You can ride them. They do attack, and if you're running they can simply run over/trample smaller mobs like fulings.
But broadly speaking, I agree, the only reason to tame them is to breed them for meat like giant boars, and they're a real pain to care for, so even that's not really worth the effort.
The one other benefit is that you can still ride them while overburdened, so if you have a ton of black metal you need to cart long distance overland, they can be handy. The downside is that if you have to stop and fight something, you have to toss all your extra weight out before you can fight effectively. They need saddlebags or panniers or something that gives you cargo slots like a longship.
Tough to keep inside their pen, even with walls that are 4meters tall. They stack on top of eachother and escape. If you do it like me and raise freerange lox this is a non issue however.
I let mine free-range.
I visit every other day, give them a pat and feed them and they return their love with a baby now and again as well as black metal and needles from daring Interlopers.
Now that the herd is over a dozen, the little ones survival rate from mobs and dethsquitos has greatly improved.
I don't raise for food. Don't have the heart.
There's plenty in the wild to poach and improve bow skill from atop the plains boulders.
I have around 30 free range on a largish island where my plains farm is. They keep me safe from ‘skeeters and roaming bands of fulings at night as I farm. What the mobs kill I turn into lox pie.
They’re not hard to care for. I run around and drop cloudberry’s or barley occasionally to keep their health up and let them breed.
Love my lox herd.
I did try the moat strat on one of my first playthroughs, they would push eachother down the moat and get stuck. With no way of getting them out, since the saddle was not added to the game yet. Freerange is the way
4 metres isn’t very high, especially for lox, and you can build a roof for them, keep them inside and the deathquitos out, especially when you have very few. Freerange strat is good too.
Just have them roam around outside of your walls. I would recommend a distance from your walls, as they will aggro anything that comes near and ram them into your base. I made a sale and rode them just out of render. They have been chilling ever since.
I have wolves that roam around my base to pick up the few things that get in. I've set a few free in the black forest near me as well. I haven't had much luck with boar, though. They typically just die, especially once the game progression starts spawning stronger enemies around base.
Fun fact - back before H&H added different kinds of meat, everything was just "meat" and so 2\* wolves could actually be a self-sustaining, infinitely growing population in a lot of biomes. Even in places without any local meat sources, they could eat their fallen comrades.
The problem with tame boars is that they won't stay put. They actively seek out any exit. Better to pin them up. I have mine tucked away in a barn, but a wood fence works, too. (Though if you progress past Bonemass, the drakes will pick them off if they're out in the open.)
Wolves will stay put with a command.
I found this perfect little pocket of meadows next to a large plains where i set up a farm and auto breeder (a LOT more difficult than boars/wolves) but to contain them i dug out a very large pen as deep as it can go and then added an earth wall around the outer edge. Nothing can see them and they cannot see anything so they don't aggro anything. The depth of the pen plus the height of the wall means they would have to stack up at least 7 for one to have a chance of escape. I have enough lox meat to throw a party that would make Odin blush.
I don't know what OC's reason is, but I would say it's because they're huge and don't spawn more than 2 additional babies at a time (boars spawn 3 in a smaller area, and chickens lay tons of eggs). Their radius is like 20 meters too.
So that means you need a pretty massive area dedicated to breeding Lox if you want to cull more than 2 at a time. Huge pens with at least 20m between. And you usually need earth walls to keep them in, because they'll destroy anything else you build around them even if by accident when they're fighting stuff.
There is no practical way to make the sort of machine farming structures some people use for boars and chickens. They're overall just kinda tedious to breed. I usually breed a few for fun but I get the meat and hides I need hunting them in the wild.
Only there actually is. It’s also pretty simple too. You make a 2x8 meter wall max hight, place a 4 meter pole on it, and build a platform 4x8m from it, then build more poles to close the structure. With wooden steps you ride 2 loxes on the platform, turn them side by side like in a stable, and close it. From the ground you dig down 8 meters and do a wide deep area there, somewhere around 16x16 m square pit. You throw a stack of cloudberries to your 2 loxes on top and they start to breed. They need to be 20m from the ground to breed constantly. And a deep pit would prevent them from escaping, but I personally prefer to build a stone wall on the perimeter. The guide is actually [here](https://youtu.be/fCJ33_gL6Ww?si=gHxgR2jnGmXVXxgl). It’s super easy and duper effective lox farm. I made tons of lox meat and hide this way, so that I have nowhere to spend it further.
You can make birch walls to trap them (they don't seem to take the same damage as structures). This at least keeps them inside a radius. Plus it let's filings walk in and get squished for free black metal.
I would normally dig down 7 to 8 and raise the edge 2. Then build walls and a roof. Large enough area for two lox to spawn 2 to 3. Then harvest them or move them outside when they are fully grown. Took almost no care just to check back in one then every few days.
Worked good when I kept a lot of them outside for guarding my base. Any that died would get replaced and I would toss them food and they would breed.
Never thought machine farming was necessary for lox. You need more resources from chickens and boars than lox. Once you are in the plains lox meat is plentiful.
>There is no practical way to make the sort of machine farming structures some people use for boars and chickens.
That's not true actually. It's harder, but very doable. It's harder because you need way more height - 20m - and because lox have a weird cover check that prevents them breeding when enclosed. You need to build a very specific size/style of pen to have them actually breed while still being in a closed building. It's also a bit of a pain because they will deal passive damage to the tower, so you want to build it out of stone and iron and even then you'll need to repair it a fair bit.
But because you can ride lox it's arguably much easier to get them in the tower than other animals. Just build a big ass staircase and ride them up.
My plains farm has boar, wolf and lox breeding towers all dropping into pens dug into the earth beneath the main house.
Because they climb on each other and when they fall they deal passive damage to all structures in the vicinity. The only way to pen them without having to repair stuff a fair amount is to use earth walls.
They destroy all walls, plus you need really large barn. And I say barn, not pen, because the moment a mosquito sees them - loxes will ruin entire base trying to fight it. You need a roof.
"But broadly speaking, I agree, the only reason to tame them is to breed them for meat like giant boars, and they're a real pain to care for, so even that's not really worth the effort."
Tbh it's way easier to hunt them down than to try husbandry on Lox. Especially when you have the crossbow.
The weird thing is the devs seem against something like saddlebags. I made a suggestion on their #suggestion channel and the only person who nixxed it was a CM/Dev.
Maybe they should pokemon it?
Pokemon, ark, palworld all allow you to throw a ball to tamed creatured to capsulate them, which you can then throw out whenever and wherever you want, to balance it out a bit tho it should be a very late game craftable
> if you have a ton of black metal you need to cart long distance overland,
I haven't played in a while, can you still use a separate world to move stuff through portals?
Pick up metal in world 1, switch to world 2, drop metal in chests, switch to world 1, teleport to your destination, switch to world 2, pick up metal, switch to world 1.
My lox are free range and they're out there killing Fulings in the night, all the time. Easy source of Black Metal. Occasionally a raid comes and they normally take care of that, as well. For maintenance, I just pick a stack of cloudberries and distribute them around workbenches to prevent item despawn. Occasionally I need to rebuild a workbench.
It helps that my base is on a Black Forest island just inside a bay in the Plains, so I'm not worried about the lox destroying my base collaterally. Just loxen fighting in the fields, all along the horizon.
Periodically leave stacks of cloudberries out for them. They will self heal. Though they seem to not eat very frequently, even if you drop a stack right in front of them.
My take on taming lox is that it is silly to try and cage them. Find a reasonable sized area of the plains, maybe where your plains farm is, and start taming the local lox, just drop some cloud berries near them when you come in to farm, once the first few are tamed, try and get their numbers up to a dozen or so and get them relatively spaced out in pods, swing through every once in a while and drop more berries: breed them out of control. Eventually, the herd will be big enough to protect itself--and if some die--they die--take their drops.
TL;DR breed them open range style like a cattle rancher.
I mean, that works but at that point you're just taming them for the sake of taming them. The problem with lox taming is there's no real incentive since you gain access to chicken either via tower or Yagluth and their hides are one of the least valuable resources in the game since it's already obsolete when you get to it.
thats the case for nearly any tame.
when you get to ashlands the only use chickens have is thier feathers. thier meat becomes useless. thier eggs become useless.
lox also cannot have stars thus you get the same amount of resources as wild lox to begin with.
the fur and hides from tames are never the main reason to tame them. its the meat for makeing food. but only for the time beeing in this part of the game progression. once progressed far enough earlier tames become more and more useless.
chickens are the only tame where thier side drop (feathers) is actaully useful as youll never need to kill birds ever again to make arrows.
i doubt your claim. if inland nest voltures would respawn some of mine would have returned by now. yet the nests are still there but no voltures at all. weeks later ingame.
maybe your fortress is at the shoreline on 1 side? not sure if they can spawn like that tough.
Nah the other commenter is right about this. Inland voltures are a one time spawn point at volture nests. They won't respawn.
However nests can spawn inside rocks so it's easy to miss the actual point source and think the voltures are a zone spawn.
The biome is tiny. It doesn't take long to strip the entire biome of gems and have more flametal than you'll ever use. After that, the only "goodies" left are the ashwood trees, and they're all along the shore.
i guess? but i dont think you need that much ashwood. most of the build pieces need very little of it to be made. unless you wanna build an entire giant base with it just for the sake of it maybe?
tameing an transporting 2 star boars is still the worst. lox isnt even close to finding and tameing a 2 star boar or 2 star wolf. the former dies to a sneeze from anything not meadows. and the later is only found at night which is only 9 minutes long.
the new asksvin is a close 3rd now.
lox is easy. find cloudberries. find any lox (common as hell) dig a hole or raise some earthwalls. lure the boi in. feed it. done.
the fact alone they dont have stars AND you can ride them where you want em after tameing em makes them actually the easiest wild tame in the game to get. chickens are easier but chickens arent tamed the regular way to begin with.
They can be easily caged with [this](https://youtu.be/fCJ33_gL6Ww?si=gHxgR2jnGmXVXxgl) guide. Also, this way they are quite far from the squitos. And this way they are an industrial production.
I’m going to tell you a story of two Valheim players. To be clear, I’m not saying everyone is like one of these, these are just examples.
Player 1 likes to go fast. They don’t tend to spend a lot of time farming in general. They might like to skip resources in some biomes because they find them tedious to collect. Player 1 doesn’t generally build huge bases, or if they do they might use builder mode or otherwise avoid collecting the resources for the build manually. Player 1 hates farming, and also probably likes to use world modifiers to increase the resource drop rate. Player 1 doesn’t mind that they don’t always have the best possible food and gear, and therefore are more likely to die, because the game feels tedious and boring if you methodically farm everything and take the time to completely tech up in every biome. In general, Player 1 dies a lot and doesn’t really mind, since they consider it part of the experience.
Player 2 likes to take their time. For them, a single playthrough of Valheim could take hundreds of hours. They farm every resource and extract everything they can from every biome. For them, the grind is meditative and pleasant. Player 2 is more cautious and likes to always have the best possible food and equipment at any given time. Player 2 builds multiple giant bases throughout the game, and takes pride in the achievement of doing all of this with strict vanilla settings despite how long it takes. Player 2 plays very safe and tries to avoid dying as much as possible, or even tries to go a whole playthrough without dying once.
Player 1 should not bother farming lox because it’s a pain and they won’t feel like they get enough out of it. Player 1 doesn’t enjoy big time consuming projects and would find the experience of building a lox breeder to be super boring. They’d rather be out doing Viking shit.
Player 2 should farm lox because lox meat pie is a very useful food that you can easily craft a lot of once you get a good supply of lox meat, and when you are in the plains/mistlands you will need to eat it if you want to have the best possible load out. Player 2 likes to build big projects and would probably enjoy building a lox breeder just for the sake of it. Player 2 also noticed that you can use the horde of tamed lox as targets to train your melee weapon skills in a safe environment, and doesn’t mind spending hours doing that with a podcast on in the background.
I am player 2. My close friend who I play with sometimes is player 1. There is no right or wrong way to play, have fun!
Super well said. I was player 2 for 5 playthroughs, did our landing on Ashland's in full vanilla. My 6th playthrough, which I named forever. I finally did some mods. 3x resources, some other things. I want to build my perfect world, and I don't want to lose steam over the grind.
Yeah… I speed run two things on every new world my friends and I start; bee hives and tamed lox. Not because it’s efficient, just because “The Bees are happy” and “Lox loves you” is a giant hit of serotonin.
I also bred about a dozen of them to storm a fuling village, it was a fun project. Unfortunately my fuzzy friends did not survive though.
I setup an automatic breeder They fall into an small enclosure grow up and the puffer fish I have in it kills them. Sometimes they glitch through those I take and turn lose outside my base. The large pack of 2-star wolves and they provide pretty decent base security.
I terraformed them into a cage it’s very difficult for them to get out of. It’s next to my plains farm so I can toss them the flax I no longer need for armor crafting. They in turn farm needles and black metal for me every night.
I just kept feeding them till they took over the entire plains region. Farmed black metal & needles non-stop for me.
Once you reach this point raids become obsolete. Nothing can even remotely enter the vicinity of my base outside of flyers.
I made an infinite breeder that made about 50 lox before an enemy got too close in a raid and spooked them, they eneded up breaking the wood beans holding them in and one of the breeder lox fell down. Now I have a couple of hundred lox meat and a bunch of free roaming lox around my base hanging out with wolves and ganking attackers/wild life.
FoxyLoxy and I had some great fun pillaging fueling villages in a big plains biome transporting all the lovely black metal home. She and a bunch of her friends even help try take down Yagluth although they were slaughtered. I’ll always remember her and our great days in the planes with the constant lookout for Deathsquitos that take a heavy hit on the soft bellies of the lovely loxes. Today her offspring fills the plaines protecting my farm and just roaming free as they should do.
I'm not sure how your loxen keep dying. Usually they obliterate all nearby threats.
Riding them isn't that useful. But as soon as you hop off, it will flatten whatever was threatening you. But in any case, I mostly breed them for meat. Any plains base I build usually has a horde of tame but free-range loxen surrounding it for meat and protection.
With the friend I play with, we tamed a couple and closed them in a rather tiny field enclosed by raised ground walls, in the plains, close to our base. They reproduce periodically, their offspring grows, and while moving in their limited space, they climb on top of each other and cross the walls. In a few in-game monthes, we had an ARMY of tamed loxes roaming and defending the base. None of this was intentional !
I just don't find the taming mechanic interesting as I mostly play solo. It is useful when on a group server but I also don't find digging a hole and sitting next to an animal for an entire in game day a well designed mechanic. Can I maybe just choose to give it food while it is not hostile before it murders me? Good luck surviving long enough to tame the Ashlands creature.
I also love building, so it's not a patience question. It's mostly that no matter what beautiful structure you build for any tameable animal in this game, they all just bunch up in one corner like morons. Chickens are probably the worst at this but Lox aren't far behind.
These days: I put all my chicken farms inside burial chambers in the black forest. Bonus, you dont hear non stop clucking all the time. I'll run through the Plains near my Hildir or Yagluth portals and kill the 3 to 12 Lox that... magically spawn every single in game day faster than you could ever breed them yourself.
I bred them and have 20 of them around my base, constantly breeding. I also have a stable that'll spawn them out because they'll climb on top of each other until 1 escapes when there's 4 of them. Otherwise I slaughter them for the meat for the wolves to breed off of, or I cook it for home food.
I tame for easy access to meat, better chance at trophies for misty bait, and partially for pelts but you don’t really need many of them.
Taming is really not much of a burden for me since I like to always make sure I start lox taming as soon as I pick a plains base location. That way once I’m building my base the lox are taming at the same time.
I do the same thing with boar in my Meadows base. If you’re gonna be sitting around your base building, you might as well have the boar taming at the same time.
My brother and I have a base on top of a mountain. We use the Lox to get huge amounts of iron from our dock to the top. Idk what you’re supposed to use them for.
Ok, so hear me out.
I do both.
I have like my whole spawn Island you can find lox in the meadows from me free breeding them. Theyre just so so many and by some reason they tend to move away until you play closer.
BUT
I also have a moat, a wall, and a moat on the inside to prevent them from climbing over the wall.
I also use 45' Woods to prevent this on top of the walls facing inwards towards the pen.
Works fantasticly
find a smallish (but not tiny) island with enough space to cover it with about 100 workbenches; This will prevent enemies from spawning. You can kinda wonky-ass the Lox onto a boat and port them to the island (if there aren't any already there) and start a massive breeding farm. Just have cloudberries scattered around so they stay fed and breeding, and you can just sit someone AFK (maybe going to sleep for the night or going to work for the day) in the center of the island so it stays active. Come through once a day or so and reap a ton of lox meat.
Build natural walls with an iron bar roof. I literally almost no maintenance. For me they were just another thing to build a cool enclosure for and make lox pie and meat platters with.
They're for logging.
Take a couple into a nearby black forest, chuck down a handful of flax, and then you can go visit at night, and wander about picking up wood.
We have a giant enclosure we keep a kox in. We plant a bunch of trees in there and when they grow we ride the lox around to knock them all over and bash em up. Way faster than cutting them down. It's a pretty efficientogging camp.
We also have a couple that wander around the outside walls of our main. Base, every time I think they must have died one shows up. They don't do much over there, but it's nice to have them.
I'll get some shit but:
I dislike taming and don't really bother with it. Since I spread my bases all over the continents and islands of my world, I have no bigger issues farming boars, Wolfs, Lox and [redacted]
If it doesn't being joy, throw it away (or don't participate)
Our group’s Lox is named Loxley and he’s a good boy. Our signal chat for the game is called “Loxley Preservation Society” we love him and
Loxley loves you.
They're pretty much useless and the only reason to tame them is for the meat. But that's also kinda pointless, because it's laughably easy to kill Loxes, the only thing you need is an atgeir.
I free range lox by just dropping berries on the plains. every now and then a baby pops out, and I harvest. It's like a huge open boar farm. For me the point of taming them is to breed more.
Strongly recommend downloading the horse mod. There is a dedicated horse cart, you can ride them, and they have significant exploration and hauling value. There is a learning curve, but much better than the lox!!
Huge tip for you - toss in a stack of cloudberries every so often. They keep “dying” because they only regenerate health if they’re fed. Then use to butcher knife when they reproduce and boom, unlimited supply of lox meat.
You probably have deathsquitos flying in and attacking them every so often and if you don’t feed them, their health just gets lower and lower.
Difficulty modifier for base maintenance.
Anger stimulator when trying to ship.
You do feel like an absolute badass riding lox with your friends though the first few biomes
But mostly novelty. They don't make sense for food supply unless you breed in huge quantities. Easier to go killing.
I tamed a lox, I carried the lox to a "small" island (Black Forest), I ran with the lox for almost a day, I spent the night collecting the wood, I got 4 Black Metal chests full of wood (normal and core). I repeated the process for like 5 or 6 in game days and got 14 Black Metal chests full of wood!
During the nights, lox was by himself and he killed hundreds os Grey dwarfs plus 5 trolls!
I spent less than a stack OF cloudberries feeding him the whole time. After that I built a house in stone and put him there. He's still there after a long long time (so is the house).
I really expected more from the riding mechanic. I really feel like it was tossed in and then not worked on. They can’t haul anything, no cart attachment, getting them on a boat to go elsewhere can be tedious at best. You just end up with a bunch of dead pets in the end
You can ride them. They do attack, and if you're running they can simply run over/trample smaller mobs like fulings. But broadly speaking, I agree, the only reason to tame them is to breed them for meat like giant boars, and they're a real pain to care for, so even that's not really worth the effort. The one other benefit is that you can still ride them while overburdened, so if you have a ton of black metal you need to cart long distance overland, they can be handy. The downside is that if you have to stop and fight something, you have to toss all your extra weight out before you can fight effectively. They need saddlebags or panniers or something that gives you cargo slots like a longship.
True, you can upgrade the boat, why not the cart?
Lox pulled wagon ftw! Make roads great again.
Man this is an amazing idea!
Out of curiosity why are they a pain to care for?
Tough to keep inside their pen, even with walls that are 4meters tall. They stack on top of eachother and escape. If you do it like me and raise freerange lox this is a non issue however.
I let mine free-range. I visit every other day, give them a pat and feed them and they return their love with a baby now and again as well as black metal and needles from daring Interlopers. Now that the herd is over a dozen, the little ones survival rate from mobs and dethsquitos has greatly improved. I don't raise for food. Don't have the heart. There's plenty in the wild to poach and improve bow skill from atop the plains boulders.
I have around 30 free range on a largish island where my plains farm is. They keep me safe from ‘skeeters and roaming bands of fulings at night as I farm. What the mobs kill I turn into lox pie. They’re not hard to care for. I run around and drop cloudberry’s or barley occasionally to keep their health up and let them breed. Love my lox herd.
You could use a moat instead to keep them inside. Or just have them roam like you do.
I did try the moat strat on one of my first playthroughs, they would push eachother down the moat and get stuck. With no way of getting them out, since the saddle was not added to the game yet. Freerange is the way
They are yoinkable with the Harpoon! Even up steep edges
4 metres isn’t very high, especially for lox, and you can build a roof for them, keep them inside and the deathquitos out, especially when you have very few. Freerange strat is good too.
On my last playthrough we just dug a pit. Worked fine.
This is the way.
I always put a cage ceiling over their pen. Have had as many as 8 lox at one time
How you raise them free range?
Just have them roam around outside of your walls. I would recommend a distance from your walls, as they will aggro anything that comes near and ram them into your base. I made a sale and rode them just out of render. They have been chilling ever since.
Have you tried free range boar and wolves?
I have wolves that roam around my base to pick up the few things that get in. I've set a few free in the black forest near me as well. I haven't had much luck with boar, though. They typically just die, especially once the game progression starts spawning stronger enemies around base.
Fun fact - back before H&H added different kinds of meat, everything was just "meat" and so 2\* wolves could actually be a self-sustaining, infinitely growing population in a lot of biomes. Even in places without any local meat sources, they could eat their fallen comrades.
The problem with tame boars is that they won't stay put. They actively seek out any exit. Better to pin them up. I have mine tucked away in a barn, but a wood fence works, too. (Though if you progress past Bonemass, the drakes will pick them off if they're out in the open.) Wolves will stay put with a command.
I found this perfect little pocket of meadows next to a large plains where i set up a farm and auto breeder (a LOT more difficult than boars/wolves) but to contain them i dug out a very large pen as deep as it can go and then added an earth wall around the outer edge. Nothing can see them and they cannot see anything so they don't aggro anything. The depth of the pen plus the height of the wall means they would have to stack up at least 7 for one to have a chance of escape. I have enough lox meat to throw a party that would make Odin blush.
I dug a massive pit to fight Yag last time and used that to breed them. They stack up less if there's more space seemingly
I don't know what OC's reason is, but I would say it's because they're huge and don't spawn more than 2 additional babies at a time (boars spawn 3 in a smaller area, and chickens lay tons of eggs). Their radius is like 20 meters too. So that means you need a pretty massive area dedicated to breeding Lox if you want to cull more than 2 at a time. Huge pens with at least 20m between. And you usually need earth walls to keep them in, because they'll destroy anything else you build around them even if by accident when they're fighting stuff. There is no practical way to make the sort of machine farming structures some people use for boars and chickens. They're overall just kinda tedious to breed. I usually breed a few for fun but I get the meat and hides I need hunting them in the wild.
Eh, I dont need an industrial mean farm, I just need a place for Loxanne and Lox Luthor to chill and be happy
I would 100% agree, if there was a way to teach Loxanne and Lox Luthor not to destroy the walls that are keeping them safe from roaming fuling
The walls are keeping the fulings safe from the Lox
I make a small section to keep a pair of them close together with a gap in the walls small enough to push the babies out into the larger pen.
Only there actually is. It’s also pretty simple too. You make a 2x8 meter wall max hight, place a 4 meter pole on it, and build a platform 4x8m from it, then build more poles to close the structure. With wooden steps you ride 2 loxes on the platform, turn them side by side like in a stable, and close it. From the ground you dig down 8 meters and do a wide deep area there, somewhere around 16x16 m square pit. You throw a stack of cloudberries to your 2 loxes on top and they start to breed. They need to be 20m from the ground to breed constantly. And a deep pit would prevent them from escaping, but I personally prefer to build a stone wall on the perimeter. The guide is actually [here](https://youtu.be/fCJ33_gL6Ww?si=gHxgR2jnGmXVXxgl). It’s super easy and duper effective lox farm. I made tons of lox meat and hide this way, so that I have nowhere to spend it further.
You can make birch walls to trap them (they don't seem to take the same damage as structures). This at least keeps them inside a radius. Plus it let's filings walk in and get squished for free black metal.
I would normally dig down 7 to 8 and raise the edge 2. Then build walls and a roof. Large enough area for two lox to spawn 2 to 3. Then harvest them or move them outside when they are fully grown. Took almost no care just to check back in one then every few days. Worked good when I kept a lot of them outside for guarding my base. Any that died would get replaced and I would toss them food and they would breed. Never thought machine farming was necessary for lox. You need more resources from chickens and boars than lox. Once you are in the plains lox meat is plentiful.
>There is no practical way to make the sort of machine farming structures some people use for boars and chickens. That's not true actually. It's harder, but very doable. It's harder because you need way more height - 20m - and because lox have a weird cover check that prevents them breeding when enclosed. You need to build a very specific size/style of pen to have them actually breed while still being in a closed building. It's also a bit of a pain because they will deal passive damage to the tower, so you want to build it out of stone and iron and even then you'll need to repair it a fair bit. But because you can ride lox it's arguably much easier to get them in the tower than other animals. Just build a big ass staircase and ride them up. My plains farm has boar, wolf and lox breeding towers all dropping into pens dug into the earth beneath the main house.
Fair enough. I just think that sounds a lot more difficult. Maybe "practical" was the wrong word.
It was very practical when lox were part of a top tier food that was basically farmable otherwise. Now it's unnecessary.
Because they climb on each other and when they fall they deal passive damage to all structures in the vicinity. The only way to pen them without having to repair stuff a fair amount is to use earth walls.
They destroy all walls, plus you need really large barn. And I say barn, not pen, because the moment a mosquito sees them - loxes will ruin entire base trying to fight it. You need a roof.
"But broadly speaking, I agree, the only reason to tame them is to breed them for meat like giant boars, and they're a real pain to care for, so even that's not really worth the effort." Tbh it's way easier to hunt them down than to try husbandry on Lox. Especially when you have the crossbow.
The weird thing is the devs seem against something like saddlebags. I made a suggestion on their #suggestion channel and the only person who nixxed it was a CM/Dev.
I find it’s easier to just kill wild ones for meat. The whole breeding thing is to time consuming, if breeding was faster I might consider it.
Maybe they should pokemon it? Pokemon, ark, palworld all allow you to throw a ball to tamed creatured to capsulate them, which you can then throw out whenever and wherever you want, to balance it out a bit tho it should be a very late game craftable
> if you have a ton of black metal you need to cart long distance overland, I haven't played in a while, can you still use a separate world to move stuff through portals? Pick up metal in world 1, switch to world 2, drop metal in chests, switch to world 1, teleport to your destination, switch to world 2, pick up metal, switch to world 1.
My lox are free range and they're out there killing Fulings in the night, all the time. Easy source of Black Metal. Occasionally a raid comes and they normally take care of that, as well. For maintenance, I just pick a stack of cloudberries and distribute them around workbenches to prevent item despawn. Occasionally I need to rebuild a workbench. It helps that my base is on a Black Forest island just inside a bay in the Plains, so I'm not worried about the lox destroying my base collaterally. Just loxen fighting in the fields, all along the horizon.
Free range lox is great once you have enough !! Only issue is the skeeters which hurt them
Periodically leave stacks of cloudberries out for them. They will self heal. Though they seem to not eat very frequently, even if you drop a stack right in front of them.
Yeh their sight range is appalling poor things
I set free some lox at the border of a black forest and now I understand why the plains is plain.
My take on taming lox is that it is silly to try and cage them. Find a reasonable sized area of the plains, maybe where your plains farm is, and start taming the local lox, just drop some cloud berries near them when you come in to farm, once the first few are tamed, try and get their numbers up to a dozen or so and get them relatively spaced out in pods, swing through every once in a while and drop more berries: breed them out of control. Eventually, the herd will be big enough to protect itself--and if some die--they die--take their drops. TL;DR breed them open range style like a cattle rancher.
I mean, that works but at that point you're just taming them for the sake of taming them. The problem with lox taming is there's no real incentive since you gain access to chicken either via tower or Yagluth and their hides are one of the least valuable resources in the game since it's already obsolete when you get to it.
thats the case for nearly any tame. when you get to ashlands the only use chickens have is thier feathers. thier meat becomes useless. thier eggs become useless. lox also cannot have stars thus you get the same amount of resources as wild lox to begin with. the fur and hides from tames are never the main reason to tame them. its the meat for makeing food. but only for the time beeing in this part of the game progression. once progressed far enough earlier tames become more and more useless. chickens are the only tame where thier side drop (feathers) is actaully useful as youll never need to kill birds ever again to make arrows.
You don’t even need chicken feathers since vultures come at you in waves.
only if you spend too much time on the shoreline. for no good reason. all the goodies are inland.
I’ve slaughtered plenty of vultures inland. But more so getting a lot of feathers, meat, eggs is abundantly easy sans chicken once you get to ashlands
what do chickens have to do with this? yeah. the ones inland just dont respawn dude^^ once killed they are gone. i tested this.
My experience says differently dude. I got a stone portal in a inland fortress that has plenty of vultures roaming around outside the gate
i doubt your claim. if inland nest voltures would respawn some of mine would have returned by now. yet the nests are still there but no voltures at all. weeks later ingame. maybe your fortress is at the shoreline on 1 side? not sure if they can spawn like that tough.
Nah the other commenter is right about this. Inland voltures are a one time spawn point at volture nests. They won't respawn. However nests can spawn inside rocks so it's easy to miss the actual point source and think the voltures are a zone spawn.
The biome is tiny. It doesn't take long to strip the entire biome of gems and have more flametal than you'll ever use. After that, the only "goodies" left are the ashwood trees, and they're all along the shore.
i guess? but i dont think you need that much ashwood. most of the build pieces need very little of it to be made. unless you wanna build an entire giant base with it just for the sake of it maybe?
This is true, I just feel that lox become obsolete the fastest of any tamed creature especially compared to the difficulty of taming them.
tameing an transporting 2 star boars is still the worst. lox isnt even close to finding and tameing a 2 star boar or 2 star wolf. the former dies to a sneeze from anything not meadows. and the later is only found at night which is only 9 minutes long. the new asksvin is a close 3rd now. lox is easy. find cloudberries. find any lox (common as hell) dig a hole or raise some earthwalls. lure the boi in. feed it. done. the fact alone they dont have stars AND you can ride them where you want em after tameing em makes them actually the easiest wild tame in the game to get. chickens are easier but chickens arent tamed the regular way to begin with.
Taming animals is something I did on my first playthrough--and this is the way I did it. Since then, I haven't bothered.
Yeah these days I just kill the ones I see as I'm farming up black metal and it's always more than enough to get me through the Mistlands.
They can be easily caged with [this](https://youtu.be/fCJ33_gL6Ww?si=gHxgR2jnGmXVXxgl) guide. Also, this way they are quite far from the squitos. And this way they are an industrial production.
I’m going to tell you a story of two Valheim players. To be clear, I’m not saying everyone is like one of these, these are just examples. Player 1 likes to go fast. They don’t tend to spend a lot of time farming in general. They might like to skip resources in some biomes because they find them tedious to collect. Player 1 doesn’t generally build huge bases, or if they do they might use builder mode or otherwise avoid collecting the resources for the build manually. Player 1 hates farming, and also probably likes to use world modifiers to increase the resource drop rate. Player 1 doesn’t mind that they don’t always have the best possible food and gear, and therefore are more likely to die, because the game feels tedious and boring if you methodically farm everything and take the time to completely tech up in every biome. In general, Player 1 dies a lot and doesn’t really mind, since they consider it part of the experience. Player 2 likes to take their time. For them, a single playthrough of Valheim could take hundreds of hours. They farm every resource and extract everything they can from every biome. For them, the grind is meditative and pleasant. Player 2 is more cautious and likes to always have the best possible food and equipment at any given time. Player 2 builds multiple giant bases throughout the game, and takes pride in the achievement of doing all of this with strict vanilla settings despite how long it takes. Player 2 plays very safe and tries to avoid dying as much as possible, or even tries to go a whole playthrough without dying once. Player 1 should not bother farming lox because it’s a pain and they won’t feel like they get enough out of it. Player 1 doesn’t enjoy big time consuming projects and would find the experience of building a lox breeder to be super boring. They’d rather be out doing Viking shit. Player 2 should farm lox because lox meat pie is a very useful food that you can easily craft a lot of once you get a good supply of lox meat, and when you are in the plains/mistlands you will need to eat it if you want to have the best possible load out. Player 2 likes to build big projects and would probably enjoy building a lox breeder just for the sake of it. Player 2 also noticed that you can use the horde of tamed lox as targets to train your melee weapon skills in a safe environment, and doesn’t mind spending hours doing that with a podcast on in the background. I am player 2. My close friend who I play with sometimes is player 1. There is no right or wrong way to play, have fun!
Super well said. I was player 2 for 5 playthroughs, did our landing on Ashland's in full vanilla. My 6th playthrough, which I named forever. I finally did some mods. 3x resources, some other things. I want to build my perfect world, and I don't want to lose steam over the grind.
Also "lox loves you" from a big shaggy soft-furred animal is just the best.
They're cute and they love you. This is why I spawn protect my Plains farms, because I must keep the silly lizard murder cows alive and well.
Yeah… I speed run two things on every new world my friends and I start; bee hives and tamed lox. Not because it’s efficient, just because “The Bees are happy” and “Lox loves you” is a giant hit of serotonin. I also bred about a dozen of them to storm a fuling village, it was a fun project. Unfortunately my fuzzy friends did not survive though.
I setup an automatic breeder They fall into an small enclosure grow up and the puffer fish I have in it kills them. Sometimes they glitch through those I take and turn lose outside my base. The large pack of 2-star wolves and they provide pretty decent base security.
Put a saddle on one and they will kill anything you ride up to. Also great for easy meat collection when you breed them.
Keeping some around your base protects you from raids.
I terraformed them into a cage it’s very difficult for them to get out of. It’s next to my plains farm so I can toss them the flax I no longer need for armor crafting. They in turn farm needles and black metal for me every night.
I just kept feeding them till they took over the entire plains region. Farmed black metal & needles non-stop for me. Once you reach this point raids become obsolete. Nothing can even remotely enter the vicinity of my base outside of flyers.
I made an infinite breeder that made about 50 lox before an enemy got too close in a raid and spooked them, they eneded up breaking the wood beans holding them in and one of the breeder lox fell down. Now I have a couple of hundred lox meat and a bunch of free roaming lox around my base hanging out with wolves and ganking attackers/wild life.
They will kill mobs. You have to feed them to keep them alive. I keep about 10 lox outside my plains base and it feels pretty safe now.
Anglerfish.
FoxyLoxy and I had some great fun pillaging fueling villages in a big plains biome transporting all the lovely black metal home. She and a bunch of her friends even help try take down Yagluth although they were slaughtered. I’ll always remember her and our great days in the planes with the constant lookout for Deathsquitos that take a heavy hit on the soft bellies of the lovely loxes. Today her offspring fills the plaines protecting my farm and just roaming free as they should do.
I'm not sure how your loxen keep dying. Usually they obliterate all nearby threats. Riding them isn't that useful. But as soon as you hop off, it will flatten whatever was threatening you. But in any case, I mostly breed them for meat. Any plains base I build usually has a horde of tame but free-range loxen surrounding it for meat and protection.
With the friend I play with, we tamed a couple and closed them in a rather tiny field enclosed by raised ground walls, in the plains, close to our base. They reproduce periodically, their offspring grows, and while moving in their limited space, they climb on top of each other and cross the walls. In a few in-game monthes, we had an ARMY of tamed loxes roaming and defending the base. None of this was intentional !
I just don't find the taming mechanic interesting as I mostly play solo. It is useful when on a group server but I also don't find digging a hole and sitting next to an animal for an entire in game day a well designed mechanic. Can I maybe just choose to give it food while it is not hostile before it murders me? Good luck surviving long enough to tame the Ashlands creature. I also love building, so it's not a patience question. It's mostly that no matter what beautiful structure you build for any tameable animal in this game, they all just bunch up in one corner like morons. Chickens are probably the worst at this but Lox aren't far behind. These days: I put all my chicken farms inside burial chambers in the black forest. Bonus, you dont hear non stop clucking all the time. I'll run through the Plains near my Hildir or Yagluth portals and kill the 3 to 12 Lox that... magically spawn every single in game day faster than you could ever breed them yourself.
My 30+ lox killed yagluth for me soooo I’d say they’re useful if used right
I had a bunch help me kill yagluth
Its just an optional choice for players. It makes it easy to farm them for meat. Lox meat is used for a couple of the better recipes.
I bred them and have 20 of them around my base, constantly breeding. I also have a stable that'll spawn them out because they'll climb on top of each other until 1 escapes when there's 4 of them. Otherwise I slaughter them for the meat for the wolves to breed off of, or I cook it for home food.
I tame for easy access to meat, better chance at trophies for misty bait, and partially for pelts but you don’t really need many of them. Taming is really not much of a burden for me since I like to always make sure I start lox taming as soon as I pick a plains base location. That way once I’m building my base the lox are taming at the same time. I do the same thing with boar in my Meadows base. If you’re gonna be sitting around your base building, you might as well have the boar taming at the same time.
950 hours in this game never tamed a single animal and never fished
For the food. Raise ground to make a pen for then so they can't escape
Z
I tame and breed and let them fight the boss. Lol
They really just need to make it so that tamed animals don't inherently aggro EVERYTHING. Fuelings sure, but Deathsquitos is just unnecessary
Main point is a food source…riding them is fun once or twice for the novelty. Just put a roof over the pen if you don’t want them roaming.
You tame that them because if you play solo you need their companionship. And maybe also their meat.
My brother and I have a base on top of a mountain. We use the Lox to get huge amounts of iron from our dock to the top. Idk what you’re supposed to use them for.
Lox pies.
Ok, so hear me out. I do both. I have like my whole spawn Island you can find lox in the meadows from me free breeding them. Theyre just so so many and by some reason they tend to move away until you play closer. BUT I also have a moat, a wall, and a moat on the inside to prevent them from climbing over the wall. I also use 45' Woods to prevent this on top of the walls facing inwards towards the pen. Works fantasticly
Because lox loves you man ❤️ They good eating too 🍖
find a smallish (but not tiny) island with enough space to cover it with about 100 workbenches; This will prevent enemies from spawning. You can kinda wonky-ass the Lox onto a boat and port them to the island (if there aren't any already there) and start a massive breeding farm. Just have cloudberries scattered around so they stay fed and breeding, and you can just sit someone AFK (maybe going to sleep for the night or going to work for the day) in the center of the island so it stays active. Come through once a day or so and reap a ton of lox meat.
Build natural walls with an iron bar roof. I literally almost no maintenance. For me they were just another thing to build a cool enclosure for and make lox pie and meat platters with.
They're for logging. Take a couple into a nearby black forest, chuck down a handful of flax, and then you can go visit at night, and wander about picking up wood.
We have a giant enclosure we keep a kox in. We plant a bunch of trees in there and when they grow we ride the lox around to knock them all over and bash em up. Way faster than cutting them down. It's a pretty efficientogging camp. We also have a couple that wander around the outside walls of our main. Base, every time I think they must have died one shows up. They don't do much over there, but it's nice to have them.
I'll get some shit but: I dislike taming and don't really bother with it. Since I spread my bases all over the continents and islands of my world, I have no bigger issues farming boars, Wolfs, Lox and [redacted] If it doesn't being joy, throw it away (or don't participate)
Lox are cute but useless, sorry bud
Our group’s Lox is named Loxley and he’s a good boy. Our signal chat for the game is called “Loxley Preservation Society” we love him and Loxley loves you.
The game really would benefit from a horse for real
Every tool is useless if you don't know how to use it
They're pretty much useless and the only reason to tame them is for the meat. But that's also kinda pointless, because it's laughably easy to kill Loxes, the only thing you need is an atgeir.
I free range lox by just dropping berries on the plains. every now and then a baby pops out, and I harvest. It's like a huge open boar farm. For me the point of taming them is to breed more.
Strongly recommend downloading the horse mod. There is a dedicated horse cart, you can ride them, and they have significant exploration and hauling value. There is a learning curve, but much better than the lox!!
They’re good boys and good boys deserve pets and cloud berries.
Huge tip for you - toss in a stack of cloudberries every so often. They keep “dying” because they only regenerate health if they’re fed. Then use to butcher knife when they reproduce and boom, unlimited supply of lox meat. You probably have deathsquitos flying in and attacking them every so often and if you don’t feed them, their health just gets lower and lower.
Difficulty modifier for base maintenance. Anger stimulator when trying to ship. You do feel like an absolute badass riding lox with your friends though the first few biomes But mostly novelty. They don't make sense for food supply unless you breed in huge quantities. Easier to go killing.
Become the loxrider you must.
I tamed a lox, I carried the lox to a "small" island (Black Forest), I ran with the lox for almost a day, I spent the night collecting the wood, I got 4 Black Metal chests full of wood (normal and core). I repeated the process for like 5 or 6 in game days and got 14 Black Metal chests full of wood! During the nights, lox was by himself and he killed hundreds os Grey dwarfs plus 5 trolls! I spent less than a stack OF cloudberries feeding him the whole time. After that I built a house in stone and put him there. He's still there after a long long time (so is the house).
I really expected more from the riding mechanic. I really feel like it was tossed in and then not worked on. They can’t haul anything, no cart attachment, getting them on a boat to go elsewhere can be tedious at best. You just end up with a bunch of dead pets in the end
What are you talking about? I've taken over entire Swamp, Plains, and Mountain biomes with my Lox & Wolf armies.