This guide will help you understand how portals in Valheim work and how to craft them and how to use portals in Valheim to fast travel around the map.
How to Use Portals in Valheim
Traveling in massive open-world survival games can be a huge drag. In Valheim, however, you can create portals for yourself that allow you to travel across the map quite easily and quickly.
Portals can be crafted almost anywhere on the map in Valheim and connected together, allowing you to travel between two portals.
Crafting Portals
To start, first you need to craft yourself portals. You need a minimum of 2 portals at different locations so that you can travel in between them. For one portal, you need the following items:
- Greydwarf eye x10
- Fine Wood x20
- Surtling Core x2
In addition to these, you also need a workbench.
Surtling Cores are obtained through Burial Chambers or Skeletal Crypts in the Black Forest biome. You can usually find the cores within the tombs. Graydwarf eyes are easy to find, as any Graydwarf will drop them.
Finally, you’ll need Fine Wood, which you can get from the Meadows. Look for the Birch Trees, which have a white-color bark. You will need a Bronze Axe to be able to farm these trees.
Setting up Portals
Once you have Fine Wood in your inventory, the recipe to craft a portal will be available and you can create your first portal.
Once you have made and set your first portal, tag this portal using a simple word or code, for example Portal 1. Make sure you remember the tag and keep in mind that these words are case sensitive.
Now go on in the map and create a second portal. Tag it with the same word and both the portals with the same words will become connected. You can link only two portals together.
Exceptions
Even though you can set up portals almost anywhere, no matter how far away, portals do still have limitations.
You cannot build portals in areas where enemies spawn a lot, such as you cannot build a portal in troll caves or any of the burial grounds. Areas warded by ancient runes also appear to be off-limits for portals, so you cannot place any portal in such areas.
Another limitation to your portals is that they will not work if you have certain items in your inventory.
Mostly, this is due to raw materials; Refined and crafted materials like your tools, weapons and armor will not cause any issue.
Following items, if in your inventory, will not allow you to use the portal:
- Tin ore
- Tin
- Copper ore
- Copper
- Bronze
- Iron
- Iron Ore
- Black Metal Scrap
- Silver ore
- Silver
Tips
Since only two portals can be linked, you can be creative to make your own portal transport system.
The best idea is to first create portals near the areas where you can farm the materials needed for the said portals, as this will allow you to quickly get the items you need to make new portals.
Create a central hub where all your portals from different areas come, this allows you to quickly jump from one area to another. You can also make smaller hubs for portals in a certain biome, that are then connected to your fort.
Don’t waste your resources making portals near mines, as most ores and their smelted counterparts cannot be carried.
If you really want to transport metals through the portals and don’t want to run all the way back, you can use this exploit:
With the ore on your person, log out of your current world and create a new single-player game. Load into the world and make a simple workbench and chest. Place the metals in the chest from your inventory, which should still be available from your previous game.
Next, log out of your single-player game and back into the world with your portals. Teleport through the portal, and then log back out and back to the single-player game you made in the previous step.
When you’re in, grab your metal out of your chest and log back over to your regular server. The metal will also spawn in your inventory.
This does save time in case your fort is too far from the mines.
