How to Use Moulds – Valheim

Valheim’s final biome, Deep North, is a land shrouded in mystery. As such, even a simple thing like crafting the biome’s new gear involves a complicated multi-step process. The key to it are the Moulds you find throughout the biome. This guide will tell you how to turn these Moulds into powerful end-game gear.

Mould Crafting Overview

1. Find Moulds inside the Winding Tunnels
2. Combine a Mould with the required resources at a Black Forge into a Cast
3. Turn Ice into Liquid Frost at a Frigid Kiln
4. Place the Cast on the Frost Foundry
5. Add some Liquid Frost to the Frost Foundry
6. Wait some time before grabbing your completed item from the Frost Foundry

Finding Moulds

You’ll find the bulk of Moulds down in the Winding Tunnels dungeons in the Deep North. The entrances to these dungeons are hidden inside the larger Nord houses. They look like big holes at the back of the house and can be quite easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking for (especially with all the identical doors and snow everywhere).

Once you get inside a Winding Tunnel you’ll have to deal with an expansive maze of narrow passages, an almost constant stream of annoying enemies, darkness, and steep narrow passages.

The enemies inside the dungeon can drop Moulds. But your best source for them are the Piles of Rubble and Wardrobe Shafts. On top of dropping Moulds, Wardrobe Shafts act as enemy spawners and hide additional passages. Make sure to destroy these objects whenever you see them to get your hands on the Moulds.

Frostcores

While you’re down in the tunnels, make sure to grab all the Frostcores you see. These large glowing snowflakes are a crucial ingredient for the next step of Deep North crafting.

Setting Up Crafting Stations

To create items out of Moulds, you’ll need a Blast Furnace and an upgraded Black Forge. You should have these from the earlier biomes. You’ll also need two new crafting stations: Frigid Kiln and Frost Foundry.

To craft a Frigid Kiln, you’ll need:

• Stone x20
• Frostcore x10
• Ice x5

And for the Frost Foundry, you’ll want:

• Iron x15
• Stone x20
• Frostcore x10

This means you’ll need to find 20 Frostcores in the Winding Tunnels before you can engage in Deep North crafting. Both these new stations take up a lot of space, and both need a Workbench nearby to be placed.

Turning Moulds into Items

Once you have everything ready, take the Mould for the item you want to the Black Forge. There, you’ll see what resources you need to turn a Mould into a Cast. The most frequently used ones are Bloodgold and Timberwood. Both of these are Deep North resources.

Timberwood is both plentiful and easy to harvest — simply chop down some Timber Trees in the Deep North. You don’t even need a high-tier axe for that.

Obtaining Bloodgold

Bloodgold is the biome’s ore and is quite tricky to get. When traversing the biome’s forests, you’ll have a chance to run into a Gammeltroll. These huge monsters are incredibly tough and deal a lot of damage in a large area around them, and they have ranged attacks.

After you manage to defeat one, instead of turning into loot, a Gammeltroll freezes into a petrified state. You’ll want to craft some Ember Charges at a Workbench to do mine a petrified troll.

Combine 2 Seal Pelts with Embers from an Eternal Pyre to create 10 Ember Charges. Equip them, and toss a charge under the petrified troll’s feet. It will explode into a ton of Petrified Tissue.

Petrified Tissue is incredibly heavy, and you can’t bring it through a regular portal. So make sure you have the ingredients for a Stone Portal (Greydwarf Eye x30, Grausten x30, Molten Core x2) to easily bring your loot back to base.

There, put the Petrified Tissue into a Blast Furnace with some Coal and wait for it to process the tissue into bars of Bloodgold.

Turning Ice into Liquid Frost

In the meantime, head for your Frigid Kiln. As you traverse the Deep North biome, you’ll see numerous frozen monsters. Hit them with a weapon to shatter them into Ice. You’ll want a lot of Ice for your Deep North crafting, so keep smashing all those frozen monsters whenever you see them. Load that Ice into the back of the Frigid Kiln and wait for it to fall out from the other end as Liquid Frost.

Creating and Using a Cast

Once all the raw resources are processed, take the Bloodgold, Timberwood, and Mould to the Black Forge. Combine them into a Cast. Take that Cast to the Frost Foundry and interact with its top to place the Cast on the Foundry.

Then, interact with its side to add Liquid Frost as fuel for the foundry. When you do that, the Cast will automatically lower into a pool of liquid ice. And after a brief wait, and about 5 Liquid Frost used up, it will come up as a finished item.

After you have the actual item and you want to upgrade it, you won’t need to go through this complicated process again. You can upgrade it as you normally would at the Black Forge Upgrade tab.