For most of the starting portion of Valheim, you’ll spend most of your time hunting animals, cutting down trees, and trying to survive in a sheltered hut. Eventually, after you take out the first Forsaken boss, Eikthyr, you’ll learn how to create a pickaxe, and you can use that tool to harvest tin and copper. Those are essential resources that you need to smelt down to upgrade your equipment. But, if you put them together, you can create bronze, and that opens up a whole new tier of weapons, armor, and tools for you.
How to create a smelter and find Surtling Cores
Before you can think about making bronze, you need to craft a smelter. You’ll only be able to do this by looting a Surtling Core. You can commonly find them in dungeons in the Black Forest. Skeletons guard these dungeons, so if you see any of the skeletons wandering around the forest, you’ll likely close to a dungeon. You need at least five Surtling Cores to make a smelter, a charcoal kiln, and a forge. When you have all of these crafted, you need to hike out to find copper and tin.
Copper is a large, silver and green deposit commonly found in the Black Forest and on the border between the Meadows and Black Forest biomes. You can hack away at it to harvest the ore, and then bring it back to game.
You can find tin close to the same regions, but you want to find locations next to the water. Tin is typically a distinctly silver node pressed into the ground, next to water. These deposits are significantly smaller than copper ones.
How to smelt bronze
Now that you have your copper and tin ore take that back to camp and place those inside the smelter. Each of those pieces of ore requires five charcoal pieces to meltdown to become ingots. You put your ore on one side and your charcoal into the other. It takes a couple of minutes for those ingots to breakdown, so feel free to wander away and complete other tasks you might have.
Once you have at least two copper ingots and one tin ingot, walk up to your forge, and you’ll be able to craft a piece of bronze. You’ll have to repeat this process several times to create multiple chunks of bronze, but when you earn enough, you’ll find that you can create upgrade tools, better weapons, and sturdy armor. Introducing bronze to your Valheim game allows you to enter tougher houses, such as the swamp. But you’ll want to visit this location after defeating the Elder.
