Iron tier gear requires a lot of iron

[LanPartyGuy]

For my taste iron tier weapons and equipment requires too much iron. It feels like the developers want the player to spend a longer amount of time in the swamps, artificially prolonging gametime. Maybe I am just impatient, what do you say?

[Suzaku]

Iron is quite valuable throughout the entire game. You're not going to need it in just the swamps, but for the rest of the game, in making weapons, armor, and structures.

The inability to use portals while carrying it (with default settings) is the biggest problem to me. Obtaining iron isn't difficult, but only being able to gather a handful before becoming over-encumbered, and then having to spend so much time transporting it is an unnecessary hassle to me.

[Aurumworks]

Carts and roadworks. I have a base in the swamp in the middle of a dungeon patch. From there I I have a path to my harbor. Between the base and dungeons, I build simple paths. Then I go to a dungeon, clear it out and move all the iron with the cart. Once I have a good amount of Iron, I move the cart to the harbor and then ship it off to my main base.

Besides, skip iron armor, it uses up so much iron and padded armor from the plains is both relatively easy to make and uses iron, too for much better protection. Heavy armor in the mountains is a pain anyway.

[Bobucles]

There's never enough iron in Valheim. Try to rush through the swamp and jump to silver equipment. Silver is lower demand and much easier to harvest piles of it.

[seven]

Just impatient I'd say. It's easy to get boatloads of iron (pun maybe intended).

[Darwin]

I say yup, you are just impatient. There are a lot of people in this current age that are like that though, so don't feel bad.

Back in my youth people had to work hard for everything they got or made due with less and still found happiness. Now, we all have silver platter lifestyles and shed tears when something is even slightly more difficult than not at all, and folks struggle to find a moment of true happiness in a day. (Generally speaking, of course.)

Hooray for progress right?

But what does all this have to do with the game play? Not much really but perhaps practicing patience in the activities that are intended to bring us happiness may just achieve that success.

[Nerevar]

use root armor. then move on to silver. iron is needed for building and supports way more than gear. most iron weapons arent worth it. silver ones are too easy and fast to get. make root armor. the chestpiece stays useful for alot longer.

[Lorska]

Always minimize time spent in areas that have a high chance to create bad situations.
Swamps have a lot of stuff that can go wrong, so get in, get the bare minimum you need (iron mace and troll armor is good enough for bone mass and pickaxe needed for silver) and get out.
Mountain is completely free in comparison and almost completely safe during daytime because star enemies do not exist there under these circumstances.
Go back to the swamps later when you have silver gear and need to farm iron for plains.
At that point you'll have the best ship, are completely safe with your gear and found the trader for extra carry weight.

[Aurumworks]

Oh, yes, you will come back to the swamp. Not just for iron, but bloodbags. Oh, so many bloodbags. And ooze, got to love me some ooze bombs.

[knighttemplar1960]

The devs changed real life mechanics for game play mechanics. In game you spend a few game days mining and smelting copper and maybe a day mining and smelting tin. IRL copper deposits are ~1% copper the rest is all waste rock and other things that become slag.

It took 3 men 12 hours to make charcoal and smelt the day's worth of hand mined copper ore into a single half pinky sized pellet of 25% pure copper. Those pellets were packed in clay and picked up by horse carts that transferred all the pellets to a ship that then sailed to an industrial town that smelted the results 3 more times to get the copper to 99% purity over an additional 3 days of labor.

Tin deposits found near fresh water rivers are 80-90% pure to start with so tin is easy. (All the water in Valheim is fresh. All of the fish species in Valheim can survive in fresh water some of them can't survive in salt water. The only thing in Valheim that can't live in fresh water are barnacles but the very bottom depths of the ocean may be salty enough for barnacles to live so that all works out).

The in game bronze recipe is wrong. Back in the Viking days bronze was made with 80% copper, 10% tin, 6-8% lead and 2-4% arsenic. It was also smelted as an alloy not cold forged on an anvil. In game 2, 12 weight copper plates are combined with 1, 8 weight tin plate to make 1, 12 weight bronze plate magically disappearing 20 weight of metal in the process.

Then 120 weight of bronze and 8 weight of wood are transformed into a 3 weight bronze buckler disappearing 125 weight of materials. More materials wouldn't be required to upgrade it, more skill and time would have been taken to make it higher quality in the first step. The other thing is that repairs take no extra materials. IRL a damaged buckler would have been dismantled, the bronze resmelted and some extra added to make up for the losses in the process and then new wood used to remake the buckler. In game repairs are free (they probably use all the left overs from the initial crafting).

Iron is the same way. IRL iron deposits from the early iron age were about 30% iron. 1 guy could mine and smelt enough iron in one day to make about 6 marble sized pellets. Once enough pellets were gathered they would be hot forged in a bloomery and hand hammered into a bar to remove enough of the slag to get the bar to 90% iron. It would take one person several weeks to mine and smelt enough iron to make 1 bar. Except for a sword most of the weapons and tools had a wooden handle and an iron head. 1 bar was all you would need to make an axe, 2 at most for a broad sword.

In game you can easily mine and smelt 30 scrap iron into 30 iron plates in a single day. In game it takes 120 weight of iron and 8 weight of ancient bark to make a 4 weight iron buckler.

[LanPartyGuy]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

The devs changed real life mechanics for game play mechanics.

Do I understand this correctly? So you are saying the developers supposedly wanted to reproduce real life conditions in ore mining and smelting, thus iron weapons need more iron to be crafted. If so, that would be an interesting take on that matter to have an correct representation of workloads of earlier ages of metal manufacturing.

Compared to a full day of work some iron farming in the swamp seems like peanuts. But still in a videogame convenience and gameplay should go over realism, Just my opninion, gamedesign choices should not feel like simply extending to an additional time span the player has to go through. It should be considered as an arguable design choice.

[Pobblebonk]

Originally posted by LanPartyGuy:

For my taste iron tier weapons and equipment requires too much iron. It feels like the developers want the player to spend a longer amount of time in the swamps, artificially prolonging gametime. Maybe I am just impatient, what do you say?

You can skip the iron chestplate and get the root chestplate instead, which will also be really good for mistlands.
Apart from that, try to make as little weapons and armor as possible out of iron because you'll need it later on for better stuff and for building.
In the Mistlands biome there are new sources for iron, so you won't always have to return to the swamp.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by LanPartyGuy:

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

The devs changed real life mechanics for game play mechanics.

Do I understand this correctly? So you are saying the developers supposedly wanted to reproduce real life conditions in ore mining and smelting, thus iron weapons need more iron to be crafted. If so, that would be an interesting take on that matter to have an correct representation of workloads of earlier ages of metal manufacturing.

Compared to a full day of work some iron farming in the swamp seems like peanuts. But still in a videogame convenience and gameplay should go over realism, Just my opninion, gamedesign choices should not feel like simply extending to an additional time span the player has to go through. It should be considered as an arguable design choice.

Nope, just the opposite. Real life mechanics would be very tedious. It would take a single Viking several weeks to mine and smelt enough copper for a bronze buckler, mace, pick, or axe.

Instead the devs decided on "game mechanics" the copper deposits contain 30% copper instead of 1%. You mine and smelt copper quickly. 30 pieces of ore turn into 30 copper plates. A single viking can do that in a single day but the devs decided to make finished products take far more materials than IRL for game balance purposes. It makes it feel as if you are making progress faster and in game you make progress MUCH faster than you would IRL.

[Aurumworks]

Realism in a building and survival game would set grind to a new dimension. Imagine you could only carry 5-8 rocks and then you're overburdened, your cart is full with 20-50, you need hours to break them out of a rock with a pickaxe, felling and processing a tree is days work. Realism only works when the scenario of survival is on a very personal level like Long Dark or Green Hell. In Valheim? Gods, please, gods, no!

[Zefar]

Originally posted by Aurumworks:

Realism in a building and survival game would set grind to a new dimension. Imagine you could only carry 5-8 rocks and then you're overburdened, your cart is full with 20-50, you need hours to break them out of a rock with a pickaxe, felling and processing a tree is days work. Realism only works when the scenario of survival is on a very personal level like Long Dark or Green Hell. In Valheim? Gods, please, gods, no!

But at the same time the swords wouldn't need a total of like 70 to 80 metal in total for all of the upgrades to it.

The amount of metal you need for almost any piece of armor gets ridiculous and it just discourage exploring other than what you need. It might also be your only armor option at the time.

[MyUrp1]

I am a bit confused by this. Why did the devs decide that Plains and Mistlands gear should use gobs of Swamp resources? Not that it's hard to clean up several Sunken Crypts with Plains level gear, but the Swamp is not really that great a biome to spend a lot of time in.

I'd like it if a lot more Silver were used. The Mountains is very scenic, and wolves and golems can be a challenge if you're not paying attention. Also more thematic, isn't silver supposed to be special magic stuff? Seems ideal for Mistlands gear.