For those looking to make chests filled with frost resistance mead, healing potions, and blood pudding in Valheim, a core ingredient to those recipes will be bloodbags. These items only drop off leeches, the long, hungry worms roaming around in the waters of a Swamp. You can roam around a Swamp, finding many of them wiggling around underneath the waters, but there are plenty of other dangerous creatures seeking you out in these biomes. There are few quicker and safer ways to hunt these creatures.
The most straightforward method to hunt down leeches is to find them in any of the Swamp biomes. These creatures will be wandering around in the waters, seldom to rise from the surface unless a player is nearby they can bite, and you want to avoid that bite as much as possible. The attack doesn’t do a lot of damage, but it does poison damage, and it can slow you down while you’re in the water. If you ever see a leech, it’s better to use your bow to take them out from afar and then dive into the water to grab the bloodbag they dropped.
A quicker way to hunt these meddlesome creatures is to create a small home, or an outpost, in or around a Swamp biome. We were able to make ours right alongside a tiny Swamp biome that was filled with water.
From there, we created a stone platform stretching out from our home, overlooking the water, and stood on the edge. The leeches were drawn to our presence, but because we were so high up, they could not bite us at all, allowing us to easily fire at them as they approached the platform and then scoop out the items we wanted.
Alternatively, you can use the harpoon to grab one of them and pull them out of the water. You won’t need a few friends to help you do this, and it is something you can do all by yourself without wasting any arrows.
The platform method worked well for us due to our location. We took advantage of the large, aggressive radius the leeches had, making it easy to pull them away from their Swamp-infested waters, away from the Draugr, skeletons, and wraiths. If you merely want to run around a Swamp with a few friends to pick out leeches, go ahead, but make sure to pack a few poison resistance mead drinks with you to prepare for any unfortunate encounters.
