It takes you a bit of time to reach the point where you can begin smelting in Valheim. You need to acquire a handful of resources, and you also need to take down the first boss, Eikthyr. When Eikthyr falls, they drop hardened antlers that allow you to craft an antler pickaxe. The antler pickaxe is the basic tool you’ll need to gather up crucial resources to smelt down, tin and copper. Even with those, you won’t be able to create a smelter until you find Surtling Cores. Once you acquire one, you’ll learn how to craft a smelter, and then your smelting journey can begin.
Where to find Surtling Cores
There are two ways for you to find Surtling Cores. The easier method is to find them in dungeons littered throughout the Black Forest and Meadow regions. Skeletons protect these areas, and if you ever see them, you’ll know that you’re near one of these lairs. You’ll have to traverse them and find the Surtling Cores inside. The other way is to kill the creatures called Surtlings, but these are a bit tougher, and you won’t encounter them in the starting locations, so the dungeons are the most effective methods at first.
How to craft a smelter
When you learn the crafting recipe to create a smelter, you can place that object down anywhere you like when you have the proper ingredients. These are all of the ingredients you need to create one. You will need to build it using your hammer.
- 20 Stone
- 5 Surtling Cores
We highly recommend you create it outside of your home as it is a large, stone-like object. You don’t want to put it too far away.
Once you have that, you can start smelting. However, we highly recommend creating a charcoal kiln, the other building recipe you learn when you pick up a Surtling core. It’s an item that allows you to create coal from wood regularly, and it’s far more reliable than waiting for meat pieces to burn above a fire. Here are all of the ingredients you need to create one, and you need to use your hammer to make it.
- 20 Stone
- 5 Surtling Cores
Because these two buildings are critical to each other, we recommend keeping them close to one another. You need coal to fuel your smelter, so you won’t be able to create metal bars to use at a forge crafting station without it.
When you have your smelter and charcoal kiln in place, all that’s left now is to place your unrefined ore on one side and your charcoal on the other. It costs five charcoal to developer a tin or copper bar, so you’ll need to chop down even more trees to fuel your smelter. Once you have enough copper and tin bars, take those over to your forge to blend them into bronze bars. The forge also needs Surtling Cores, so make sure you have a few of those laying around. You can use your bronze ingots to create even better tools, weapons, and armor.
