I love the game, but crafting feels terribly inefficient.

[V-Bro - The Titan's Driver]

Does anyone else feel like it costs far too many resources to forge certain items and weapons?
I just looked at how much resources I needed to forge a silver sword.
It requires includes 40 units of silver and 5 units of iron.
Combined, the weight of that is 620!

What's the weight of the sword you make with all that? Literally just 1.
What happened to the other 99.8% of the material?
I wouldn't care if carrying all that weight wasn't such a burden in the first place.

You can't teleport metals in standard play, and the max carry weight is 450. So it's often way too heavy to carry what you actually need in one trip. The end result is repeated travel between point A and B to get things where needed, which is rough for single player. Why do I need this much mass to make just a few lightweight tools anyway?

I thought I could solve this with carts to reduce trips, but it turns out they can't handle the amount of metal I wanted to transport. Valheim terrain is practically never flat for carts; even with a hoe, I don't think I can carve a good flat path into a tall mountain where I mined all my silver.

The combined obstacles feel too much like a big grind for me, comparable to a dull RPG where you repeated fight the same monsters just to level up.

[glass zebra]

Silver sword is a special case and out of line with the rest. The silver sword is the best weapon up to and including tier 5 against the 5th boss, which was for some time the last boss in the game. It is also the most expensive weapon to craft in the game. The game basically offers you to craft a special weapon (that was not that special against other enemies) for a lot of resource input.

If you are a sword user, you can just use a leveled iron sword and proceed to the black metal sword without much issue really. There is no _need_ to craft this special weapon. After tier ~3, item upgrades are less and less meaningful for pure power and you don't need to grab every single one, as number progression is linear. Normally swords would cost 20 [metal], but this one is special and silver tier in general is special (or is where "special" starts and linear progression dilutes) and hardly hogged by base items or tools (only butcher table).

I don't think I've ever used carts to transport silver. I get more than I can carry, then crouch down the mountain, then put that into a boat. I guess you can get unlucky and get a mountain that is far away from any coast though.

You could also take up a small amount of metal up there and build a forge on the mountains.

In general I'd say this is one way to game offers something for different playstyles. Some go lots of hunting and skill up their weapon skills a lot, some are into base building and aim to have the best ranching/farm food at all times with a long comfort buff and strong defenses, some are into grinding materials and get the strongest items each tier. Most will do a mix, but getting all of them to the max at all times is not mandatory and you can choose and deepen what is most interesting for you.

[Crystal_Pistol]

This game's crafting system is simple but also a discouraging grind.

[Dain_Ironfoot]

Yeah, I just started playing a week or so ago and been having fun, but now that I'm about to go to the swamp I am a bit discouraged by all the junk you need for crafting certain food, potions and stuff. I've enjoyed the building and some of the crafting, but now it's looking a bit too tedious to get into the more advanced items.

[Taizan]

The weight of the silver sword is off, that's all about it. In general crafting is ok, especially Iron feels valid, bronze is a bit tedious, silver is generally ok, leather tiers feel ok as well. The addition of things like the root armor spice it up a bit.

[Soma]

The content of Valheim is why I love it. With the new world options (modifiers) please do not let a mechanic of the game ruin the content for you. The game is meant to have unnecessary grind. It is why so many love it. In your situation I would consider these options:

Hammer mode until you have silver upgraded:
This will let you easily(free) build a forge next to any silver veins where you can upgrade all your silver stuff on the spot. When you are done with silver turn Hammer mode off, and continue. Any changes you make to the mechanics can be changed back to "normal" at any time.

Portal everything:
Change the restriction on ore through portals at your discretion. If you want the closest thing to a normal playthrough (insane amount of grind for someone who has a job and a family), just do it for silver then change it back.......

Acceptance:
You WANT this to take a long time. It is a beautiful world to be explored. LIke a good book, there is that little depression when you kill the last boss.

So yeah, ores are grindy. They are how the devs chose to make you spend more time in these amazing worlds they have created. If it wasnt ores it would have to be something else. THe difference between an action/adventure game and a survival game is grind. The new world modifiers let you set the grind! Literally a game changer.

[JimmyEatSquirrel]

Glass Zebra nailed it., though I ended up with LOTS of silver. I just found a steep part of the mountain... threw it all in a cart and ran down to my waiting boat. Its not a required weapon but one of the best, and best looking.

[MyUrp1]

The Megingjord comes in handy when hauling lots of metal around, it's easy to carry 300 lbs when equipped. I often do metal runs with it. Don't forget to invoke Eikthyr at the start of a carry run. I never bother with carts, more trouble than they're worth.

[Mharr]

Yeah, every resource is more grind than I'd like, so I always used a server-side loot doubling mod. Now I don't need to because that option is in the vanilla game.

[Oakshield]

What I usually am doing, is to bring the required resources in several steps to my crafting bench, then pick everything up and craft the required upgrade.
It's convenient to have a chest nearby so you can drop things in there; like metals near a forge, wood and stone near a workbench and so forth; but the more you progress the more you'll find out that you will always need combinations of resources to craft stuff.
So dropping items in 2-3 runs nearby or in a chest and loading everything up to do the crafting or upgrading is the "easiest" solution, imho.

But then, considering I'm used to the imping system of Wurm Online, in which you need to have water, a hammer, a pelt, a whetstone and a lump of the desired metal in your inventory to upgrade a weapon to a higher quality (or level, if you prefer that), I find the upgrading system of Valheim pretty easy. Even if it means you need to be overloaded for a few minutes.

Thorin :)

[Lucidess]

Consider the weight more of a "burden" than an actual physical weight, and that portals cannot carry such burdens. Valheim's physics are very different than the physical world. Also consider that this is a videogame and it's not supposed to make sense, even though I tried to make it make sense.

[SoloQ]

I turned off that silly portal rule. It makes no sense. Raw ore and metal bars can't go through portals, but what I make with them can....okay....sure...lol
I hate how overused the phrase 'immersion breaking' is, but that's truly some mind boggling immersion breaking design decision making.
I still love the game though. It was a gem when I bought it and it's only gotten better since then.

[Mharr]

Portal restrictions were intended to stop the world's scale becoming mere background to a fast travel system and your bases all being effectively a single building with portals for doors. Implementing that as "ores can't teleport because reasons" wasn't super effective.

[hallaloth]

Originally posted by Mharr:

Portal restrictions were intended to stop the world's scale becoming mere background to a fast travel system and your bases all being effectively a single building with portals for doors. Implementing that as "ores can't teleport because reasons" wasn't super effective.

Yeah, I get that mindset. . .but even that you still have to sail to find new resource zones. I immediately flipped my save over to non-restricted portals as well. I enjoy the sailing. . whwn I'm not grounding myself on every plains coastline I see. . . but It already takes a while sailing to find things. . . sailing back just makes it a tedious grind. Portaling the ores back cuts back on that and personally makes the game more enjoyable for me.

Kudos to those that don't.

[DarkFaceGlow]

Like stated above, you can skip things. I just returned today after a long time, and I remember using leather armor for a long time and skipping other armors. I’ll likely go that route again. Bottom line, don’t think you need to always get the next thing available.

[Air Bear]

I found I really enjoyed running ores home without a cart. Even if it was 4 or 5 sprints back and forth atop the mountains, it felt like a victory lap. Way funner than trying to cart the stuff. Now in Multiplayer we've definitely loaded up a mountain's worth of silver on top and carted it down to a boat, with 3 or 4 people guarding the cart and trying to smooth out bumps, but it always felt more like a chore then. On the other hand, those were very memorable experiences.