The swamp biome was already Valheim’s deadliest, in my opinion. A new “stirring in the mist” just made it a little bit deadlier — but also brought some new rewards.
The Valheim devs were coy about just what was new in the swamps after the latest update, but I’m here to spoil it for you.
Start right with the feature image up top: That’s the new mob, the “Abomination”, a creature made of wood and spite — probably related in some way to the gray dwarfs, who are also mostly wood.
I roamed around the swamp near where we fight Bonemass for about half an hour, fighting wraiths, gray dwarfs, draugr, oozes, leeches, some fulings, skeletons, looking for the new monster that I was promised. When I saw a pile of tree trunks suddenly lift itself up, I knew I’d found what I was looking for.
The Abomination fights similarly to the Stone Golem in the mountain biome — easily blocked arm swing and a more difficult to block ground slam. Every time I fought it, it summoned everything in the area to help, so there’d be draugr and dwarfs and oozes and leeches and whatever else was somewhere around.
It drops roots, wood, and the Abomination trophy, which itself looks like a pile of tree cuttings mounted on your wall.
The armor looks pretty cool. The stats are appropriate for a Viking who is new to the swamps, but a Viking who has faced Yagluth and is in the Plains biome armor will not want to use the root armor for anything but show.
The root armor is in three pieces — mask, breastplate and leggings. Each of them takes 10 roots and some ancient bark to make, and more of the same to upgrade, so you will need to fight a fair number of Abominations in order to make a fully upgraded set.
The nicest thing about the armor is its special buffs. The standard armor for this tier, iron armor, has more defense — by six per piece — but also more of an impact on run speed — -5% vs -2% for the root armor. Additionally, root armor gives resistance to poison and piercing, but a corresponding weakness to fire. It is made of roots, after all. Lastly, it gives a 15% buff to the Bow skill when wearing all three pieces in the set.
Basically, if you’re going to take on the boss of the swamp, Bonemass, and you’re going to use arrows to do it, you’ll want to be wearing this set.
I imagine most everyone who has killed all the bosses will continue to wait for the Mistlands expansion before returning to the game, but for someone starting out new — more fun waits for them in the swamp.
Love the new armor . . . I AM ROOT!
Forgot I was wearing it and wore it to another world I saw on Reddit, got attacked on the plains, did fine.