How to Craft and Use Portals (Valheim)

The world of Valheim is huge, and getting around it by foot, or even by ship, can take a long time. To mitigate travel time, players can create portals to travel to between any two points near-instantaneously (there’s a loading screen, so we can’t call it instant). Setting up portals is fairly straightforward, but we’ve created a step by step guide to make it easy for you to collect the necessary materials and get your portals up and running.

  • x2 Surtling core
  • x10 Greydwarf eyes
  • x20 Fine wood

The Greydwarf eyes are easy to get, but Surtling cores and Fine wood require more effort. To get Surtling cores, you’ll need to go to the Black Forest and explore Burial Chambers to find Surtling cores in chests or on pedestals. To get fine wood, you can destroy shipwrecks (found in the Black Forest), or you can craft a Bronze axe and chop down Birch or Oak trees in the Meadows biome. Note: Before you’re able to craft a Bronze axe, you’ll need to make sure you know how to mine and smelt basic ores.

Once you’ve gathered the requisite materials, you’ll simply need to pull out your hammer while near a Crafting station. Then, use right click to open the build menu, and go to the Misc tab to find the portal and place it.

How To Craft And Use Portals Placing Your Portal
You’ll want to put your portal on a platform to give it its due grandeur

Connecting portals is easy. If you don’t set a tag on a portal, once you build a second portal, those two portals will automatically link. If you have more than two portals set up, you’ll have to set tags on the portals in order to travel through them. We’ll run through a simple scenario to illustrate how it works:

  1. You have 1 portal in your base, and 2 portals at two different outposts: a Meadows outpost and a Black Forest outpost.
  2. You want to be able to travel between the 3 portals.
  3. You can use the E key on a portal to “Set tag” on a portal. Give the portal a short, simple name like “B1”, “mOP”, etc.
  4. Now, to travel from your base to your Meadows outpost, you’ll need to change the name of your base portal to “mOP”. This is because portal tags (names) must match in order to be linked.
  5. You can now travel to your meadows outpost and back through your portal. To use a portal, just walk into it!
  6. If you want to travel from your base portal to your Black Forest outpost, you’ll need to match the name of your base portal to your Black Forest outpost.

The above-listed method should work well for those of you who are short on Surtling cores. However, if you have the resources available, you can create two portals for each connection you want to create, making it so that you don’t have to change portal tags each time you want to go somewhere.

Exploring the biomes and finding creative ways to transport your loot back to base is a cornerstone of Valheim. Still, at some point not being able to use Portals in order to move ores, metal, and various other precious materials can get annoying. Once you reach the fiery Ahslands biome, being unable to teleport with your inventory full of metal will be a thing of the past.

Using the resources found in the Ashlands, you’ll be able to construct Stone Portals. Stone Portals don’t have the limitations of regular ones. They allow you to move all the previously prohibited items. And the great thing is, you don’t need to replace all your regular Portals with Stone ones. A Stone Portal can be connected to a regular Portal and still work.

valheim stone portal showcase
Compared to regular Portals, Stone Portals have some real “you vs. the Stargate she told you not to worry about” energy.

Here’s what you’ll need to construct your own Stone Portal:

  • x10 Greydwarf Eyes
  • x30 Grausten
  • x2 Molten Cores

If you’re looking to build a Stone Portal, you should know where to get Greydwarf Eyes very well. Just go fight some Greydwarfs inhabiting the Black Forest and Meadows biomes and you’ll get plenty of those. Grausten is the stone used to build all the Ashlands ruins. Simply smash them with your pickaxe to get it.

To get your hands on some Molten Cores, you’ll need to explore Putrid Holes and Charred Fortresses. Both are Ashlands points of interest. A Putrid Hole is the Ashlands version of a dungeon. A Charred Fortress is a big keep manned by charred warriors.

Constructing a Stone Portal is a bit more complicated than a regular one. You will need to have a Stonecutter nearby if you want to place a Stone Portal. In turn, you will need a Workbench to build the Stonecutter. The materials you’ll need are as follows:

  • x10 Wood
  • x2 Iron
  • x4 Stone

Don’t forget about the extra 10 Wood you’ll need for the Workbench. Both the Workbench and the Stonecutter can be found in the Crafting tab of your Hammer Build menu. The Stone Portal, however, is in the Misc. tab.


You should now be ready to use portals in Valheim! We hope this guide was helpful. For questions or suggestions, head to the comments below.

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DanielD
DanielD

Unabashed FromSoftware fanboy still learning to take his time with games (and everything else, really). The time he doesn't spend on games is spent on music, books, or occasionally going outside.

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WesternWilson
WesternWilson
8 months ago

Why do the developers set it up so portals much match in pairs? Why not program in a kind of menu when you enter a portal from which you can choose which of your placed portals you want to arrive at? Makes much more sense and you would not need to build a danged portal room/building…