The first evening on a shared Valheim world goes best when the group stops behaving like five single-player characters standing near each other. Split the jobs straight away - one person on wood and the workbench, one hunting deer for the two trophies that summon Eikthyr, one gathering stone and flint, one scouting the edge of the Black Forest - put the first base in the Meadows within sight of the forest and the sea, kill Eikthyr together on the first or second evening, and then spend the next sessions turning burial chambers into surtling cores and copper into bronze. The Elder is the end of this stage, and he goes down easily to a group with fire arrows and bronze. Everything below is the detail: what to make first, where to build, who should do what, and what a dedicated server changes about each step.
What changes when the start is shared#
In single player the Meadows is a tutorial. On a server, three things make it different, and they shape every decision in this guide.
The first is that boss kills belong to the world, not the player. When anyone kills Eikthyr, the world gains the defeated_eikthyr key, and that changes which raids can happen and what the trader sells for everybody on the server - including the friend who has not logged in yet. The full picture of what is shared and what is personal is in boss progression on shared servers. The short version for the opening days: agree when bosses are fought, because a keen player who kills The Elder alone on a Tuesday has moved the raid table forward for the whole group.
The second is that characters are not shared. Inventory, skills, known recipes, the explored map and the forsaken powers you have chosen all live in each player's own character file. A recipe one person discovered by picking up resin is not known to the others until they pick up resin too. Nobody shares a map unless you build a cartography table, which comes later.
The third is how the server simulates the world. The world is cut into zones, and each zone is run by the first player who walks into it. If that player has a poor connection, everything nearby stutters for everyone. At the start, when the whole group clusters around one campfire, this rarely matters. It matters a great deal at the boss altars, covered below.
The first hour: who does what#
A group of four to six that splits the opening jobs has a workbench, a roofed shelter, a bed each and flint tools inside an hour. A group that all chase the same boar is still in rags at nightfall. A split that works:
| Role | First jobs | Hands off to the group |
|---|---|---|
| Builder | Wood, workbench, roofed shelter, fire, beds | Repair station, chests, first walls |
| Hunter | Boar and deer, leather scraps, deer hide, trophies | Two deer trophies for Eikthyr, food |
| Gatherer | Stone, flint from shores and rivers, raspberries, mushrooms | Flint tools, stone for the kiln and smelter |
| Scout | The Black Forest edge, burial chambers, the trader, Vegvisirs | Map pins and directions shared in chat |
Rotate the roles after the first session; nobody wants to be the person who only ever chops wood. What matters is that each resource has an owner, so you do not end up with four stacks of flint and no wood.
A few rules that save arguments later:
- One shared chest for the boss materials. Deer trophies, ancient seeds and later surtling cores go in a labelled chest at the workbench, not into whoever picked them up. When the person carrying the trophies is offline, the boss fight should not have to wait.
- Beds are personal. Each player sets their own spawn by sleeping in their own bed. Build one per person in the first shelter. A bed needs a roof over it and the area around it free of enemies before you can sleep.
- Skipping the night needs everyone asleep. If one player is out fishing at midnight, nobody skips. Agree on it early - sleep and day and night on servers covers the habits groups settle on.
- Food is a shared job. Raspberries, mushrooms, cooked boar and cooked deer meat are the first foods. Three food slots matter more than armour for most of the early game, because health and stamina come from food.
Where to put the first base#
The first base lives longer than people expect. The workbench, the fire and the first bed are where everyone starts after a death for weeks, so put a little thought into it.
The best first base sits in the Meadows on the edge of a Black Forest, close to the coast. The Meadows is safe enough to build without interruption, the Black Forest next door has copper, tin, burial chambers and greydwarf nests, and the coast is where the first boat will launch when you go looking for a Swamp. A river mouth gives you flint and tin nearby too.
Avoid building right on top of the starting stones. Everyone returns there to hang boss trophies, the area is often well explored and busy, and it puts your base wherever the seed placed the spawn rather than where it is useful.
On a server, also think about spacing. Raids aim at a player standing near a base, and the zone around a big base gets expensive to simulate as the group adds pieces. Keep the first base modest, do not flatten a hillside with the hoe for it, and leave room for each player to build their own house later without everything sitting in one zone. Base placement for shared servers covers this in depth, including why the second base matters more than the first.
Eikthyr as a group#
Eikthyr is the first boss and the easiest. You summon him by placing two deer trophies on his altar. His location is usually not far from spawn and is marked by a Vegvisir - the glowing runestone - in the Meadows; when one player reads it, only that player's map gets the marker, so have the scout pin it and describe the route in chat.
What to bring:
- A crude bow and a good stack of wood or flint arrows for each player with a bow, plus melee weapons for the rest.
- The best food you have, eaten just before the fight.
- Leather or rag armour; it barely matters at this stage.
Eikthyr checklist- 2 deer trophies (in the shared boss chest)- bow and 50+ arrows each for the ranged players- club, axe or spear for the melee players- full food slots- a fire or workbench near the altar for a quick respawn planEikthyr charges, swings his antlers and stomps out short-range lightning. Melee players should hit from the side and back off when he rears up; ranged players should spread out so his charge only threatens one of them. Bosses scale their health and damage with the number of players near them, so a group of five is not fighting the same Eikthyr as a solo player - but it is still the easiest fight in the game. How enemies scale with player count explains the mechanism.
He drops hard antlers, which make the antler pickaxe - the tool you need to mine copper and tin - and his trophy. Hang the trophy on the matching stone at the starting area. Each player then walks up to the stone and selects Eikthyr's power for themselves; it improves running and jumping stamina for a few minutes and has a long cooldown. Powers are per character, which is why late joiners need to make that walk too. Forsaken powers in multiplayer covers activation, cooldowns and which power to use where.
If the group needs more antler pickaxes than one kill gives, summon him again with two more deer trophies. Every boss can be fought again; only the first kill sets the world key.
The Black Forest: copper, tin and surtling cores#
With antler pickaxes in hand, the group moves into the Black Forest. This is where the early game is actually decided, and it is the stage that rewards organisation most.
The forest has three resources the group needs, in this order:
- Surtling cores, found on pedestals inside burial chambers - the stone stairways into the ground, guarded by skeletons and the occasional ghost. The charcoal kiln and the smelter each need five cores, and the first portal needs two. That is twelve cores before you have smelted a single bar or linked two places together.
- Copper, from the large copper deposits in the forest. A deposit gives a lot of ore but takes a long time to mine out, so this is a good job for two players while others clear burial chambers.
- Tin, which lies along the shores and riverbanks in and near the Black Forest. Tin is quick to mine and easy to find once you know to look at the water's edge.
Copper and tin go into the smelter with charcoal, and the bars are combined at the forge: two copper and one tin make one bronze. Bronze is the first real tier - bronze axe, bronze mace, bronze armour, the cultivator, nails for the cart and the Karve.
| Material | Where | Tool | What it unlocks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Surtling core | Burial chambers | none | Kiln, smelter, portals |
| Copper ore | Copper deposits in the Black Forest | Antler pickaxe | Forge, bronze |
| Tin ore | Shorelines and rivers | Antler pickaxe | Bronze |
| Fine wood | Birch and oak | Bronze axe | Portals, bows, many builds |
| Core wood | Pine trees | Flint axe or better | Bigger builds, cultivator |
| Greydwarf eye | Greydwarfs | none | Portals, wards |
A sensible Black Forest split for a group of four to six is two on burial chambers (with a pickaxe for the rocks that sometimes block corridors and plenty of torches), two on copper, and one on everything else: tin, wood, food and keeping the smelter fed. Ore is heavy, so the miners need someone ferrying. A cart helps once bronze nails exist; before that, it is carrying by hand.
Two dangers to brief people on:
- Trolls. A troll in the Black Forest can kill an early character in a few hits and knocks down buildings. They are slow, and a group can kill one with arrows from different directions, but nobody should fight one alone in leather armour. Troll hide makes good light armour.
- Greydwarf shamans and brutes. Shamans heal other greydwarfs and throw poison; kill them first. Brutes hit hard and are slower; treat them like small trolls.
The trader, Haldor, also lives in a Black Forest somewhere on the map. The scout who finds him should pin him; his belt, Megingjord, raises carry weight, which makes ore runs much more pleasant later. What he stocks depends on which bosses the world has killed, described in the traders on a server post.
Portals, the cart and early logistics#
Once bronze exists, two things change how the group moves. The bronze axe cuts birch and oak for fine wood, and fine wood is what portals need: twenty fine wood, ten greydwarf eyes and two surtling cores each. A portal pair between the main base and a forward camp by a copper deposit or burial chamber cluster saves hours of walking.
What portals will not carry, by default, is ore and metal. Copper, tin, bronze and every metal after them cannot go through a portal under normal rules, and later in the game neither can dragon eggs. The group has to haul metal by hand, by cart, or by boat. For the Black Forest that usually means building the smelter close to the copper, or using a cart on a cleared path. Ore logistics with ships and carts is the full treatment.
This is also the moment to have the conversation about the portals world modifier. On a dedicated server it is a launch argument, and it changes the whole shape of the game:
# Default rules: no metal through portals-modifier portals casual # ore and metal may go through portals-modifier portals hard # no portals to boss altars-modifier portals veryhard # no portals at allportals casual removes most of the hauling and sailing the game is built around. Some groups love that; others find the Swamp and Mountains lose their tension. Decide as a group before the first iron run rather than halfway through it. The rules, the tag pairing and what counts as a teleportable item are in portal rules and teleport restrictions, and the other modifiers worth agreeing on early are in Valheim world modifiers and presets.
Bronze also brings the ward, which needs fine wood, greydwarf eyes and a surtling core. On a friends-only server a ward is mainly useful to stop creatures spawning inside a base and to show whose house is whose; on a public one it is a griefing tool as much as a defence, covered in wards and griefing.
The Elder as a group#
The Elder is summoned by placing three ancient seeds on his altar. Ancient seeds drop when you destroy greydwarf nests - the spiky growths in the Black Forest that keep spawning greydwarfs - so the burial-chamber team will have collected some without trying. His altar is marked by a Vegvisir in the Black Forest.
He is a large, slow tree. His attacks are a stomp, roots that burst from the ground around the arena, and a vine attack at range. Fire arrows are the standard answer, and a group with bronze weapons and a few bows makes short work of him.
The Elder checklist- 3 ancient seeds- bows with fire arrows (wood, resin, feathers)- bronze weapons and bronze or troll armour- full food: deer stew, queens jam, boar jerky if you have them- a portal near the altar, tagged clearly- a backup of the world taken before the fightSpread out so the roots do not catch everybody at once, and have the melee players stay close to his trunk where the root waves are easier to step out of. The Elder's arena has trees and stones that block arrows; stand where you have a clear line rather than where you can hide.
He drops the swamp key, which opens the sunken crypts in the Swamp, and his trophy, which gives the power that speeds up chopping trees. The key is not used up when you open a crypt, so one key can serve the group, but it lives in one player's inventory - put it in the shared boss chest when that player is offline, or summon him again for a second key.
Killing The Elder is the moment the Black Forest stage ends and the world's raid table moves forward to the Swamp. The group should be ready for that before anyone swings an axe, and the next stage is in the Swamp and Bonemass group guide.
Early raids and how to survive them#
Raids on a server are rolled for the whole world and then aimed at one player standing near a base - a player who is online, outside a dungeon, and within about forty metres of a few base pieces. If nobody is home, nobody is raided. Raids and events on servers explains the roll in full; for the first days you need to know which raids are possible.
| Event | Message | Creatures | Enabled by | Retired by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
army_eikthyr | Eikthyr rallies the creatures of the forest | Boars, necks | New world | defeated_eikthyr |
army_theelder | The forest is moving... | Greydwarfs, brutes, shamans | defeated_eikthyr | defeated_gdking |
foresttrolls | The ground is shaking | Trolls | A troll killed | defeated_gdking |
The boar and neck raid is harmless. The greydwarf raid after Eikthyr is the one that teaches groups to build walls: greydwarfs throw rocks, shamans heal, and brutes chew through wooden walls. A ring of stakewall or a simple raised earth wall with the hoe around the core of the base, and someone standing on a platform with a bow, handles it. The troll raid is the one that can flatten a wooden base. Note that killing The Elder retires both the greydwarf and the troll raids.
If raids are spoiling a casual group's evening, the raids world modifier turns them down (-modifier raids less or muchless) or off (none) on the next restart. If players progress at very different speeds, the -setkey playerevents switch makes the raid fit each player's own progress rather than the world's.
Server habits worth starting now#
The first days are when good habits are cheap. A few that pay off for the life of the world:
- Agree on the rules before the first boss. Who may summon bosses, whether solo kills are allowed, whether metal goes through portals, and how raids are set. Write them in the group chat.
- Lower the save interval. The world is written to disk on a timer - thirty minutes by default.
-saveinterval 600caps what a crash can cost you at ten minutes. - Take a backup before every boss fight. It costs nothing and is the only clean way back if something goes badly wrong, such as an accidental kill by one player or a destroyed base. Server backups and world corruption explains what to keep and where.
- Send the best connection in first at boss altars. Because the first player into a zone simulates it, the player with the most stable connection should walk into the boss arena before the others. A boss simulated over hotel wifi rubber-bands for everyone.
- Pin everything. Until the cartography table exists, map pins are personal. A scout who shares locations in chat saves the group an evening.
On RE:NODE, Valheim servers come with crossplay already on and a join password generated, the launch settings above are fields on the Startup tab, and backup slots are included on every plan - so the backup before The Elder is one button, and restoring it is another. The Schedules tab can take a daily backup at an hour when nobody plays.
FAQ#
Can one player summon Eikthyr without the rest of the group?
Yes. Any player with two deer trophies can summon and kill him, and the world key applies to everyone. That is why groups agree on boss nights in advance; the fight is easy, but the raid table changes for everybody.
Does everybody need to be at the fight to get the forsaken power?
No. Powers are taken from the stone at the starting area once the trophy is hung there, and each player activates their own. Someone who missed the fight still walks up to the stone and selects it.
How many surtling cores does a group need early on?
At least twelve before the first portal pair works: five for the kiln, five for the smelter, two for the portal. Each further portal costs two more, and wards need one each. Clear burial chambers early and keep the cores in a shared chest.
Can we skip the night if one player is not in bed?
No. Every player online has to be asleep. Groups with members in different time zones often agree that whoever is out at night carries on and the others just keep playing.
Should the first base be big?
No. Build a small, roofed base on the Meadows edge and grow it later. Large bases cost more to simulate, attract raids at the worst moments, and are often abandoned once the group moves towards the Swamp or the coast.
What if someone kills The Elder before we are ready?
The world key defeated_gdking is set and the Swamp raid can start appearing. You can restore a backup taken before the kill, or an admin can remove the key with a mod that enables devcommands. On a friends server, a restored backup is usually the honest fix.
