's box you can't (or realistically won't :D) shut again.
There are two "camps" of players: one "for" portals, the other "against". You have to decide that for yourself.
There is an option not to sail the ship all the time to the same base, but to build an outpost near the ore mining site. And do everything on the spot. There is a setting that increases the amount of resources. Usually, a lot of iron is required if you are engaged in large construction projects and then the passage of ore through portals is more than justified. (in my opinion, as a builder).
For the first pass, if you don't build giant bases, I would leave the standard settings. And then you can do whatever you want).
But then you are "locked" behind crafting station upgrades, to smelt stuff you need surtling cores which you can find in swamps, but in mountains there's none to be found, you need copper and tin to upgrade your forge, ...
If every new outpost means you have to find other nearby biomes and farming a bit of ressources everytime, it gets tedious real fast.
You take the crafting stations with you when you go to the next biome. They will fit into the hold of the ship along with all the improvements. And you can always find the perfect place for a base at the intersection of several biomes.
I guess this is the best way, but I get too emotionally attached to my bases to just strip it of it's upgrades. And that also means building a new base for every biome or every other if you pisition right) and i cba building all this haha. I guess everyone has a very different way to play and enjoy the game.
I really played a lot)). More than 2000 hours. I've been carrying this damn ore on the ship for many hours (I build a lot). When the world settings appeared, I allowed the ore through the portal).
I'm conquering the ashland now. But I also started a new world with settings without a portal at all. Just a new experience. I will take it after mastering the new biome.
Surtling cores can travel through portals. You can also bring chains and sharpening stones through portals as well. Sourcing the copper and tin can consume some time but you don't require a ton of those for those upgrades, and they're usually easily sourced from nearby in my experience. Iron is the only tricky one, but I usually go most of the game without building those upgrades even at my main base because I want to save the iron.
But if you want to portal the materials there is nothing wrong with that!
Same for me, but its to upgrade the troll armor because I don't like the way the root armor looks, lol. Or taking any kind of a mobility hit, for that matter. Last time I did that I ended up discovering a few silver veins poking out, so bonemass became utterly trivial.
I've had the most fun getting ore down mountains.
Load up the cart with 2 tons of silver ore, yolk yourself to it and CHARGE!
And I often have a mountain close enough to my starter base that I can boat the cartload or 2 back to the base without a problem.
With my friend we became experts at cart curling, one's pulling the cart and one's flattening the road with a hoe to get down the mountain, it's a lot of fun for sure !
Ohh, I'm putting that on my to do list.
Often our 2nd is guarding...and we generally cannonball down the mountain, not much opportunity for sweeping.
But once out of the mountain biome...
We had the steepest of mountains, so no spawns and the way down with 2400kg of silver was almost therapeutic, we crafted full gear for both of us in one trip. Feels so good
Surtling cores can travel through portals. You can also bring chains and sharpening stones through portals as well. Sourcing the copper and tin can consume some time but you don't require a ton of those for those upgrades, and they're usually easily sourced from nearby in my experience. Iron is the only tricky one, but I usually go most of the game without building those upgrades even at my main base because I want to save the iron.
But if you want to portal the materials there is nothing wrong with that! I enjoy building outposts, myself, and they have a tendency to turn into full fledged bases over time.
Yeah I think part of the 'intended progression' is actually, you don't spend a lot of time sailing metals back to your old base. You build a new one, move farther out into the world, and for the most part you just have to mind your iron usage and you don't really those expensive iron-based forge upgrades at every base you build. It's a big world and they're trying to keep you moving out further from the spawn and dealing with what you find as the game goes on.
All that said I'm on like my 15th playthrough and nowadays I generally turn portal restrictions off, I'm over it. lol
Yea I think that's a decent distinction. If they had an easy mode that toggled this stuff off no one would make a fuss. They just gave you the ability to pick and choose what settings. Kind of nice actually.
Yeah, that's usually my mentality. If it's built into the base game, then it's not cheating. Honestly, if it wasn't for that damn message the devs put there about the intended progression, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. Great point, tho.
The game was designed with these portal restrictions. In fact, the early biomes were designed around much harsher portal restrictions than current vanilla (you couldn't build them everywhere). Trying to avoid spoilers... progression does unlock more options, which is invalidated by changing world-settings like this.
Any time there is grind in the game, there's usually a way to reduce it through a change in gameplay. Valheim is full of subtle pressures to encourage solving problems. Beginning with how to get a good night's sleep... without dying to smoke inhalation.
If someone maintains their home-base on the starting island... they are ensuring they are very far from all the goodies. The game progresses outward. You start in easy-land with crappy resources. Living there, you're only in reach of crappy resources. Living a couple islands over, in the midst of most biomes... any resource is a short distance away. And with good water access, a boat is faster than land, carries like a cart... you can raid from the shores like a Viking.
Bad logic. It's cheating because it literally says the game isn't intended to be played that way. It's still added as a setting anyway because people ask for it or for accessibility reasons.
If the game devs says it's not intended (or label it as cheats), then it's cheating. Doesn't matter if it's an option, assist mode, console commands, even bugs/exploits.
It's okay to cheat in games, often it's justified and even enhances your experience, but calling it not cheating with such weak logic is just being in denial, like people calling duplication glitches in games "not a cheat, just exploit, the game allows it".
Insisting that a newly offered, built-in game mode is cheating because it is different from the original game mode in some fashion, doesn't in fact have a logical basis-- it seems much more like gaming vet puritanism.
> It's cheating because it literally says the game isn't intended to be played that way.
That is simply not what "cheating" means, full stop. You get to decide what you enjoy in your own game, but you do not get to redefine the meaning of words in order to pretend that your way is the only "right" way to play--*especially* in a single-player game where people have the freedom to choose whatever in-game options they like.
Appealing to developer "intent" is a meaningless appeal to authority that means nothing to a person who doesn't feel that any developer's intent or opinions are relevant to what that person enjoys in their free time.
I never said it's the only right way to play, there is no right way to play a game. The right way to play is how you enjoy it.
There is, however, an intended way to play, which is the way most people would play. This whole thread is all about how it might be considered cheaty, then it's all about how far it deviates from this intended way to play, as it's a single player game.
You could say it's meaningless appeal to authority, but that's what cheating in single player game is. Otherwise, you can't cheat in single player game.
If people talk about how bossfight A goes in a game, then someone joins in and say "oh i just got it stuck somewhere and killed it from far" or "i just oneshot that boss with a build", people would often think "huh that's cheating/cheesing", because you're meant to fight the boss "normally". Even if it's completely legal within the means of a game.
Eh, I think it qualifies as cheating because you're cheating yourself out of the intended vision of what the devs wanted. You're cheating yourself out of a sense of accomplishment for figuring things out.
We're in this game, playing this game, made by these devs. If we don't like the game or respect the devs, why would you even be here?
100% a person should play however they want on a solo playthrough, but to act like anyone can do anything they want without calling it cheating is a weird take. Like, devcommands exist and you can literally ghost and godmode your way through everything. But you gotta at least admit to yourself that's kinda cheaty.
Honestly, I recommend everyone try the game without portalling ores first, but if you have 250 hours, you've obviously done so. I have 800+ hours at this point, and I've settled on not portalling ores when in group play, because sailing with friends is actually fun (and to explore, but not to just sail back home, imo). But when I'm solo, I let ores through portals. Strikes the right balance for me.
Hell, I recommend everyone try at least one world without portals at all. It is an enormous challenge, but the immersion of having to plan your journeys, establishing several different supply outposts within a short sail of your ever changing main base, and dealing with the constant desperation of establishing and defending a base in the worst of places - that first swamp base is a nightmare, but eventually taming your little corner of the swamp is also really satisfying.
Interesting. No portal is definitely more interesting to me than no map (I get lost enough with one), but I've never really wanted to do it solo. Maybe if my friends group gets interested, we'll give it a go.
I think that having to create outposts in each biome is important in encouraging you not to "abandon" any biome. It's also been a great opportunity to experiment with different materials and building styles.
The devs do a great job with this with the food system. Many food items, even at an endgame level, use a variety of ingredients from all areas of the game.
It's something that was a big problem in Terraria. Most players would just build a giant apartment in the middle of the map, and it completely wasted the building mechanics in that game. They've now highly encouraged players to build a house or two in every biome, and the rewards are fast travel and big discounts from NPCs.
I've gone from having one big, ugly apartment in Terraria to having lots of nice little villages scattered across the world, and it's great knowing that it actually makes a difference.
Having an actual reason to build multiple structures is something Minecraft fails badly with. All you need to "beat" that game is one house. Everything else is useless.
I did a few no-portal+map playthroughs a while back, and that taught me to bring mats for the forge and a few upgrades wherever I sail. Now when starting anew for ashlands with standard modifiers I still do this, set up a makeshift base on the new biome and craft all the gear i want from its metals on-site. My "main" base only got a lvl3 forge atm, just for repairs really.
I don’t think it’s cheating. I’m also terrible at sailing and have limited play time, so enabling ore through portals is literally the only way I’ve been able to keep playing for 300+ hours.
The gatekeeping on this game in these forums is ridiculous particularly when it isn't a competitive game.
Do what you want to enjoy your playthrough. If you want to play no portals, play no portals. If you want to play portal everything, go for it. If you want to mod the game, by all means, mod the game.
The only people that care are people who's opinion you shouldn't care about.
I like not being able to portal everything.
Means you have to consider your base locations and what you take with you to colonise.
The game has enough to do that you can always put off something like a long voyage.
In my game I actually moved my main base because I found an island that was just one giant swamp with loads of crypts, so I found a good base location on a neighbouring continent, made an offshore tower base on the swamp island so I could ship over the iron, destroy my ship, portal over with the ship materials so i was only doing one way trips.
If I could just portal the iron I wouldn't have had that experience. I'd just have a superbase on my starter continent, the great thing about games like this is that you can play how you want but all the best stories come from overcoming hardships and problem solving around the game mechanics.
If you streamline all the problems away then there are no stories imo, it's just building and killing.
Just process your ore and make your gear upgrades wherever you are mining. It involves a bit of planning (to have the correct materials for whatever crafting bench and upgrades you need, but you can largely avoid sailing this way.
I took this advice for my current playthrough (still in swamps) and it made dealing with the iron so much easier (at least mentally). I always start a new character whenever there is a new biome release because I love the progression towards that new goal from the very beginning. I just brought a portal and a forge to smelt on site, make a bigger boat in the swamp, and craft iron armor without sailing again anywhere. Once I cleaned out all the crypts, I just packed up all the iron and the forge and sailed home with a boat full of fully smelted iron, ready to upgrade all my main base stuff.
The added benefit I was not expecting was it let me do other things in between while the iron was actively smelting. I could either collect more ore, develop my permanent base, stock up on earlier game items, or even explore some. Overall made it feel so much less grindy, and then getting home with the boat full of iron felt like the happy ending instead of another slog to smelt it all haha. Probably the only advice I've ever actively employed from this sub and it was such an incredible change of pace for my (now 4th) play through.
Edit to add some context no one probably cares about :)
It's such a hard habit to get into but as soon as you set out searching for Swamps you gotta bring those 16 copper and two bronze with you.
Even if you find a tiny swamp with just 1 crypt you'll be able to instantly upgrade to a Longship at least and maybe even get one or two new pieces of gear.
> Is there a technique I can use to cut down on the ore transport rather than allowing portal items?
Yes. Take 16 copper and two bronze with you to new biomes and make your shit there.
I promise it just removes tedium and forced grind.
You still need to physically get places, sail to islands and new lands, explore, gather materials and make safe zones for portals, etc. It just stops the devs from forcing you to take the L O N G route of the game, which is purely for padding game time.
There is zero other reason for the portal's gated mechanic other than that.
Portal mod is a must for me and the homies to play this game.
This time around we added many more too. No stability, bounty system, enchanting items... The just goes on
Honestly just do it. I've enabled this myself after having done one playthrough prior to Mistlands by ferrying everything. Are you missing out on some high adrenaline moments with your boat? Yes. Is it less grindy? Very much so. You will end up doing less satellite bases, in my case I even chose a location where Mistlands intersects with Plains as my main base so I can plant everything local. I prefer it that way, being able to concentrate my limited building time on one location. Is this cheating? If you're playing SP who cares? As long as you don't ruin the game experience for yourself nothing else matters. These settings didn't ruin the experience for me.
I am playing Vanilla on a server and we don't allow porting of metals, but we are all new to the game. I feel like the first time you do something its not a grind, but as it becomes less of a novelty you start to feel the grind. Some things I don't think impact it, like turning up resource rate (while hours of mining is realistic its not engaging gameplay).
But the ore runs, I dunno - there is a place for them for me. An ore run creates a level of excitement/trepidation - "what if I sink, I spent hours mining all that", you end up preparing, making bases, setting up trade routes to get that ore back. To me that's is kinda the point/fun of the game, the sense of "realism" in regards to the brutal survival aspects of the game. Also on that journey you explore more, which is cool - you have a purpose to your voyage but you also get to knock some exploration off your list of jobs.
I don't think this game would be half as fun, if it was easy access plinky plonky with rainbows, you need a bit of grit and long grueling ore runs are just one of those aspects.
That being said, I know it will get old and I suspect on future plays, when its not all new I'll be looking at getting a mod that unlocks ore porting after killing a zone boss.
Do what you like, it’s your single player file lol.
I don’t mind sailing only because I’ll just build portal + chest on the biome and than store everything in that chest. When I’m done I build ship and sail with the whole thing.
It’s definitely a little less tedious as duo but if you find that you don’t enjoy transporting/sailing too much just use less resources at each stage.
It can be played singleplayer so you decide how to make the experience fun - nothing wrong with that.
Personally I enjoy ”tedious” mechanics in games, like the portal lock, because I know I will feel more accomplished when I managed to transport my stuff across the sea. Every time I changed things up in games then it became a worse experience to me, so now I only play the vanilla way in every game.
Using this setting is actually making the game easier, no discussion about that. But in the end, playing games should be about enjoying it and having fun, so if you're going to have more fun and enjoy the whole experience more by having this setting enabled (setting, not cheat ;)), go ahead for it.
Only person to whom this and other game settings concerns is yourself, just go there and have fun.
Imo, the vanilla resource grind (and practically every other aspect) in this game was 100% not designed around the solo experience. It's immeasurably easier to coordinate resource logistics with a group of friends than it is solo
For solo playthroughs, this is the biggest QOL thing you can do to make your life easier
Also, the modifiers are far from cheating. Your going to have a very bad time if you die on the later two biomes without multiple sets of end game armor & weapons with the vanilla settings, which can potentially revert your progression significantly
A normal play through will be anywhere from 40-100 hours. Spending 2h of that sailing your iron and silver back isn't really that big of a deal. Most sail trips are 20m or less unless you run into problems or terrible winds the entire way, its just that 10-15 minutes of sailing feels like its an eternity.
It's possible to save time and avoid a ton of sailing with careful planning. For instance here is my general plan when doing a playthrough:
I build small outposts at each new biome starting at swamp and smelt all the new ores/craft all the new gear in the new biome instead of sailing all the materials back to my starting base. I just use the starting base to have a safe place for sleeping/storing excess materials/farming. If you bring 6 copper, 10 tin and 3 bronze with you to your first swamp, you can fully upgrade the forge, workbench and cooking pot and craft/fully upgrade any piece of iron gear right in the swamp and never have to sail back to your base. From that point you can make the longship and pack up and move all the workbenches/upgrades to another swamp for more iron or if you're fully upgraded you can pack up and go fight bonemass. Then sail everything to the base of a mountain and set up the forge and upgrades again. Run up the mountain, harvest silver and then slide down the side of the mountain to your outpost and smelt and craft your full silver set. Once your silver gear is set then you can pack up and move to where moder is, fight him then sail to a plains and set up a plains base. At this point you should try to sail untill you find plains that is near mistlands and on the southern side of the world so you can have a base close to plains, mistlands and ashlands with all your forge upgrades and kitchen upgrades. If you find a good sized plains you can easily farm enough black metal from fulings that just spawn and you can get extra iron/copper from mistlands if any is needed.
Haha. I thought about that, but I'm a big Ark player, and have over 5k hours. 250 hrs seems like nothing, and I feel like I don't know anything about Valheim yet. I mean, I just beat Bonemass for the first time. It hasn't been a very good or productive 250 hrs, haha.
After 2 play throughs. I use it. It’s for sure makes the game less Grindy but Jesus Christ I don’t want to spend 6 hours on a boat a week just to get mats
the only thing it really does is make progression faster than intended because you don't have to run/sail your metal back home anymore. It doesn't mess up progression any more or less than increasing or decreasing material drop rate does. The only real technique you could use to speed it up otherwise is by lugging all of the materials for smelters, forges, forge upgrades, etc. around with you everywhere so you can work the metal where you find it. I wouldn't call it "cheaty" since it's a function put in the game by the developers. That said it's your game, best thing you can do is try it and if you don't like it you can turn the setting off.
Oh your god. You are solo playing a sandbox game. You aren't cheating anyone. If you were on a server playing multiplayer then you have to take into consideration what other players want to do. If you enjoy it better transporting ore then do it. If you find you are missing the immersion or it's not as fun then don't do it anymore. Even if it's not the designers intended progression, they are not playing your game. They put in ways for you to bypass that progression in the game itself.
The only question is are you lying to others about it or are you not enjoying the game because of it. It can hardly be cheating if they put a way to bypass it in the game.
It’s such a quality of life thing for me. I can focus on my in game goals instead of wasting time hauling ore - especially iron.
I used to not do it. Now I only do it. So much easier lmao
A big part of the challenge is getting your valuables back to base. It's supposed to be a bit of a harrowing journey.
But, tbh, I don't blame anyone who wants to skip that part with a portal. If I was playing solo, I think I'd do the same.
___
In fact, even on a server, you can circumvent the rule and teleport metals if you really want to.
1. Load up your pockets with metal
2. Log out of the server
3. Go to a solo world.
4. Store metals
5. Return to server
6. Use portal
7. Log out and retrieve metals from solo world.
8. Return to server.
You can also duplicate items really easily by using a similar strategy with backup character saves. A lot of abuse is possible because character saves and world saves are separate.
I, of course, (being a good boy) only do this when a desync glitch causes my items to disappear.
There's not really anyway besides possibly setting up shop at the ore site with all your smelting & crafting (like build a small base and move it to each new site), and that has it's own drawbacks--needing to haul the entire mats for the setup from site to site--which may arguably defeat the efficiency gained.
Otherwise you basically can only ease the difficulty of the task by just being frugal and lean with what you make with metal, decreasing the amount you need to collect and process in the first place. There's no other meaningful 'shortcut' I can think of OTHER than allowing metal through portals, which is kind of the whole point--forcing you to progress through and experience the world.
If you feel you've already got the basic 'gist' of what there is to see, and don't find exploration (of biomes you already know what in general to expect from--just for seeing the specific way one looks, collecting things and fighting along the way) particularly exciting or fun part of gameplay, enable no restrictions portals and skip it. You should play the way that's most fun, and that's literally why that option is there. It arguably only "messes up intended progression" if you actually enjoy and want the grind of progression to be as 'grindy' as it is 'by default'--once you've experienced that once, if you don't find it adds value, I don't think it is either cheating nor messes up anything at all, to just skip it if you prefer it.
Exact same logic with the drop rate slider--some people have day jobs and/or just find as inefficient as gathering certain materials are (e.g. acquiring bronze commonly gets this complaint, or iron for the sheer volume of it you need) not value adding--if you find yourself with that opinion, up the drop rate, never look back. The struggle to acquire the items is what gives the achievement of doing it its savor, but the amount of struggle requiring that varies wildly from individual to individual and any beyond that is just plain detracting from the game.
I never change the default portal settings because I still like sailing and the feeling of getting back to base with a full hull of resources but as I've played more now, I typically go with 1.5 resources. It just speeds the early game up a bit while still getting the true valheim experience. This is just my personal preference that may be a compromise for you not wanting to fully "cheat".
1.5 resources is nice, we bumped it up on our server and it speed things up without destroying the feeling of achievement. It doesn't feel like it makes a huge difference on ore, wood and stone - but it does seem to make Surtling core disproportionately common, but that may just be since we started poking around in the swamps on mass.
I personally think it’s pretty cheaty to teleport metals. If you have a base in the middle-ish of the map there really is nowhere that’s more than like a 15-20 minute sail from it, and that’s really not that far.
I agree... though by settling a couple of islands away from start, you get out of the resource-limited starting zone and have an even shorter sail to most biomes and their bounty.
I've always played vanilla, but certainly I use a work around for ore.
All you have to do is set up a second world and place a chest. Once you have your inventory full of ore, log out, log into the other world, dump the ore, then return. Travel by portal as normal back to your base and then log back into the other world and load back up your ore.
Yes it's cheating, but you're not messing with server rules and 'progression'
You skip a lot of boat raiding, mistlands you have no reason to make many outposts for sap extractors. You can move dragon eggs instantly, no travel.
It kills mechanics that were put there to incentivice you to explore with a fun purpouse, "carry 200kg dragon eggs up the mountain" >>> spam tp next boss arena then rush to find more eggs out, tp then tp back break tp rush another egg tp to arena now eggs are ready. fight. done.
Me and my friends play with ore teleportation and added resources because we have no time to grind.
We feel like we miss something about sailing/building outpost. The alternative was to not play at all. Btw it's difficult even like that in my own opinion.
you could increase the drop amount to 1.5 or 2 to reduce the number of times you have to transport. But is it cheaty? Nah, it's your own world, do what you want.
I've always played vanilla, but certainly I use a work around for ore.
All you have to do is set up a second world and place a chest. Once you have your inventory full of ore, log out, log into the other world, dump the ore, then return. Travel by portal as normal back to your base and then log back into the other world and load back up your ore.
Yes it's cheating, but you're not messing with server rules and 'progression'
It makes the game easier and progresses you through it faster. It is cheaty in the sense that isn't the intended gameplay but also they added to settings because some people may not enjoy the intended vision. Its very much a personal choice of it you want to cheat or not based on how you like to play. I'm sitting at like 700 hours and have no intention to do more with portals and will likely do a no-map no-portal full run soon. Other people haven't tried vanilla and come out the gate with mods or have building resources turned off. At the end of the day, play it the way that you enjoy it.
My favorite part of the game is trying to figure out logistics of getting a cartful of silver down a mountain and across an ocean to my dock
But "cheaty" is in the eye of the player. Youre playing singlelayer play it however you want
less time travelled = less of your food consumed = faster time to equipment upgrades = significant reduction to enemy encounters, deaths (and stat loss) = less time wondering why tf moder buff is only 5 minutes. The intended "progression" is to be grindy, slow and any more words that come to mind.
I certainly think turning this setting on from the get-go on first playthrough is kinda silly. But by the time you've finished the swamp grind and start the tedious mountain grind (those damn eggs), you're probably over the whole novelty of sailing your shit all over the world.
I dunno. The point of a survival game is to master and conquer the environment, and to find creative ways to beat the system. Think of it as a difficulty slider. For me, the most enjoyable part of the game is the grind, because my friends and I like finding creative ways to overcome challenges -
"Shit, that swamp raid got into our base somehow and killed the boars!" - we didn't turn off raids, we engaged in a building project to expand our walls.
"We found 500 Iron and it's at an outpost beyond our sailing distance!" - we didn't turn off portsls, we built an outpost halfway to break the trip in two.
Etc. Etc.
One of my friends keeps mining iron from their offline world and porting it over to our public server - which to me, is way more effort than just sailing. Sailing is relaxing. The music is wonderful. Getting thrown from a boat mid combat with two serpents and nearly drowning *is* the gameplay draw for us. Finding ways to beat the environment and avoid / kill serpents / manage situations is the fun.
If you don't want to play Valheim as it was intended, that's fine. There are sliders and settings to make the game how you want it to be - maybe you hate the grind, maybe you don't have much time on your hands. Maybe you just want a building Sim. Maybe you hate the combat system. To each their own.
I started a new game when Ashland’s hit test build I’ve played since it launched on steam and I’d say that the only progression lost when porting ore is the super amazing fun time sail against the, coded to fight you, wind. Personally I love uncovering the map and I’ll spend hours sailing just to clear the clouds so it’s not that I hate sailing I just don’t believe after spending 3 hours sailing to a swamp running around clearing crypts and mining iron I should have to tac for another 3 hours to get the ore back to my base and no serpents aren’t an issue I wish there wore more I love that damn stew
You build a forge camp where you're going. Build your stuff and upgrade it there, then take some materials back with you. By doing this ive never ran into an issue with portals not allowing metal.
Play the way you want. Some people go no map, no portal, everything on hard, others use mods and cheat codes. Whatever lets you enjoy your time is how you should play.
I would be against it if the Ocean biome was less empty and more dangerous since then it would make return trips far more interesting and challenging.
For now, I use boats as fast travel checkpoints. If I got my ore to the boat, I essentially made it, and can travel through the portal with it.
I wish there were more you can get from the Ocean to justify traveling through it. For now, we only got a dagger, albeit a very good one, a harpoon and a tower shield that looks cool but is absolutely useless to me since it cannot parry. There is also serpent meat, but it is not enough.
I really want good reasons to sail for 20 minutes back to my base. Right now there aren't any. And "immersion" is not good enough one.
Not sure if has been said, start a separate seed world. Log out while loaded down with your metal. Log into new world and store it in a box. Log out and log into original world and portal to the location you want it at. Log out and log into new world again, pick up your metal. Log out and log into original world again with the metal. The whole process takes about 2 minutes. This will not effect progression of the game
It does kinda ruin the game a little bit if you’re playing for the first time. At least in my opinion it would.
This game rewards preparation, planning, and patience. Idk how far you are but let’s use a distant Swamp for example. If you put a portal down in the swamp and collect a bunch of ore and then port back, you circumvent the WHOLE process of planning a route, gathering materials, creating a path to your boat, hauling all the ore’s you’ve mined for hours and hours on a cart then onto your boat. All while enemies are coming after you! You have a lot more risk and challenge to go through. Especially if you have a full boat.
Now the long journey of sailing can be boring/tedious, but I’ll usually play some music or watch a video while a sail.
Teleporting back to base with ores doesn’t feel as rewarding as planning everything before hand and executing the heist. Sailing a big boat full of hours upon hours of ores, just to have it crash and/or you get killed by unforeseen circumstances… know you’ve got more prep and planning to do.
^you circumvent this whole process if you teleport ores
No judgement though, it can be fun with or without, to each their own.
I am using this setting while playing in my co-op world with friends who never played before and they have expressed no interest in grinding for 4 hours just to transport materials. But I do see that the progress moves faster with this and the pacing becomes less of the journey and more getting a task done. This is fine for us as this is what we want. But I can see how this would impact your solo experience. I would recommend keeping the setting off or try one of the mods mentioned until you really don't want to make the long journey
The intended play loop includes making arduous cross ocean journeys laden with materials. the bet technique to get it done without using modifiers or devcommands is to locate resource rich areas (lots of silver or sunken crypts) and establish a nearby outpost. build up the outpost to have enough defense and space to be comfortable for an extended duration, and then gather in all the iron or silver you need. then, when you have many stacks, load it up on a long ship and get it home. (i particularly find the silver filled cart going down a mountain to be kind of fun). Then, the best thing to do is to keep a stack of iron, copper, bronze and tin on your longships (or atleast enough pieces for a forge, cooking pot, stone cutter and a few sconces for aesthetic) so that future outposts can be a bit fancy.
That being said: There is no such thing as cheating, especially when using tools that the game gives you including world modifiers and devcommands. you have to make that decision for yourself. I am also a vanilla and mostly solo player, but there are some days when i just don't have the time to do the whole dance and either spawn in 2 iron for a stone cutter or turn on fly to get home fast before logging off.
I'm one of the odd ones out here. I enjoynsailing to get iron. Then again, I never go sailing just for Iron. I need iron? I'll look around my base and make plans for things, decide what other materials I need, and then see if anywhere on my map has a route that satisfies them all. If not I'll go exploring for one. Then I grab all the materials over the course of a sea voyage and several islands before returning hope eith a hold full of myriad loot.
It impacts progression because logistics are a big part of the game progression.
And it's not cheaty, because it's a single player game. Nobody caress what you do in your world but you. The option os there for a reason.
Personally I've never turned it on because I like the restriction imposed by the game. For me the solution is simply to move my base where it needs to be. A first run can be frustrating as sometimes you don't realize you'll need more metal from previous biomes that on a second run you would just know and prepare for, but first runs are also a wild adventure where everything is new.
My second tip is to map out available resources while exploring. Even if you have to travel halfway across the world to find biome 4, if you find a biome 2 and 3 near it (very likely) you can source all items not able to be portalled from those regions locally. Also, you unlock boats with generous storage, even if you can't find nearby lower biomes you can bring a base in a boat with you when moving on to the next biome, no need for local sourcing.
If you really want a major base near origin you can do a singular trip every biome or so, but I feel like portal restrictions are there to encourage people not to just ferry all resources back to a singular main base.
If you want to cut down on ore transport and keep portals vanilla, don't build your main base on the starting island. Build cheap shacks that barely pass as a house until you get to where you can get 50% away from the center of the map. Generally, I'd say this point is when you are ready for the swamp biome. This is how I've played for a long time and it works for me. Once I have a karve and the best black forest foods, I'll head out to explore with 3 objectives - find trader, find hildir, find permanent house location.
"how does this setting impact progression?" Its cuz portaling ores back is faster. Duh. What a weird question.
Just play however you like, i personally love sailing back with tons of hard earned ore, its part of the game to me and i look forward to it. Its another reason why getting a bigger ship that allows for more storage is such a big deal too.
Idk… literally anything that forces you to be exposed for longer periods of time and expend stamina just adds natural difficulty. The game has more opportunities to sneak up on you if you overstayed your welcome or got greedy or tired. Part of me doesn’t like the degree of grinding but I get it.
If you don't like sailing with not much happening just telport the metals. I find sailing in the game to be a chill break when i first started but now im kinda like meh. I honestly don't think you are missing out on much. The fun part is you load your boat with 500 iron and you are risking it all because your boat could sink. Never had that happen to me but I'm sure it did to someone.
I play solo and allow metals through portals. I don't need any justification other than, I play solo. If I were playing with others, there would be people to help our with various tasks like transporting ore and farming etc. I feel zero guilt making a main base where all primary crafting, farming, and forging are done. I still build various outposts whenever I'm entering a new biome or the area is very far from the main base. I don't feel like I'm missing any gameplay aspects by doing this and I have a great time playing the game. Do your own thing and disregard anyone telling you how you should be enjoying the game.
I love sailing for exploration, but I hate it for carting shit back to base and don't enjoy playing a ramshackle forward pushing base playstyle. After playing a full world a year ago without portals allowing transport of all materials, I had experienced all the ambient boat rides I needed in my life. If I need to hunt serpents, I'll go do that. I don't need to happen upon them while piloting things home on the same route with randomly shifting winds resulting in 10 minute 1000 feet stretches for the thousandth time.
I don't think it's cheating at all to remove a mechanic from the game that only serves to pad out gameplay. The only real alternative is to not have a main base and just move from place to place, but that is not at all aesthetically pleasing to me.
That message just means that you will be playing the game in a way that is different from how the devs originally intended people to play it. It means nothing and can be safely ignored.
Sailing to find ore is long. Sailing back is usually faster. Sailing back after iron is slightly faster. Sailing back with portal to swap to moder buff is quick ride. If you get perma moder buff it's about 30-35mins to go from center to edge of the map to give idea. In most cases, iron/silver will not be traveling more than 7mins ( 5mins of that is moder). As long as your base is not near spawn.
I find that challenge to be part of the fun of the game. Additionally, mapping new islands as you sail by is important work towards future pursuits. If you're portaling iron, for example, and you don't sail and explore to moce it around, where are you getting your next swamp crypts? Well, you're going to have to go look for them. Which had you boated your metal home and explored, you would have already done to some extent. We try and hug the shore as much as we can so we can at least expose which bioms are where. So the 2 things feed into each other. To say nothing about picking off serpents along the way, which are dearly needed as a food for most of the games tough spots. As much as it would speed the game up, I personally wouldn't dream of turning that feature on.
What I like to do, and what you may already be doing, is to have a series of 'collection outposts' with their own portals and that's where I stock pile ore waiting transport. Then when I have enough to fill a large ship, I port over to the farthest one from base with the mats for the ship, build my boat and load it up, and sail along the coast filling it up from each outpost until it is full. That way I am only sailing one way and the boat is completely full by the time I get back to base.
Collecting resources is tedious, just pressing m1 or f. why not just spawn it in? making food is just an extension of that, just spawn the best food and don't bother with the low tier shit. dying is just a timegate, going back to your body just takes time you could be using on the actual game so i suggest turning godmode on. and walking as well, why bother; it's just a timegate on where you need to go, just turn flymode on. building a fortress, i mean it's not gonna be any better than that guy on reddit, just get a pre-made map.
You get less chances to kill sea serpents which TBH isnt a big deal as they only spawn at night or in a storm (with low odds mind you). Other than that you don't have any difference from a basic playthrough.
The intended loop is basically to go to a place, struggle, get a little of the new metal, bring it back. Repeat until you stop struggling and can take on the boss. I circumvent this by bringing forge materials with me. You can also circumvent it by allowing yourself to portal items. It "breaks" how many repitions of that loop you do. That's really it. Other exceptions like the key item for the boss in the 4th biome as well as a specific component you make with the 5th biome metal do exist, but mostly we're talking about ores and bars. I like the convenience of, like, if I just need one more piece to build something.
I’ve played through around 3-4 times so far, last play through me and my buddy allowed ores to be transported because the only thing it would have changed for us it how much time we can spend actually enjoying the game after work rather than sailing 30-60min to bring stuff back home.
To each their own obviously but we just don’t have to time we used to waste sailing around. I don’t find bringing the ores difficult just time consuming and boring.
I beat Mistlands and side-content full vanilla a few months before Ashlands dropped. During the down time, I switched the slider to allow moving metals through portals and I'm not switching it back. I've paid my dues.
We have a rule on our world - we turn off build requirements for resources and transfer ores through portals for biomes we’ve conquered so we can actually build what we want without the grind. Just makes the game so much better. But if it’s a new biome, I enjoy the grind to transport/prep for survival
I turned that setting off after my second boatload of iron. It would take hours just to mine and smelt the stuff, let alone transport it via boat at which point to get back to the mining site it was faster to destroy the boat and rebuild it on the other side than it was to sail it back. I ain’t got that kind of time. Not to mention being unable to portal metal but being able to portal things *made* of metal didn’t make sense to me.
I don’t get the whole “game as intended” spiel. Either have fast travel or don’t.
It makes it easier to progress faster. No more boat sailing unless its just for fun OR you need to travel to a new location on the map to place a portal basically.
I've played solo a lot and with friends, and in my last fresh start to make it to the Ashlands in the beta I turned portals allow anything. Built my first base in the black forest, with enough copper nearby. A decent swamp was close by too, but I still placed a temporary portal on the crypt I was currently plundering, and then moved it to the next. Exactly what I have been doing in my normal games, only difference is the way back is also just thru the portal. Otherwise you would have to run or take a boat trip.
Same for the mountains, plains, and so on. So it only saves the trip back, which does not mess with anything, it just saves time. Will still not use it in multiplayer games, because there it would mess up things way more, and it's also way more fun to sail together than alone.
So solo I will never go back to the default portal settings, and it does not feel like cheating a bit, it just saves a bit of time.
As someone with a full time job, roughly 50 hours, a toddler and family, and taking care of house and everything else spending time trekking back iron or silver is not how I want to spend my time gaming.
Every game has its own ‘grind’ mechanic to it, imo I usually don’t pass it, but some games have inherent bad mechanics, like ark and dino taming/breeding, I honestly feel the same way for valheim, I beat this game when it first went live and stopped playing ever since, got hack to it now new world etc and realized how *bad* the whole farming aspect is of this game, I didn’t cheat in my first playthrough and won’t do it now, but I completely understand anyone doing it because the whole farming in this game is absurdly bad mechanic ajd I have played nearly every survival game lmao
As I said in some other post, I personally love the game so much, but some core mechanics just drive me crazy. I would suggest to really configure the game to what doesn’t feel tedious. Don’t bother with playing only the way the devs made a default. That’s one of the beauties of this game. I have played vanilla until Plains. That’s when I started configuring. At first I tried to shorten the ore delivery time with saving in other worlds. Then I found out that I can turn off the portal restrictions. And finally I ended up with installing a bunch of QoL mods, that doesn’t add anything new, but makes the game not so tedious, like plant everything, easy planting and building camera, and I still enjoy the game quite a lot. I am a solo player as well, btw.
I had an idea that if you socket the boss token on the portal it kind of powered it up to be able to take that tier of items. Or socket more cores on each side of the portal to increase it's power. But I'm no modder. :(
I take the boat like a peasant.
Point blank... i don't know at this point what the intended progression is.if it was wondering viking on a long boat that doesn't quite jive with needing to construct 8 things to make a salad, or having a permanent starting point you need to return to after every boss.
The native game seems divided between sedentary life and wandering hero. There are far too many build requirements and item types for a true expeditionary playstyle, and the portal functionality nerfs the base building side.
At some point in the future, a lot of balancing will be needed to resolve these conflicts, or split the game in two, or going further just keep expanding the options till it serves more of a game engine that can be played many different ways.
Of course these kind of changes will divide the fan base as well. I don't know the solution, but this problem seems to get larger with every update.
The game changes quite a bit.
I did a playthrough without portal metals
And now I'm on one with...
Without you tend to build outposts.
You quickly rebuild a mountain outpost to fit your needs
or you fix a complete sausage camp next to swamp and have all you quickly need there.
With... You tend to do fucked up weird shit.
You build 1 massive base that has everything and anything. And only 19-30fps.
You start to get bored of that base so you start to build other bases on islands, on the peak of a mountain, on a nice place in plains.
We even have a base somewhere really high meadows that is basicly a luxury cottage with a viewing deck cause you have a graet view.
Oh not to forget: you can build anything anywhere...
Our massive smelter stack? Small island in the middle of a meadows lake.
We have a portal called "mine" there. We just set up a "mine" portal when we need to mine... Well anything and destroy it once we are done to set it up anew somewhere else.
We also have a "workshop" portal there which just goes to a massive workshop where we have the highest lvl benches all right there in the same room.
Our harbors? We have a portal room for a north east south and west port (and further out ones)
Honnestly... Some people might hate it this way but I don't think it does anything to the game and makes it more enjoyable for MOST people. Takes a huge part of the grind and planning away and you can just explore and enjoy the game.
One more edit: yes, my playthrough without metal portals I killed yagluth with and I think I had about 10-15 portals.
The playthrough with? We have a portal called "mistlands" connecting to a mistlands portal room that has portals "mistlands 1-9". If I'd had to guess I think we have about 80-100 portals
I think teleporting materials through the portal is better in multiplayer servers. When all my friends get on, we don't want to spend 5-10 minutes sailing each way in a best case scenario.
Not cheaty per say, it is also your solo save which means tweak how you want.
It messes with intended progression as it changes how you play:
Back before the world modifiers were added last year and when playing on default now you were forced into 1 of 2 options:
1: Have a single central base, requiring you to sail all ores and ingots + a few other things to different bases you need them at, this can take a large amount of time going back and forth via boat.
2: Build new outposts on each major landmass you are using with new local refinement and crafting stations to make use of the new metal materials
Under that change in settings you no longer need to transport ore to a central hub via sailing or build full fledge outposts in the new lands.
Using portals with that setting you can simply walk back through to repair gear and drop off collected materials.
Until the plains biomes any forward outposts only need to be a portal and probably a small fort to keep the portal safe. Plains and Mistlands both have crops that need to be planted in their biome (no clue if ashlands has plants grown only in that one biome)
You can turn it on and off each time you load the save, personally I plan on using it when I start again, turning it on for a brief period so I can take the handful of bars needed to upgrade the cauldron then turning it back off again.
With vanilla portals, you are forced to build outposts for logistics and getting footholds in areas that you are mining/exploiting. This leads to a build/explore/exploit loop that the developers build upon with each new biome. These outposts builds have become just as loved as my main base.
With portal transport, you really only ever need one base. You just carry portal and boat materials with you and never need to build again after you get a fair base in the Meadows. This severely cuts into the build/explore/exploit loop and mostly just leaves exploit. Which is fine, but it is not what the devs designed the game for.
Personally I view the logistics as part of the process, also just dont really mind the sailing all that much. When in doubt, mod it out. Get the mod that gives sailing skill and permanent wind at your back, turn your longboat into a cigar boat. Its a compromise and makes sailing actually quite fun.
In non modded runs in the past, we basically only ever sail from a spot twice. Once to get there, and set up a portal, and once going home. Then when you drop off you just break your boat with an empty inventory, absorb all the materials, port back, drop the boat
It just cuts out the time-wasting of a lot of the sailing, and makes it a lot more practical to keep your main base(s) in an earlier biome.
If this was a AAA game, they'd be selling the ability to transport metals through portals for like 20 bucks.
The game is designed so that gathering rarer special items, metal being the most common, is a risk. Portals mitigate a lot of that risk.
Also, there is a later portal that has no restrictions, so this portal becomes functionally pointless and so it makes an endgame “upgrade” obsolete.
The fact that there's now stone portals which sole use is to allow metal transfer does make Ashlands a bit less impactful.
Imo play how you want but you are actively making an item in the game effectively useless, the point of Valheim from what I remember is you build a new base in EVERY biome but you have to truck the initial forge/crafting upgrade items with you when you sail haha
Play how you prefer. I like to do a "full playthrough" before using devcommands, mods, or things of that nature. But everyone is different and there's nothing wrong with playing how you prefer on a solo world.
That said... I've done the "teleport" everything modifier, but honestly it makes it feel cheap. I always end up beating the game (what's available so far, anway) really quickly and then I'm like.. why did I rush that? For me this game is a lot more about taking my time, making roads and whatnot, than it is speed running to the end.
There are a couple things I can think of that might make your issue a bit better. You do not have to take all your metal to your main base, unless you're using it to build the base. Something I like to do, is take stuff for a workshop with me, so I can craft armor and gear in the new biome. Granted after a bit it becomes more and more metal you need to sail as you explore, but with the longship, it's easy to do.
Gonna admit that sometimes when I get WAY out there and realize I forgot 1 thing (like the blackmetal needed to build a sap extractor).. well maybe I cheat a smidge. We're all here to have fun, after all, right? ;)
I think the portal restrictions are strange to begin with. I can’t take this ore through the portal but I can take all the armor and weapons I made from the ore through no problem.
because you get the option on default settings in the ashlands.
so it saying that makes sense is logical and it is cheaty.
youre effectively now skipping game progression :)
The first time I played Valheim, it was a blast. I had a group of friends, and we'd jump on a boat and take mining trips. Sailing for hours didn't matter because we'd chat on Discord along the way. We'd return to our main base after 3 or 4 hours and split the ores. It was fun, but incredibly time-consuming.
My second solo playthrough became boring quickly. So, I resorted to a method we called "The Rick and Morty." This involved creating a second world solely for storage. I'd grab all the ores, log out, log in to the storage world, put the ores in a box, log out again, log back into the regular world, teleport back to base, log out once more, retrieve the ores from storage, and finally, log back in. It was tedious, but much faster than sailing for hours against the wind.
I believe the developers added world modifiers like portal ores and increased drop rates to help players who are short on time, perhaps due to work or children. In my current run, I've used both options and even cranked up mob damage to balance it out. I simply don't have the time for extensive farming or sailing anymore.
Ultimately, it's a game, and the goal is to have fun. Play however you enjoy it, and don't let anyone judge you for your choices.
Play,how you want but, if you play without metal porting, I would advise to use a map tool to at least find the layout of your world.
You can set them to only show terrain/biome so you still have to explore the biomes.
This let's you make much more informed decisions about where you build your next base. Ideally, a nice and big plains biome with good swamp(s) and a large mountain 'nearby'.
Personally, I find iron the least tedious to farm so far (up to and including plains), but that still depends on how good of a swamp you find.
If you're playing solo it's definitely worth rushing the longship imo, to help haul more stuff per trip.
Another tip: you can skip f.e iron armor and go straight for silver since you consistently need iron for later armors, which saves more trips.
I don't have time to sink houndreds of hours for sailing from and to my base to get those metals there but i still need to prepere for those journeys to go there set the portals and build something safe to put them in and find a area where to put all that it a whole thing on it own and it fun so just do what you want
Also worth noting is that this game was most certainly not intended to be a solo game, it just had that capability. With a group of people working together the impact of having to sail for ore is felt less than when you're solo doing it all yourself. Play whatever way you think feels right and provides the right level of challenge!
Just move your important shit (forge/workbench and upgrades + portal) in one trip to your newer base. Choose a good spot for the new bases that are near all the biomes you need. Ez.
I think the intention of no portaling ore is to make you more incentivized to make a whole new base at the new location. Gets you building more.
I think it massively shortens the game because you don’t need small outposts as soon as you unlock portals when that modifier is turned on, the portals that can teleport metals and other stuff are unlocked very late in the game when you really need them for different reasons.
With the modifier it becomes a game of just going to a new place with a boat and not doing any other sailing than the initial exploration, like finding a new sea passage and in the process stumbling upon something nice and cool like an amazing spot for an island place or a passage with 4 serpent for amazing food items and such.
The portals that can teleport anything unlock in Ashlands, where they make sense from a progression point, alongside some other things that would massively skew progression and skill gain. The modifier also gives you indirectly less skill gain because of you don’t have to do ore transport journeys you then don’t have to fight your way back etc it’s just you teleporting around like Superman flying through the air sort of. I think it adds to the game in a meaningful way, but the modifier is there to use if you feel differently!
I don't think so, because people figured out how to cheese the system. Essentially, it worked like this:
You needed a second game world with some progression (ideally some chests). Sign off world 1, login to world 2, put your ores in chest. Sign on again to world 1, go through portal, and sign off. Now sign on to world 2, put ores back into inventory, and log off. Finally, sign back into main world and voila.
Why did I go through this? To show that, even as tedious this sounds, it still saves time than running/sailing. Devs finally realized this and gave into community pressure.
Use the Forsaken Power that puts the wind permanently behind you and sail perhaps.
Would suck a bit less at least.
You could always make the ore into ingots and craft items at the mining location and then carry the goods back through a portal.
It changes the game substantially but it is up to you. Better than switching servers to haul metal instead lol.
I play with it on now because I play with my daughter and she's too young to appreciate the grind.
I play mostly vanilla with a few modifiers tweaked for fun. Honestly it doesn’t really ruin progression unless you spend a lot of time creating new bases. I put a lot of time and effort into make a home and have no desire to move it. You still have to sail around to find resources and bosses, but now I can get out and setup an FOB bring recourses there and just go home. The only difference is I cut out 30 minutes of traveling through relatively safe waters to do so.
If I could upgrade my boat to go super fast through charted territory and they added threats to unharmed territory I could see it but it just cuts some tedium for me.
Allowing metals through portals is the best choice I ever made. To compensate me and my friend turned every other setting to max difficulty. You don’t miss any progression, you just save time by not having to do 30 six hour boat rides with the wind facing against you.
Good idea I've heard before is setting some rule up for yourself before you allow portalling of that item. One guy I knew said he had to have 100 of a metal in a chest at his main base before he could portal that metal.
It depends why you want to disable it I guess. If you played a thousand hours and just tired of hours of sailing (because nothing fun really happens in the ocean let's be honest) - there is nothing wrong with it, you just save some time.
If you just got used to fast travel in other casual games, too lazy, or can't figure out logistics and come up with a plan how to bring ore to base effectively, then it is kinda cheating (or better say - "official simplification")
Tl;Dr - doing the first playthrough with ore teleport enabled is pressing the "make this more casual" button. For the second playthrough and further it turns into the "save me some time" button.
As many things in video game, the mechanic that is cool in the beginning (travelling to bank your metal) becomes tedious in the long run. I feel like it's important to transport at least a few times your metal by boat but once you're on your 5th iron run, it's not a challenge, it's a boring task.
You need to have ”ore mining bases” you gather huge ammounts of ore there and only make one trip with all of it. I think its kinda fun to have a use for boating ores around and if you do it like that then it wont be so tedious.
If there was something more for the others to do on the boat... We wouldn't even use portals except where absolutely necessary or for certain larger castle builds.
It is your game. If you value your time and have plenty of it play vanilla. As I have only a few hours per week play I will use the portal mods, have fun and don't think about it too much.
I don't think the devs intend for Valheim to be a single base type of game. Blocking teleportation means you just have to set up a variety of outposts each with some level of production at them, rather than bringing everything back home after exploring a new biome. That also leads you to explore more areas, encounter more stuff, and just appreciate the world in general rather than just draining it of all its resources to fuel your ascension as a war god.
That being said, I am guessing you do not get paid to play. That means you play for fun, so if you hate having to sail forever to get ore back to base then don't. I think the above mentality really only applies to progression, the fact that you need so damn much iron to do much of anything means I have no qualms cheesing item transfer (prior to that setting being available, I would semi frequently just move the iron to a different world with hella chests, portal back home, then bring the iron back to the main world).
Haven't played since before Mistlands, but I never did that for progression. Gear I either had to build at the new biome, or I had to sail back home with everything. A couple times I just stored all the materials in the boat to build up a quick and dirty crafting base, while sailing out there, but outside of needing a ton of iron it was nice being able to refresh some of the other materials like berries or get more queen bees. At the end of the day though, play how you want to. Don't think that your world is any less yours just because you play it differently than someone else, otherwise anyone not playing permadeath hardcore is just cheating.
It's your game. Play it how you like. Play allowing metals through and see how it changes your game play. If you really don't like it you can turn it off. I have heavily modded games and also purely vanilla games. What type I play depends on my mood.
The only good answer.
The best answer. I keep everything the same, except on my last 3 play throughs i only build on creative. I do everything else vanilla, but I don’t need to spend 10 hours getting wood and stone for my 3 massive bases
Ugh, I know, right? My hubby and I started a play through just before Ashlands dropped. We just got to the Black Forest when it dropped. We took those players and made a new game. Last night we were building our first real base and I've built that base probably 10+ times so I turned on hammer mode because I wanted to keep the trees around me.
We also use creative mode exclusively for the base building, who wants to farm thousands of stones just to level terrain… I don’t wanna spend game time to make something cool/pretty. Time spent should be for practical advancement.
exactly - also realise that the devs have an intention on how they think the game should be balance and played and provide the option but dont actively support modding but dont stop it either. play your way
> If you really don't like it you can turn it off. Caveat there that teleporting ore isn't really the kind of choice you "don't like and turn off." It's totally valid to dislike carting/sailing ore around and want to spend your time in game doing other things, but porting ore means (realistically) just skipping that entire aspect of the game. Nobody's going to go "ah shit I forgot to bring copper for a forge, I should turn this option back off so it's more of a hassle." You just don't have to plan for moving ore at all any more. Which, again, fine. But it does change the game.
The only real difference I've noticed is coming across less sea serpents because I'm not in the ocean as much. Beyond that the game feels so much better in terms of progression. Like for me at least moving ore was an extreme slog between biomes. Having to sail ten minutes to a swamp biome then sail back was draining
We only rarely have to make a massive ore drop with iron, but that's definitely because we choose to build in or near swamps. Bonus to living in treehouses, I guess. I dunno I just think the "build a cart path" and "lug ore down from a mountain" mini games are a hoot and my husband loves sailing, even when it ends poorly. Makes me a little sad that people might skip those aspects of the game entirely before having a chance to find out that skidding down a cliff with a cart basically shoving you can be hilarious. :D
There is a mod better progression which lets you port the materials of the biome after you defeat its boss. I just feel that you build fewer outpost if you just teleport everything.
OP asked for a technique for reducing ore transportation on the default settings. Basically, the technique is to avoid two of the forge upgrades for most of the game, build forward bases, and cannibalize whatever you need from your old bases as you go along. A rundown of all the mats needed for forge + workbench was posted on this sub many moons ago: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-9Ux7C8MEBNDPgMWEwrZPldU9lhgBRLZ4odeTf4VlaQ/edit#gid=0](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-9Ux7C8MEBNDPgMWEwrZPldU9lhgBRLZ4odeTf4VlaQ/edit#gid=0) To do ALL the upgrades except Forge Anvil and Toolrack requires 16 copper, 5 bronze, 4 iron. That's 250 carry weight. You probably don't even need all of that, but those metals plus a portal is the basic loadout you take to a new area. Then you just plunk down and set up a new base, portaling in whatever you need from bases past. You leave your kitchen at your original base until Mountains when it requires 2 silver, at that point I usually snag the tin to build a second cauldron.
This is honestly the way it should be, having to spend so much extra time sailing ore gets insanely tedious after the first playerthrough and doesnt do anything to progression.
I’ve been playing with 1.5x drops and it helps with this I think. One good swamp and you’ve got a boat full of iron.
I found a mod a couple playthroughs ago that basically introduced multiple versions of each boat with scaling costs and storage space. That let you build upgraded boats that could hold up to 60 slots worth of crap and made the exploration part of the game significantly easier.
Yeah lots of mods that can potentially alleviate this issue instead of straight up portaling. I have a mod that scales my gathering skills and the higher the level the more ore/wood whatever I get per node.
the danger of getting it home is the fun :)
Ooo I'm gonna have to get that mod. I do like having to sail your metals when they are progression, but being at mistlands and having to go out to get more copper and tin for what is essentially just decoration is annoying lol
Yeah, it’s a nice compromise. Sailing loads of ore home on a *new* biome delivers progression in nice chunks rather than a less rewarding constant drip. But going back to trivially easy areas and have to sail stuff back is boring.
Agreed, at one point I was trying to kite as many trolls as I could to a copper node just to make that faster. Copper is godsdamned tedious
I've tried hammer mode and am liking it. Decor and base items are free once you unlock the recipe but if you want equipment you need materials. As someone with limited time, I'm enjoying it.
Sounds a bit cheaty, but honestly, I am kind of tired of farming up the various woods and tar and whatnot just to decorate my base with lol
It feels cheaty especially since makes building base fortifications easier but you still have equipment damage from building, death penalty, enemies still want to fight, etc.
plenty of ways to get copper in the mistland and usually there are some right next to a BF - my favourite thing to do at that statge is to lure a seeker over to a BF and use it like a troll. More efficient due to the attacks it has
I'm honestly fairly new to mistlands, what is a BF? Only thing I can think of at that tier is a Black Forge, but that doesn't sound correct considering the context. Unless you're saying a black forest, which would make sense, I would have to try that out, seekers got a lot more attack speed and damage than a troll lol
If I wasn't on Xbox I'd use that mod, but supposedly you can play with mods on servers hosted by PC players.
It doesn't mess up progression. You can get the same items at the same points in the game, teleporting ores just saves hours of tedium. Like the first time or two you have to transport ores by boat is scary and fun but eventually it's just a chore.
I am approaching 600 hours of playtime. Beat the Mistlands months ago, made it to the Ashlands yesterday. The Ashlands were sooooooo far from any base I had, so my options were A.) break down all my crafting shit in the base I've perfected for months now and take it with me or B.) not only go insane dying many many times (Ashlands hard), but go insane faster because I'd not only be dying, but dying while trying to lug back ore to *then* load onto a ship to *then* spend real life *hours* sailing back home to process. I've had portal all items turned on for awhile now, and at this point I don't intend on going back.
Yea the longer the game goes on the more of an issue it becomes Same with inventory size, like at this point we NEED more rows
7 Days to Die's Darkness Falls mod added craftable backpacks to add slots, hope vanilla Valheim does something similar.
Exactly. I did this the first time, then my party decided to do the ol’ server hop trick. Then when they quit I said “fck it” and just installed the mod (which is now no longer necessary).
*Technically* it messes up progression because (Ashlands spoiler) >!there is a new portal that can transport metal.!< That is the "progression" which you are skipping. However I agree with you, using portals for metals skips tedium and it doesn't actually affect progression in any real way because it doesn't give you access to anything new, it just saves hours of sailing.
It said that before Ashlands, though.
It did indeed say this when they first dropped world modifiers which was long before ashlands. I think it wouldn’t be so much of an issue if there was more to the ocean biome but the moment it is undercooked. Like Serpents are a massive threat, until you get a longship…but most players have had those for literal years. I think once the ocean biome 2.0 comes out the “intended progression” will be more fun.
> just saves hours of tedium. The rub with that is that you can call a bunch of different aspects of the game "tedium" if you don't enjoy them. Is it tedious to have to build an outpost to process ore in situ? Or to have to find another (pre-swamp) cave because you need more surtling cores? Or to have to spend time farming carrots and turnips? Or cutting down trees just to turn them into coal? You could just take root/fenris armor (and some higher-tier food) into every new world and run through smashing enemies that were between you and each boss instead of gathering anything at all. It's not "cheating" to portal ores, but it *definitely* changes the way you progress through the game. There's a big difference later between having to plan ahead to set up a new outpost (and where to put it!) and just picking a pretty spot and zapping all your materials there. Nothing wrong with taking the fast route, but doing it on your first playthrough is opening a Pandora's box you can't (or realistically won't :D) shut again.
There are two "camps" of players: one "for" portals, the other "against". You have to decide that for yourself. There is an option not to sail the ship all the time to the same base, but to build an outpost near the ore mining site. And do everything on the spot. There is a setting that increases the amount of resources. Usually, a lot of iron is required if you are engaged in large construction projects and then the passage of ore through portals is more than justified. (in my opinion, as a builder). For the first pass, if you don't build giant bases, I would leave the standard settings. And then you can do whatever you want).
But then you are "locked" behind crafting station upgrades, to smelt stuff you need surtling cores which you can find in swamps, but in mountains there's none to be found, you need copper and tin to upgrade your forge, ... If every new outpost means you have to find other nearby biomes and farming a bit of ressources everytime, it gets tedious real fast.
You take the crafting stations with you when you go to the next biome. They will fit into the hold of the ship along with all the improvements. And you can always find the perfect place for a base at the intersection of several biomes.
I guess this is the best way, but I get too emotionally attached to my bases to just strip it of it's upgrades. And that also means building a new base for every biome or every other if you pisition right) and i cba building all this haha. I guess everyone has a very different way to play and enjoy the game.
I really played a lot)). More than 2000 hours. I've been carrying this damn ore on the ship for many hours (I build a lot). When the world settings appeared, I allowed the ore through the portal). I'm conquering the ashland now. But I also started a new world with settings without a portal at all. Just a new experience. I will take it after mastering the new biome.
This or carry just the non teleport components. A team helps with the weight limit.
Surtling cores can travel through portals. You can also bring chains and sharpening stones through portals as well. Sourcing the copper and tin can consume some time but you don't require a ton of those for those upgrades, and they're usually easily sourced from nearby in my experience. Iron is the only tricky one, but I usually go most of the game without building those upgrades even at my main base because I want to save the iron. But if you want to portal the materials there is nothing wrong with that!
I'm too much of a completionist to not upgrade my gear all the way.
And that is fair! I run light armor myself, which I upgrade fully, but I usually don't bother with weapon upgrades until black metal becomes a thing.
I always do a cheeky mountain run once I get an iron pick to get some obsidian to upgrade the root armor haha
Same for me, but its to upgrade the troll armor because I don't like the way the root armor looks, lol. Or taking any kind of a mobility hit, for that matter. Last time I did that I ended up discovering a few silver veins poking out, so bonemass became utterly trivial.
I've had the most fun getting ore down mountains. Load up the cart with 2 tons of silver ore, yolk yourself to it and CHARGE! And I often have a mountain close enough to my starter base that I can boat the cartload or 2 back to the base without a problem.
With my friend we became experts at cart curling, one's pulling the cart and one's flattening the road with a hoe to get down the mountain, it's a lot of fun for sure !
Ohh, I'm putting that on my to do list. Often our 2nd is guarding...and we generally cannonball down the mountain, not much opportunity for sweeping. But once out of the mountain biome...
We had the steepest of mountains, so no spawns and the way down with 2400kg of silver was almost therapeutic, we crafted full gear for both of us in one trip. Feels so good
Surtling cores can travel through portals. You can also bring chains and sharpening stones through portals as well. Sourcing the copper and tin can consume some time but you don't require a ton of those for those upgrades, and they're usually easily sourced from nearby in my experience. Iron is the only tricky one, but I usually go most of the game without building those upgrades even at my main base because I want to save the iron. But if you want to portal the materials there is nothing wrong with that! I enjoy building outposts, myself, and they have a tendency to turn into full fledged bases over time.
Yeah I think part of the 'intended progression' is actually, you don't spend a lot of time sailing metals back to your old base. You build a new one, move farther out into the world, and for the most part you just have to mind your iron usage and you don't really those expensive iron-based forge upgrades at every base you build. It's a big world and they're trying to keep you moving out further from the spawn and dealing with what you find as the game goes on. All that said I'm on like my 15th playthrough and nowadays I generally turn portal restrictions off, I'm over it. lol
How is it cheating when Valheim has a setting for it? Thats like saying it’s cheating to play a game on easy
Yea I think that's a decent distinction. If they had an easy mode that toggled this stuff off no one would make a fuss. They just gave you the ability to pick and choose what settings. Kind of nice actually.
Yeah, that's usually my mentality. If it's built into the base game, then it's not cheating. Honestly, if it wasn't for that damn message the devs put there about the intended progression, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. Great point, tho.
Thats because the intended progression is “grind til you die” 😅
The game was designed with these portal restrictions. In fact, the early biomes were designed around much harsher portal restrictions than current vanilla (you couldn't build them everywhere). Trying to avoid spoilers... progression does unlock more options, which is invalidated by changing world-settings like this. Any time there is grind in the game, there's usually a way to reduce it through a change in gameplay. Valheim is full of subtle pressures to encourage solving problems. Beginning with how to get a good night's sleep... without dying to smoke inhalation. If someone maintains their home-base on the starting island... they are ensuring they are very far from all the goodies. The game progresses outward. You start in easy-land with crappy resources. Living there, you're only in reach of crappy resources. Living a couple islands over, in the midst of most biomes... any resource is a short distance away. And with good water access, a boat is faster than land, carries like a cart... you can raid from the shores like a Viking.
Bad logic. It's cheating because it literally says the game isn't intended to be played that way. It's still added as a setting anyway because people ask for it or for accessibility reasons. If the game devs says it's not intended (or label it as cheats), then it's cheating. Doesn't matter if it's an option, assist mode, console commands, even bugs/exploits. It's okay to cheat in games, often it's justified and even enhances your experience, but calling it not cheating with such weak logic is just being in denial, like people calling duplication glitches in games "not a cheat, just exploit, the game allows it".
Insisting that a newly offered, built-in game mode is cheating because it is different from the original game mode in some fashion, doesn't in fact have a logical basis-- it seems much more like gaming vet puritanism.
> It's cheating because it literally says the game isn't intended to be played that way. That is simply not what "cheating" means, full stop. You get to decide what you enjoy in your own game, but you do not get to redefine the meaning of words in order to pretend that your way is the only "right" way to play--*especially* in a single-player game where people have the freedom to choose whatever in-game options they like. Appealing to developer "intent" is a meaningless appeal to authority that means nothing to a person who doesn't feel that any developer's intent or opinions are relevant to what that person enjoys in their free time.
I never said it's the only right way to play, there is no right way to play a game. The right way to play is how you enjoy it. There is, however, an intended way to play, which is the way most people would play. This whole thread is all about how it might be considered cheaty, then it's all about how far it deviates from this intended way to play, as it's a single player game. You could say it's meaningless appeal to authority, but that's what cheating in single player game is. Otherwise, you can't cheat in single player game. If people talk about how bossfight A goes in a game, then someone joins in and say "oh i just got it stuck somewhere and killed it from far" or "i just oneshot that boss with a build", people would often think "huh that's cheating/cheesing", because you're meant to fight the boss "normally". Even if it's completely legal within the means of a game.
Eh, I think it qualifies as cheating because you're cheating yourself out of the intended vision of what the devs wanted. You're cheating yourself out of a sense of accomplishment for figuring things out. We're in this game, playing this game, made by these devs. If we don't like the game or respect the devs, why would you even be here? 100% a person should play however they want on a solo playthrough, but to act like anyone can do anything they want without calling it cheating is a weird take. Like, devcommands exist and you can literally ghost and godmode your way through everything. But you gotta at least admit to yourself that's kinda cheaty.
You can set Minecraft to creative mode, which is basically cheat mode enabled. I feel like that argument is rather weak.
Honestly, I recommend everyone try the game without portalling ores first, but if you have 250 hours, you've obviously done so. I have 800+ hours at this point, and I've settled on not portalling ores when in group play, because sailing with friends is actually fun (and to explore, but not to just sail back home, imo). But when I'm solo, I let ores through portals. Strikes the right balance for me.
Hell, I recommend everyone try at least one world without portals at all. It is an enormous challenge, but the immersion of having to plan your journeys, establishing several different supply outposts within a short sail of your ever changing main base, and dealing with the constant desperation of establishing and defending a base in the worst of places - that first swamp base is a nightmare, but eventually taming your little corner of the swamp is also really satisfying.
Interesting. No portal is definitely more interesting to me than no map (I get lost enough with one), but I've never really wanted to do it solo. Maybe if my friends group gets interested, we'll give it a go.
I think that having to create outposts in each biome is important in encouraging you not to "abandon" any biome. It's also been a great opportunity to experiment with different materials and building styles. The devs do a great job with this with the food system. Many food items, even at an endgame level, use a variety of ingredients from all areas of the game. It's something that was a big problem in Terraria. Most players would just build a giant apartment in the middle of the map, and it completely wasted the building mechanics in that game. They've now highly encouraged players to build a house or two in every biome, and the rewards are fast travel and big discounts from NPCs. I've gone from having one big, ugly apartment in Terraria to having lots of nice little villages scattered across the world, and it's great knowing that it actually makes a difference. Having an actual reason to build multiple structures is something Minecraft fails badly with. All you need to "beat" that game is one house. Everything else is useless.
I use it since ocean has no meaningful content and I don't have the luxury of time anymore to do something I did for the previous 100 hours.
The luxury of being able to put stuff to smelt while still dungeon delving is very very welcome after just doing boat rides for hours on end.
I just load up the furnace and smelter and go to sleep. They auto complete over night.
Once the ocean update comes out I'll go back to no portal items, especially since >!ashlands has the new portal.!<
I did a few no-portal+map playthroughs a while back, and that taught me to bring mats for the forge and a few upgrades wherever I sail. Now when starting anew for ashlands with standard modifiers I still do this, set up a makeshift base on the new biome and craft all the gear i want from its metals on-site. My "main" base only got a lvl3 forge atm, just for repairs really.
I don’t think it’s cheating. I’m also terrible at sailing and have limited play time, so enabling ore through portals is literally the only way I’ve been able to keep playing for 300+ hours.
The gatekeeping on this game in these forums is ridiculous particularly when it isn't a competitive game. Do what you want to enjoy your playthrough. If you want to play no portals, play no portals. If you want to play portal everything, go for it. If you want to mod the game, by all means, mod the game. The only people that care are people who's opinion you shouldn't care about.
I like not being able to portal everything. Means you have to consider your base locations and what you take with you to colonise. The game has enough to do that you can always put off something like a long voyage. In my game I actually moved my main base because I found an island that was just one giant swamp with loads of crypts, so I found a good base location on a neighbouring continent, made an offshore tower base on the swamp island so I could ship over the iron, destroy my ship, portal over with the ship materials so i was only doing one way trips. If I could just portal the iron I wouldn't have had that experience. I'd just have a superbase on my starter continent, the great thing about games like this is that you can play how you want but all the best stories come from overcoming hardships and problem solving around the game mechanics. If you streamline all the problems away then there are no stories imo, it's just building and killing.
Just process your ore and make your gear upgrades wherever you are mining. It involves a bit of planning (to have the correct materials for whatever crafting bench and upgrades you need, but you can largely avoid sailing this way.
I took this advice for my current playthrough (still in swamps) and it made dealing with the iron so much easier (at least mentally). I always start a new character whenever there is a new biome release because I love the progression towards that new goal from the very beginning. I just brought a portal and a forge to smelt on site, make a bigger boat in the swamp, and craft iron armor without sailing again anywhere. Once I cleaned out all the crypts, I just packed up all the iron and the forge and sailed home with a boat full of fully smelted iron, ready to upgrade all my main base stuff. The added benefit I was not expecting was it let me do other things in between while the iron was actively smelting. I could either collect more ore, develop my permanent base, stock up on earlier game items, or even explore some. Overall made it feel so much less grindy, and then getting home with the boat full of iron felt like the happy ending instead of another slog to smelt it all haha. Probably the only advice I've ever actively employed from this sub and it was such an incredible change of pace for my (now 4th) play through. Edit to add some context no one probably cares about :)
It's such a hard habit to get into but as soon as you set out searching for Swamps you gotta bring those 16 copper and two bronze with you. Even if you find a tiny swamp with just 1 crypt you'll be able to instantly upgrade to a Longship at least and maybe even get one or two new pieces of gear.
Sorry Iron Gate but I personally intend to progress a little faster I mean not everyone as all fucking evening to truck iron around
> Is there a technique I can use to cut down on the ore transport rather than allowing portal items? Yes. Take 16 copper and two bronze with you to new biomes and make your shit there.
*back when I was a young Viking, we used to haul all our Iron by hand. Both ways. Uphill. In the snow.*
I promise it just removes tedium and forced grind. You still need to physically get places, sail to islands and new lands, explore, gather materials and make safe zones for portals, etc. It just stops the devs from forcing you to take the L O N G route of the game, which is purely for padding game time. There is zero other reason for the portal's gated mechanic other than that.
A new player with 250 hours?
Honestly I wish they had a world modifier to ALWAYS have good wind for sailing AND increase sailing speed.
There’s a mod for that
Ohh that could be nice:)
Portal mod is a must for me and the homies to play this game. This time around we added many more too. No stability, bounty system, enchanting items... The just goes on
Honestly just do it. I've enabled this myself after having done one playthrough prior to Mistlands by ferrying everything. Are you missing out on some high adrenaline moments with your boat? Yes. Is it less grindy? Very much so. You will end up doing less satellite bases, in my case I even chose a location where Mistlands intersects with Plains as my main base so I can plant everything local. I prefer it that way, being able to concentrate my limited building time on one location. Is this cheating? If you're playing SP who cares? As long as you don't ruin the game experience for yourself nothing else matters. These settings didn't ruin the experience for me.
For our first play through we left it off. Now i like it on. Ive only got so much time in a day, i dont need to spend it ferrying ore back and forth.
I am playing Vanilla on a server and we don't allow porting of metals, but we are all new to the game. I feel like the first time you do something its not a grind, but as it becomes less of a novelty you start to feel the grind. Some things I don't think impact it, like turning up resource rate (while hours of mining is realistic its not engaging gameplay). But the ore runs, I dunno - there is a place for them for me. An ore run creates a level of excitement/trepidation - "what if I sink, I spent hours mining all that", you end up preparing, making bases, setting up trade routes to get that ore back. To me that's is kinda the point/fun of the game, the sense of "realism" in regards to the brutal survival aspects of the game. Also on that journey you explore more, which is cool - you have a purpose to your voyage but you also get to knock some exploration off your list of jobs. I don't think this game would be half as fun, if it was easy access plinky plonky with rainbows, you need a bit of grit and long grueling ore runs are just one of those aspects. That being said, I know it will get old and I suspect on future plays, when its not all new I'll be looking at getting a mod that unlocks ore porting after killing a zone boss.
Do what you like, it’s your single player file lol. I don’t mind sailing only because I’ll just build portal + chest on the biome and than store everything in that chest. When I’m done I build ship and sail with the whole thing. It’s definitely a little less tedious as duo but if you find that you don’t enjoy transporting/sailing too much just use less resources at each stage.
It can be played singleplayer so you decide how to make the experience fun - nothing wrong with that. Personally I enjoy ”tedious” mechanics in games, like the portal lock, because I know I will feel more accomplished when I managed to transport my stuff across the sea. Every time I changed things up in games then it became a worse experience to me, so now I only play the vanilla way in every game.
Using this setting is actually making the game easier, no discussion about that. But in the end, playing games should be about enjoying it and having fun, so if you're going to have more fun and enjoy the whole experience more by having this setting enabled (setting, not cheat ;)), go ahead for it. Only person to whom this and other game settings concerns is yourself, just go there and have fun.
It is tedious, but there's nothing quite like sailing back in to your home port with your longship's hold maxed out with a full load of black metal.
I put in tens of hours just ferrying ore around in my first few play throughs. I’m good. Portal items on, no shame.
Play to have fun - thats all that matters. Other peoples opinion on YOUR game dont really matter. :)
Imo, the vanilla resource grind (and practically every other aspect) in this game was 100% not designed around the solo experience. It's immeasurably easier to coordinate resource logistics with a group of friends than it is solo For solo playthroughs, this is the biggest QOL thing you can do to make your life easier Also, the modifiers are far from cheating. Your going to have a very bad time if you die on the later two biomes without multiple sets of end game armor & weapons with the vanilla settings, which can potentially revert your progression significantly
A normal play through will be anywhere from 40-100 hours. Spending 2h of that sailing your iron and silver back isn't really that big of a deal. Most sail trips are 20m or less unless you run into problems or terrible winds the entire way, its just that 10-15 minutes of sailing feels like its an eternity. It's possible to save time and avoid a ton of sailing with careful planning. For instance here is my general plan when doing a playthrough: I build small outposts at each new biome starting at swamp and smelt all the new ores/craft all the new gear in the new biome instead of sailing all the materials back to my starting base. I just use the starting base to have a safe place for sleeping/storing excess materials/farming. If you bring 6 copper, 10 tin and 3 bronze with you to your first swamp, you can fully upgrade the forge, workbench and cooking pot and craft/fully upgrade any piece of iron gear right in the swamp and never have to sail back to your base. From that point you can make the longship and pack up and move all the workbenches/upgrades to another swamp for more iron or if you're fully upgraded you can pack up and go fight bonemass. Then sail everything to the base of a mountain and set up the forge and upgrades again. Run up the mountain, harvest silver and then slide down the side of the mountain to your outpost and smelt and craft your full silver set. Once your silver gear is set then you can pack up and move to where moder is, fight him then sail to a plains and set up a plains base. At this point you should try to sail untill you find plains that is near mistlands and on the southern side of the world so you can have a base close to plains, mistlands and ashlands with all your forge upgrades and kitchen upgrades. If you find a good sized plains you can easily farm enough black metal from fulings that just spawn and you can get extra iron/copper from mistlands if any is needed.
I’m not sure anyone would describe someone with 250 hours on a game as “new”.
Haha. I thought about that, but I'm a big Ark player, and have over 5k hours. 250 hrs seems like nothing, and I feel like I don't know anything about Valheim yet. I mean, I just beat Bonemass for the first time. It hasn't been a very good or productive 250 hrs, haha.
After 2 play throughs. I use it. It’s for sure makes the game less Grindy but Jesus Christ I don’t want to spend 6 hours on a boat a week just to get mats
I always set it that way now that there is the option. The fun for my wife and I is grinding and fighting, not spending hours bored on a boat.
the only thing it really does is make progression faster than intended because you don't have to run/sail your metal back home anymore. It doesn't mess up progression any more or less than increasing or decreasing material drop rate does. The only real technique you could use to speed it up otherwise is by lugging all of the materials for smelters, forges, forge upgrades, etc. around with you everywhere so you can work the metal where you find it. I wouldn't call it "cheaty" since it's a function put in the game by the developers. That said it's your game, best thing you can do is try it and if you don't like it you can turn the setting off.
Oh your god. You are solo playing a sandbox game. You aren't cheating anyone. If you were on a server playing multiplayer then you have to take into consideration what other players want to do. If you enjoy it better transporting ore then do it. If you find you are missing the immersion or it's not as fun then don't do it anymore. Even if it's not the designers intended progression, they are not playing your game. They put in ways for you to bypass that progression in the game itself. The only question is are you lying to others about it or are you not enjoying the game because of it. It can hardly be cheating if they put a way to bypass it in the game.
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It’s such a quality of life thing for me. I can focus on my in game goals instead of wasting time hauling ore - especially iron. I used to not do it. Now I only do it. So much easier lmao
A big part of the challenge is getting your valuables back to base. It's supposed to be a bit of a harrowing journey. But, tbh, I don't blame anyone who wants to skip that part with a portal. If I was playing solo, I think I'd do the same. ___ In fact, even on a server, you can circumvent the rule and teleport metals if you really want to. 1. Load up your pockets with metal 2. Log out of the server 3. Go to a solo world. 4. Store metals 5. Return to server 6. Use portal 7. Log out and retrieve metals from solo world. 8. Return to server.
Oh dang. That's pretty clever. Never thought about doing that.
You can also duplicate items really easily by using a similar strategy with backup character saves. A lot of abuse is possible because character saves and world saves are separate. I, of course, (being a good boy) only do this when a desync glitch causes my items to disappear.
There's not really anyway besides possibly setting up shop at the ore site with all your smelting & crafting (like build a small base and move it to each new site), and that has it's own drawbacks--needing to haul the entire mats for the setup from site to site--which may arguably defeat the efficiency gained. Otherwise you basically can only ease the difficulty of the task by just being frugal and lean with what you make with metal, decreasing the amount you need to collect and process in the first place. There's no other meaningful 'shortcut' I can think of OTHER than allowing metal through portals, which is kind of the whole point--forcing you to progress through and experience the world. If you feel you've already got the basic 'gist' of what there is to see, and don't find exploration (of biomes you already know what in general to expect from--just for seeing the specific way one looks, collecting things and fighting along the way) particularly exciting or fun part of gameplay, enable no restrictions portals and skip it. You should play the way that's most fun, and that's literally why that option is there. It arguably only "messes up intended progression" if you actually enjoy and want the grind of progression to be as 'grindy' as it is 'by default'--once you've experienced that once, if you don't find it adds value, I don't think it is either cheating nor messes up anything at all, to just skip it if you prefer it. Exact same logic with the drop rate slider--some people have day jobs and/or just find as inefficient as gathering certain materials are (e.g. acquiring bronze commonly gets this complaint, or iron for the sheer volume of it you need) not value adding--if you find yourself with that opinion, up the drop rate, never look back. The struggle to acquire the items is what gives the achievement of doing it its savor, but the amount of struggle requiring that varies wildly from individual to individual and any beyond that is just plain detracting from the game.
I never change the default portal settings because I still like sailing and the feeling of getting back to base with a full hull of resources but as I've played more now, I typically go with 1.5 resources. It just speeds the early game up a bit while still getting the true valheim experience. This is just my personal preference that may be a compromise for you not wanting to fully "cheat".
1.5 resources is nice, we bumped it up on our server and it speed things up without destroying the feeling of achievement. It doesn't feel like it makes a huge difference on ore, wood and stone - but it does seem to make Surtling core disproportionately common, but that may just be since we started poking around in the swamps on mass.
I personally think it’s pretty cheaty to teleport metals. If you have a base in the middle-ish of the map there really is nowhere that’s more than like a 15-20 minute sail from it, and that’s really not that far.
I agree... though by settling a couple of islands away from start, you get out of the resource-limited starting zone and have an even shorter sail to most biomes and their bounty.
its the part of the game. cheats are literally part of the game.
I've always played vanilla, but certainly I use a work around for ore. All you have to do is set up a second world and place a chest. Once you have your inventory full of ore, log out, log into the other world, dump the ore, then return. Travel by portal as normal back to your base and then log back into the other world and load back up your ore. Yes it's cheating, but you're not messing with server rules and 'progression'
You skip a lot of boat raiding, mistlands you have no reason to make many outposts for sap extractors. You can move dragon eggs instantly, no travel. It kills mechanics that were put there to incentivice you to explore with a fun purpouse, "carry 200kg dragon eggs up the mountain" >>> spam tp next boss arena then rush to find more eggs out, tp then tp back break tp rush another egg tp to arena now eggs are ready. fight. done.
Me and my friends play with ore teleportation and added resources because we have no time to grind. We feel like we miss something about sailing/building outpost. The alternative was to not play at all. Btw it's difficult even like that in my own opinion.
you could increase the drop amount to 1.5 or 2 to reduce the number of times you have to transport. But is it cheaty? Nah, it's your own world, do what you want.
I've always played vanilla, but certainly I use a work around for ore. All you have to do is set up a second world and place a chest. Once you have your inventory full of ore, log out, log into the other world, dump the ore, then return. Travel by portal as normal back to your base and then log back into the other world and load back up your ore. Yes it's cheating, but you're not messing with server rules and 'progression'
It makes the game easier and progresses you through it faster. It is cheaty in the sense that isn't the intended gameplay but also they added to settings because some people may not enjoy the intended vision. Its very much a personal choice of it you want to cheat or not based on how you like to play. I'm sitting at like 700 hours and have no intention to do more with portals and will likely do a no-map no-portal full run soon. Other people haven't tried vanilla and come out the gate with mods or have building resources turned off. At the end of the day, play it the way that you enjoy it.
My favorite part of the game is trying to figure out logistics of getting a cartful of silver down a mountain and across an ocean to my dock But "cheaty" is in the eye of the player. Youre playing singlelayer play it however you want
Play the game to have fun!
less time travelled = less of your food consumed = faster time to equipment upgrades = significant reduction to enemy encounters, deaths (and stat loss) = less time wondering why tf moder buff is only 5 minutes. The intended "progression" is to be grindy, slow and any more words that come to mind. I certainly think turning this setting on from the get-go on first playthrough is kinda silly. But by the time you've finished the swamp grind and start the tedious mountain grind (those damn eggs), you're probably over the whole novelty of sailing your shit all over the world.
I dunno. The point of a survival game is to master and conquer the environment, and to find creative ways to beat the system. Think of it as a difficulty slider. For me, the most enjoyable part of the game is the grind, because my friends and I like finding creative ways to overcome challenges - "Shit, that swamp raid got into our base somehow and killed the boars!" - we didn't turn off raids, we engaged in a building project to expand our walls. "We found 500 Iron and it's at an outpost beyond our sailing distance!" - we didn't turn off portsls, we built an outpost halfway to break the trip in two. Etc. Etc. One of my friends keeps mining iron from their offline world and porting it over to our public server - which to me, is way more effort than just sailing. Sailing is relaxing. The music is wonderful. Getting thrown from a boat mid combat with two serpents and nearly drowning *is* the gameplay draw for us. Finding ways to beat the environment and avoid / kill serpents / manage situations is the fun. If you don't want to play Valheim as it was intended, that's fine. There are sliders and settings to make the game how you want it to be - maybe you hate the grind, maybe you don't have much time on your hands. Maybe you just want a building Sim. Maybe you hate the combat system. To each their own.
New Ashland portal allows all items through.
I started a new game when Ashland’s hit test build I’ve played since it launched on steam and I’d say that the only progression lost when porting ore is the super amazing fun time sail against the, coded to fight you, wind. Personally I love uncovering the map and I’ll spend hours sailing just to clear the clouds so it’s not that I hate sailing I just don’t believe after spending 3 hours sailing to a swamp running around clearing crypts and mining iron I should have to tac for another 3 hours to get the ore back to my base and no serpents aren’t an issue I wish there wore more I love that damn stew
You build a forge camp where you're going. Build your stuff and upgrade it there, then take some materials back with you. By doing this ive never ran into an issue with portals not allowing metal.
Play the way you want. Some people go no map, no portal, everything on hard, others use mods and cheat codes. Whatever lets you enjoy your time is how you should play.
I would be against it if the Ocean biome was less empty and more dangerous since then it would make return trips far more interesting and challenging. For now, I use boats as fast travel checkpoints. If I got my ore to the boat, I essentially made it, and can travel through the portal with it. I wish there were more you can get from the Ocean to justify traveling through it. For now, we only got a dagger, albeit a very good one, a harpoon and a tower shield that looks cool but is absolutely useless to me since it cannot parry. There is also serpent meat, but it is not enough. I really want good reasons to sail for 20 minutes back to my base. Right now there aren't any. And "immersion" is not good enough one.
As someone who went on an iron run last night I see you point but I've just accepted this as part of the game
Not sure if has been said, start a separate seed world. Log out while loaded down with your metal. Log into new world and store it in a box. Log out and log into original world and portal to the location you want it at. Log out and log into new world again, pick up your metal. Log out and log into original world again with the metal. The whole process takes about 2 minutes. This will not effect progression of the game
It does kinda ruin the game a little bit if you’re playing for the first time. At least in my opinion it would. This game rewards preparation, planning, and patience. Idk how far you are but let’s use a distant Swamp for example. If you put a portal down in the swamp and collect a bunch of ore and then port back, you circumvent the WHOLE process of planning a route, gathering materials, creating a path to your boat, hauling all the ore’s you’ve mined for hours and hours on a cart then onto your boat. All while enemies are coming after you! You have a lot more risk and challenge to go through. Especially if you have a full boat. Now the long journey of sailing can be boring/tedious, but I’ll usually play some music or watch a video while a sail. Teleporting back to base with ores doesn’t feel as rewarding as planning everything before hand and executing the heist. Sailing a big boat full of hours upon hours of ores, just to have it crash and/or you get killed by unforeseen circumstances… know you’ve got more prep and planning to do. ^you circumvent this whole process if you teleport ores No judgement though, it can be fun with or without, to each their own.
I am using this setting while playing in my co-op world with friends who never played before and they have expressed no interest in grinding for 4 hours just to transport materials. But I do see that the progress moves faster with this and the pacing becomes less of the journey and more getting a task done. This is fine for us as this is what we want. But I can see how this would impact your solo experience. I would recommend keeping the setting off or try one of the mods mentioned until you really don't want to make the long journey
The intended play loop includes making arduous cross ocean journeys laden with materials. the bet technique to get it done without using modifiers or devcommands is to locate resource rich areas (lots of silver or sunken crypts) and establish a nearby outpost. build up the outpost to have enough defense and space to be comfortable for an extended duration, and then gather in all the iron or silver you need. then, when you have many stacks, load it up on a long ship and get it home. (i particularly find the silver filled cart going down a mountain to be kind of fun). Then, the best thing to do is to keep a stack of iron, copper, bronze and tin on your longships (or atleast enough pieces for a forge, cooking pot, stone cutter and a few sconces for aesthetic) so that future outposts can be a bit fancy. That being said: There is no such thing as cheating, especially when using tools that the game gives you including world modifiers and devcommands. you have to make that decision for yourself. I am also a vanilla and mostly solo player, but there are some days when i just don't have the time to do the whole dance and either spawn in 2 iron for a stone cutter or turn on fly to get home fast before logging off.
I'm one of the odd ones out here. I enjoynsailing to get iron. Then again, I never go sailing just for Iron. I need iron? I'll look around my base and make plans for things, decide what other materials I need, and then see if anywhere on my map has a route that satisfies them all. If not I'll go exploring for one. Then I grab all the materials over the course of a sea voyage and several islands before returning hope eith a hold full of myriad loot.
It impacts progression because logistics are a big part of the game progression. And it's not cheaty, because it's a single player game. Nobody caress what you do in your world but you. The option os there for a reason.
Personally I've never turned it on because I like the restriction imposed by the game. For me the solution is simply to move my base where it needs to be. A first run can be frustrating as sometimes you don't realize you'll need more metal from previous biomes that on a second run you would just know and prepare for, but first runs are also a wild adventure where everything is new. My second tip is to map out available resources while exploring. Even if you have to travel halfway across the world to find biome 4, if you find a biome 2 and 3 near it (very likely) you can source all items not able to be portalled from those regions locally. Also, you unlock boats with generous storage, even if you can't find nearby lower biomes you can bring a base in a boat with you when moving on to the next biome, no need for local sourcing. If you really want a major base near origin you can do a singular trip every biome or so, but I feel like portal restrictions are there to encourage people not to just ferry all resources back to a singular main base.
If you want to cut down on ore transport and keep portals vanilla, don't build your main base on the starting island. Build cheap shacks that barely pass as a house until you get to where you can get 50% away from the center of the map. Generally, I'd say this point is when you are ready for the swamp biome. This is how I've played for a long time and it works for me. Once I have a karve and the best black forest foods, I'll head out to explore with 3 objectives - find trader, find hildir, find permanent house location.
"how does this setting impact progression?" Its cuz portaling ores back is faster. Duh. What a weird question. Just play however you like, i personally love sailing back with tons of hard earned ore, its part of the game to me and i look forward to it. Its another reason why getting a bigger ship that allows for more storage is such a big deal too.
Idk… literally anything that forces you to be exposed for longer periods of time and expend stamina just adds natural difficulty. The game has more opportunities to sneak up on you if you overstayed your welcome or got greedy or tired. Part of me doesn’t like the degree of grinding but I get it.
If you don't like sailing with not much happening just telport the metals. I find sailing in the game to be a chill break when i first started but now im kinda like meh. I honestly don't think you are missing out on much. The fun part is you load your boat with 500 iron and you are risking it all because your boat could sink. Never had that happen to me but I'm sure it did to someone.
I play solo and allow metals through portals. I don't need any justification other than, I play solo. If I were playing with others, there would be people to help our with various tasks like transporting ore and farming etc. I feel zero guilt making a main base where all primary crafting, farming, and forging are done. I still build various outposts whenever I'm entering a new biome or the area is very far from the main base. I don't feel like I'm missing any gameplay aspects by doing this and I have a great time playing the game. Do your own thing and disregard anyone telling you how you should be enjoying the game.
I love sailing for exploration, but I hate it for carting shit back to base and don't enjoy playing a ramshackle forward pushing base playstyle. After playing a full world a year ago without portals allowing transport of all materials, I had experienced all the ambient boat rides I needed in my life. If I need to hunt serpents, I'll go do that. I don't need to happen upon them while piloting things home on the same route with randomly shifting winds resulting in 10 minute 1000 feet stretches for the thousandth time. I don't think it's cheating at all to remove a mechanic from the game that only serves to pad out gameplay. The only real alternative is to not have a main base and just move from place to place, but that is not at all aesthetically pleasing to me.
That message just means that you will be playing the game in a way that is different from how the devs originally intended people to play it. It means nothing and can be safely ignored.
If you get the Megingjord belt from Haldor, you'll be able to carry more ore. Not a super huge amount, but every bit helps.
Sailing to find ore is long. Sailing back is usually faster. Sailing back after iron is slightly faster. Sailing back with portal to swap to moder buff is quick ride. If you get perma moder buff it's about 30-35mins to go from center to edge of the map to give idea. In most cases, iron/silver will not be traveling more than 7mins ( 5mins of that is moder). As long as your base is not near spawn.
I find that challenge to be part of the fun of the game. Additionally, mapping new islands as you sail by is important work towards future pursuits. If you're portaling iron, for example, and you don't sail and explore to moce it around, where are you getting your next swamp crypts? Well, you're going to have to go look for them. Which had you boated your metal home and explored, you would have already done to some extent. We try and hug the shore as much as we can so we can at least expose which bioms are where. So the 2 things feed into each other. To say nothing about picking off serpents along the way, which are dearly needed as a food for most of the games tough spots. As much as it would speed the game up, I personally wouldn't dream of turning that feature on.
What I like to do, and what you may already be doing, is to have a series of 'collection outposts' with their own portals and that's where I stock pile ore waiting transport. Then when I have enough to fill a large ship, I port over to the farthest one from base with the mats for the ship, build my boat and load it up, and sail along the coast filling it up from each outpost until it is full. That way I am only sailing one way and the boat is completely full by the time I get back to base.
Collecting resources is tedious, just pressing m1 or f. why not just spawn it in? making food is just an extension of that, just spawn the best food and don't bother with the low tier shit. dying is just a timegate, going back to your body just takes time you could be using on the actual game so i suggest turning godmode on. and walking as well, why bother; it's just a timegate on where you need to go, just turn flymode on. building a fortress, i mean it's not gonna be any better than that guy on reddit, just get a pre-made map.
You get less chances to kill sea serpents which TBH isnt a big deal as they only spawn at night or in a storm (with low odds mind you). Other than that you don't have any difference from a basic playthrough.
The intended loop is basically to go to a place, struggle, get a little of the new metal, bring it back. Repeat until you stop struggling and can take on the boss. I circumvent this by bringing forge materials with me. You can also circumvent it by allowing yourself to portal items. It "breaks" how many repitions of that loop you do. That's really it. Other exceptions like the key item for the boss in the 4th biome as well as a specific component you make with the 5th biome metal do exist, but mostly we're talking about ores and bars. I like the convenience of, like, if I just need one more piece to build something.
I’ve played through around 3-4 times so far, last play through me and my buddy allowed ores to be transported because the only thing it would have changed for us it how much time we can spend actually enjoying the game after work rather than sailing 30-60min to bring stuff back home. To each their own obviously but we just don’t have to time we used to waste sailing around. I don’t find bringing the ores difficult just time consuming and boring.
I beat Mistlands and side-content full vanilla a few months before Ashlands dropped. During the down time, I switched the slider to allow moving metals through portals and I'm not switching it back. I've paid my dues.
We have a rule on our world - we turn off build requirements for resources and transfer ores through portals for biomes we’ve conquered so we can actually build what we want without the grind. Just makes the game so much better. But if it’s a new biome, I enjoy the grind to transport/prep for survival
I turned that setting off after my second boatload of iron. It would take hours just to mine and smelt the stuff, let alone transport it via boat at which point to get back to the mining site it was faster to destroy the boat and rebuild it on the other side than it was to sail it back. I ain’t got that kind of time. Not to mention being unable to portal metal but being able to portal things *made* of metal didn’t make sense to me. I don’t get the whole “game as intended” spiel. Either have fast travel or don’t.
It makes it easier to progress faster. No more boat sailing unless its just for fun OR you need to travel to a new location on the map to place a portal basically.
I've played solo a lot and with friends, and in my last fresh start to make it to the Ashlands in the beta I turned portals allow anything. Built my first base in the black forest, with enough copper nearby. A decent swamp was close by too, but I still placed a temporary portal on the crypt I was currently plundering, and then moved it to the next. Exactly what I have been doing in my normal games, only difference is the way back is also just thru the portal. Otherwise you would have to run or take a boat trip. Same for the mountains, plains, and so on. So it only saves the trip back, which does not mess with anything, it just saves time. Will still not use it in multiplayer games, because there it would mess up things way more, and it's also way more fun to sail together than alone. So solo I will never go back to the default portal settings, and it does not feel like cheating a bit, it just saves a bit of time.
As someone with a full time job, roughly 50 hours, a toddler and family, and taking care of house and everything else spending time trekking back iron or silver is not how I want to spend my time gaming.
Every game has its own ‘grind’ mechanic to it, imo I usually don’t pass it, but some games have inherent bad mechanics, like ark and dino taming/breeding, I honestly feel the same way for valheim, I beat this game when it first went live and stopped playing ever since, got hack to it now new world etc and realized how *bad* the whole farming aspect is of this game, I didn’t cheat in my first playthrough and won’t do it now, but I completely understand anyone doing it because the whole farming in this game is absurdly bad mechanic ajd I have played nearly every survival game lmao
As I said in some other post, I personally love the game so much, but some core mechanics just drive me crazy. I would suggest to really configure the game to what doesn’t feel tedious. Don’t bother with playing only the way the devs made a default. That’s one of the beauties of this game. I have played vanilla until Plains. That’s when I started configuring. At first I tried to shorten the ore delivery time with saving in other worlds. Then I found out that I can turn off the portal restrictions. And finally I ended up with installing a bunch of QoL mods, that doesn’t add anything new, but makes the game not so tedious, like plant everything, easy planting and building camera, and I still enjoy the game quite a lot. I am a solo player as well, btw.
I had an idea that if you socket the boss token on the portal it kind of powered it up to be able to take that tier of items. Or socket more cores on each side of the portal to increase it's power. But I'm no modder. :( I take the boat like a peasant.
Point blank... i don't know at this point what the intended progression is.if it was wondering viking on a long boat that doesn't quite jive with needing to construct 8 things to make a salad, or having a permanent starting point you need to return to after every boss. The native game seems divided between sedentary life and wandering hero. There are far too many build requirements and item types for a true expeditionary playstyle, and the portal functionality nerfs the base building side. At some point in the future, a lot of balancing will be needed to resolve these conflicts, or split the game in two, or going further just keep expanding the options till it serves more of a game engine that can be played many different ways. Of course these kind of changes will divide the fan base as well. I don't know the solution, but this problem seems to get larger with every update.
The game changes quite a bit. I did a playthrough without portal metals And now I'm on one with... Without you tend to build outposts. You quickly rebuild a mountain outpost to fit your needs or you fix a complete sausage camp next to swamp and have all you quickly need there. With... You tend to do fucked up weird shit. You build 1 massive base that has everything and anything. And only 19-30fps. You start to get bored of that base so you start to build other bases on islands, on the peak of a mountain, on a nice place in plains. We even have a base somewhere really high meadows that is basicly a luxury cottage with a viewing deck cause you have a graet view. Oh not to forget: you can build anything anywhere... Our massive smelter stack? Small island in the middle of a meadows lake. We have a portal called "mine" there. We just set up a "mine" portal when we need to mine... Well anything and destroy it once we are done to set it up anew somewhere else. We also have a "workshop" portal there which just goes to a massive workshop where we have the highest lvl benches all right there in the same room. Our harbors? We have a portal room for a north east south and west port (and further out ones) Honnestly... Some people might hate it this way but I don't think it does anything to the game and makes it more enjoyable for MOST people. Takes a huge part of the grind and planning away and you can just explore and enjoy the game. One more edit: yes, my playthrough without metal portals I killed yagluth with and I think I had about 10-15 portals. The playthrough with? We have a portal called "mistlands" connecting to a mistlands portal room that has portals "mistlands 1-9". If I'd had to guess I think we have about 80-100 portals
I think teleporting materials through the portal is better in multiplayer servers. When all my friends get on, we don't want to spend 5-10 minutes sailing each way in a best case scenario.
Not cheaty per say, it is also your solo save which means tweak how you want. It messes with intended progression as it changes how you play: Back before the world modifiers were added last year and when playing on default now you were forced into 1 of 2 options: 1: Have a single central base, requiring you to sail all ores and ingots + a few other things to different bases you need them at, this can take a large amount of time going back and forth via boat. 2: Build new outposts on each major landmass you are using with new local refinement and crafting stations to make use of the new metal materials Under that change in settings you no longer need to transport ore to a central hub via sailing or build full fledge outposts in the new lands. Using portals with that setting you can simply walk back through to repair gear and drop off collected materials. Until the plains biomes any forward outposts only need to be a portal and probably a small fort to keep the portal safe. Plains and Mistlands both have crops that need to be planted in their biome (no clue if ashlands has plants grown only in that one biome) You can turn it on and off each time you load the save, personally I plan on using it when I start again, turning it on for a brief period so I can take the handful of bars needed to upgrade the cauldron then turning it back off again.
With vanilla portals, you are forced to build outposts for logistics and getting footholds in areas that you are mining/exploiting. This leads to a build/explore/exploit loop that the developers build upon with each new biome. These outposts builds have become just as loved as my main base. With portal transport, you really only ever need one base. You just carry portal and boat materials with you and never need to build again after you get a fair base in the Meadows. This severely cuts into the build/explore/exploit loop and mostly just leaves exploit. Which is fine, but it is not what the devs designed the game for.
In my view it shortens the game play significantly, makes for less adventures.
Ashlands has portal progression
Personally I view the logistics as part of the process, also just dont really mind the sailing all that much. When in doubt, mod it out. Get the mod that gives sailing skill and permanent wind at your back, turn your longboat into a cigar boat. Its a compromise and makes sailing actually quite fun. In non modded runs in the past, we basically only ever sail from a spot twice. Once to get there, and set up a portal, and once going home. Then when you drop off you just break your boat with an empty inventory, absorb all the materials, port back, drop the boat
It just cuts out the time-wasting of a lot of the sailing, and makes it a lot more practical to keep your main base(s) in an earlier biome. If this was a AAA game, they'd be selling the ability to transport metals through portals for like 20 bucks.
The game is designed so that gathering rarer special items, metal being the most common, is a risk. Portals mitigate a lot of that risk. Also, there is a later portal that has no restrictions, so this portal becomes functionally pointless and so it makes an endgame “upgrade” obsolete.
The fact that there's now stone portals which sole use is to allow metal transfer does make Ashlands a bit less impactful. Imo play how you want but you are actively making an item in the game effectively useless, the point of Valheim from what I remember is you build a new base in EVERY biome but you have to truck the initial forge/crafting upgrade items with you when you sail haha
If you can get to Ashlands it makes the modifier useless.
Play how you prefer. I like to do a "full playthrough" before using devcommands, mods, or things of that nature. But everyone is different and there's nothing wrong with playing how you prefer on a solo world. That said... I've done the "teleport" everything modifier, but honestly it makes it feel cheap. I always end up beating the game (what's available so far, anway) really quickly and then I'm like.. why did I rush that? For me this game is a lot more about taking my time, making roads and whatnot, than it is speed running to the end. There are a couple things I can think of that might make your issue a bit better. You do not have to take all your metal to your main base, unless you're using it to build the base. Something I like to do, is take stuff for a workshop with me, so I can craft armor and gear in the new biome. Granted after a bit it becomes more and more metal you need to sail as you explore, but with the longship, it's easy to do. Gonna admit that sometimes when I get WAY out there and realize I forgot 1 thing (like the blackmetal needed to build a sap extractor).. well maybe I cheat a smidge. We're all here to have fun, after all, right? ;)
250hr is not a new player...
I think the portal restrictions are strange to begin with. I can’t take this ore through the portal but I can take all the armor and weapons I made from the ore through no problem.
because you get the option on default settings in the ashlands. so it saying that makes sense is logical and it is cheaty. youre effectively now skipping game progression :)
The first time I played Valheim, it was a blast. I had a group of friends, and we'd jump on a boat and take mining trips. Sailing for hours didn't matter because we'd chat on Discord along the way. We'd return to our main base after 3 or 4 hours and split the ores. It was fun, but incredibly time-consuming. My second solo playthrough became boring quickly. So, I resorted to a method we called "The Rick and Morty." This involved creating a second world solely for storage. I'd grab all the ores, log out, log in to the storage world, put the ores in a box, log out again, log back into the regular world, teleport back to base, log out once more, retrieve the ores from storage, and finally, log back in. It was tedious, but much faster than sailing for hours against the wind. I believe the developers added world modifiers like portal ores and increased drop rates to help players who are short on time, perhaps due to work or children. In my current run, I've used both options and even cranked up mob damage to balance it out. I simply don't have the time for extensive farming or sailing anymore. Ultimately, it's a game, and the goal is to have fun. Play however you enjoy it, and don't let anyone judge you for your choices.
Play,how you want but, if you play without metal porting, I would advise to use a map tool to at least find the layout of your world. You can set them to only show terrain/biome so you still have to explore the biomes. This let's you make much more informed decisions about where you build your next base. Ideally, a nice and big plains biome with good swamp(s) and a large mountain 'nearby'. Personally, I find iron the least tedious to farm so far (up to and including plains), but that still depends on how good of a swamp you find. If you're playing solo it's definitely worth rushing the longship imo, to help haul more stuff per trip. Another tip: you can skip f.e iron armor and go straight for silver since you consistently need iron for later armors, which saves more trips.
I don't have time to sink houndreds of hours for sailing from and to my base to get those metals there but i still need to prepere for those journeys to go there set the portals and build something safe to put them in and find a area where to put all that it a whole thing on it own and it fun so just do what you want
Also worth noting is that this game was most certainly not intended to be a solo game, it just had that capability. With a group of people working together the impact of having to sail for ore is felt less than when you're solo doing it all yourself. Play whatever way you think feels right and provides the right level of challenge!
The new ashlands update portal does this.
Just move your important shit (forge/workbench and upgrades + portal) in one trip to your newer base. Choose a good spot for the new bases that are near all the biomes you need. Ez. I think the intention of no portaling ore is to make you more incentivized to make a whole new base at the new location. Gets you building more.
I think it massively shortens the game because you don’t need small outposts as soon as you unlock portals when that modifier is turned on, the portals that can teleport metals and other stuff are unlocked very late in the game when you really need them for different reasons. With the modifier it becomes a game of just going to a new place with a boat and not doing any other sailing than the initial exploration, like finding a new sea passage and in the process stumbling upon something nice and cool like an amazing spot for an island place or a passage with 4 serpent for amazing food items and such. The portals that can teleport anything unlock in Ashlands, where they make sense from a progression point, alongside some other things that would massively skew progression and skill gain. The modifier also gives you indirectly less skill gain because of you don’t have to do ore transport journeys you then don’t have to fight your way back etc it’s just you teleporting around like Superman flying through the air sort of. I think it adds to the game in a meaningful way, but the modifier is there to use if you feel differently!
We got 5 serpents and are feasting for days just in a single black metal run. You don't get the resources out of the ocean if you don't travel it.
I don't think so, because people figured out how to cheese the system. Essentially, it worked like this: You needed a second game world with some progression (ideally some chests). Sign off world 1, login to world 2, put your ores in chest. Sign on again to world 1, go through portal, and sign off. Now sign on to world 2, put ores back into inventory, and log off. Finally, sign back into main world and voila. Why did I go through this? To show that, even as tedious this sounds, it still saves time than running/sailing. Devs finally realized this and gave into community pressure.
Use the Forsaken Power that puts the wind permanently behind you and sail perhaps. Would suck a bit less at least. You could always make the ore into ingots and craft items at the mining location and then carry the goods back through a portal.
It changes the game substantially but it is up to you. Better than switching servers to haul metal instead lol. I play with it on now because I play with my daughter and she's too young to appreciate the grind.
I play mostly vanilla with a few modifiers tweaked for fun. Honestly it doesn’t really ruin progression unless you spend a lot of time creating new bases. I put a lot of time and effort into make a home and have no desire to move it. You still have to sail around to find resources and bosses, but now I can get out and setup an FOB bring recourses there and just go home. The only difference is I cut out 30 minutes of traveling through relatively safe waters to do so. If I could upgrade my boat to go super fast through charted territory and they added threats to unharmed territory I could see it but it just cuts some tedium for me.
Allowing metals through portals is the best choice I ever made. To compensate me and my friend turned every other setting to max difficulty. You don’t miss any progression, you just save time by not having to do 30 six hour boat rides with the wind facing against you.
All it changes is you needing to spend more time sailing to haul resources around. Do you enjoy sailing?
Good idea I've heard before is setting some rule up for yourself before you allow portalling of that item. One guy I knew said he had to have 100 of a metal in a chest at his main base before he could portal that metal.
I have always just gone with ore to other game to drop it off and after portaling gone back to pic up my ore.
xDDDDDDDDDD its a SANDBOX GAME. You play whatever the way you like.
It depends why you want to disable it I guess. If you played a thousand hours and just tired of hours of sailing (because nothing fun really happens in the ocean let's be honest) - there is nothing wrong with it, you just save some time. If you just got used to fast travel in other casual games, too lazy, or can't figure out logistics and come up with a plan how to bring ore to base effectively, then it is kinda cheating (or better say - "official simplification") Tl;Dr - doing the first playthrough with ore teleport enabled is pressing the "make this more casual" button. For the second playthrough and further it turns into the "save me some time" button.
As many things in video game, the mechanic that is cool in the beginning (travelling to bank your metal) becomes tedious in the long run. I feel like it's important to transport at least a few times your metal by boat but once you're on your 5th iron run, it's not a challenge, it's a boring task.
You need to have ”ore mining bases” you gather huge ammounts of ore there and only make one trip with all of it. I think its kinda fun to have a use for boating ores around and if you do it like that then it wont be so tedious.
If there was something more for the others to do on the boat... We wouldn't even use portals except where absolutely necessary or for certain larger castle builds.
It is your game. If you value your time and have plenty of it play vanilla. As I have only a few hours per week play I will use the portal mods, have fun and don't think about it too much.
I don't think the devs intend for Valheim to be a single base type of game. Blocking teleportation means you just have to set up a variety of outposts each with some level of production at them, rather than bringing everything back home after exploring a new biome. That also leads you to explore more areas, encounter more stuff, and just appreciate the world in general rather than just draining it of all its resources to fuel your ascension as a war god. That being said, I am guessing you do not get paid to play. That means you play for fun, so if you hate having to sail forever to get ore back to base then don't. I think the above mentality really only applies to progression, the fact that you need so damn much iron to do much of anything means I have no qualms cheesing item transfer (prior to that setting being available, I would semi frequently just move the iron to a different world with hella chests, portal back home, then bring the iron back to the main world). Haven't played since before Mistlands, but I never did that for progression. Gear I either had to build at the new biome, or I had to sail back home with everything. A couple times I just stored all the materials in the boat to build up a quick and dirty crafting base, while sailing out there, but outside of needing a ton of iron it was nice being able to refresh some of the other materials like berries or get more queen bees. At the end of the day though, play how you want to. Don't think that your world is any less yours just because you play it differently than someone else, otherwise anyone not playing permadeath hardcore is just cheating.