The current speedrunning record for clearing Valheim and killing all the bosses is (as of the time of this blog) 11h 36m 30s. All bosses, random world, no glitches. I don’t know why it took me weeks to get ready for Bonemass, the third boss.
Well, I do. I’ve been playing other games alongside it; I haven’t been laser focused on progression. But I figured I could catch up if I could just do things the way speedrunners do them. The folks I share the server with are way ahead in progression (currently working their way through Mistlands), and if I wanted to ever have a hope of catching up, I was going to need to be clever.
They have offered, of course, to just hand me the progression-appropriate gear and carry me through the bosses, but I’m not a super big fan of that. When I fight a boss, I want to have earned that fight.
So: Bonemass. That’s a big ooze monster who vomits poison and summons friends during the fight. The OG way to fight Bonemass is to craft about a thousand flinthead arrows and plink at it from a tree until it eventually somehow dies, perhaps of old age, perhaps of boredom. The better way is to make a blunt weapon and some poison resist mead and just whack it from melee. The best way is to make the weapon Frostner, a hammer that does massive damage to him, and just… delete him.
Yes, this is how I wanted to fight Bonemass. I wanted to hit the Delete button and have it just die. But Frostner requires silver to make. Silver is found in the next biome, the mountains. Finding silver requires a wishbone. That is dropped when you kill Bonemass.
This is a chicken-and-ooze-bomb problem.
Speedrunners come to the rescue here. Speedrunners have no time to be futzing around in biomes they can skip. And you can skip Bonemass’ swamp biome entirely with Stagbreaker, a massive hammer you can actually make Day 1 of your Valheim adventure. The trick is: If you make your Stagbreaker and just run around pounding it on the ground, you can sometimes get “Too Hard” messages. This means there is silver or iron beneath. You don’t need Bonemass’ wishbone. You just need some frost resist mead or a nice warm cloak.
I died a lot during this. I died three times and lost my gear, my backup gear, and my gear again when I tried a naked run. And then the wolves (including a one star wolf) destroyed my portal. I had to log in a character from a previous run to clear out the area so I could get my stuff.
But I did find the silver, and deaths aside, managed to get it back to my base through the rebuilt portal. (Our game allows carrying metal through portals). I made Frostner, wolf armor, including a warm cloak. Having done these things, I felt I had permission to grab more silver from the guys’ stash (they did, in fact, urge me to take it). They themselves had just killed Yagluth (Plains boss) and were ready to help me with the fights for which I was legitimately prepared.
Bonemass went swimmingly. I hit hard with my new Frostner, and I had three other people helping. I had the poison resist mead and wolf armor; I don’t know if I took damage through the entire fight, and I was standing right in front of it, slamming it the entire time. Got the wishbone (if it mattered).
The guys pronounced me ready for Moder, and I was — wolf armor to keep me warm, frost resist mead ready, a stack of fire arrows left over from the Elder, and I’d even gathered the requisite three dragon eggs while looking for silver. And so we killed her as well.
I didn’t tank the dragon, but I did a lot of fire plinking. The guys were all in plains armor and had plains weapons, so yeah — I was carried, a little bit.
So I’m at a crossroads, now. I am ready for the Plains biome. They’ve all gone past it and I imagine they will be in the Ashlands soon. What I want to do is make a new Plains base and just relax for awhile; make my armor and weapons, do some exploration, make a home — and then strike out for the end game. But I may not have the chance. We’re looking forward to Enshrouded’s 1.0 coming very soon, and that is a game that I have never played. If I don’t hurry up and finish this game, I may not have a chance.
Also: none of us are playing with mods, because apparently if you mod, you are branded a cheater and will no longer earn achievements. This makes crafting a real chore.
Well, I guess I’ll figure out what I want to do about everything. It is tough plinking away at the lower level stuff while the chat is full of people way ahead in progression.
