The Plains is where a Valheim group stops visiting a biome and starts living in one. Barley and flax only grow there, the black metal you need comes from the Fuling villages there, and the creatures - Deathsquitos, Fulings, lox and growths - can each kill a careless player in seconds. What works on a server is a walled farm base in the Plains with a portal home, a group of three or four raiding villages together with shields and bows while one person farms, a careful split of Fuling totems between the blast furnace and Yagluth, and stone or earth defences at every base before anyone kills Moder. Yagluth himself is a slow, stationary fight that rewards fire resistance and spacing. His death ends the Fuling raids and starts the Mistlands ones.
What the Plains asks of a group#
The Plains looks peaceful - golden grass, open sky, a few lox grazing - and that is the trap. Three things make it the deadliest biome so far.
Deathsquitos. Giant mosquitoes that fly fast, dart in from a distance, and hit for enough damage to kill an underequipped player in one or two stings. They have very little health. A player who sees one coming and blocks or shoots it is fine; a player who is chopping a tree with their back turned is not.
Fulings. Goblin-like creatures that live in villages ringed with walls. Ordinary Fulings come in groups, berserkers are large and hit very hard, and shamans throw fire and shield their allies. A village is a real fight for a group of four in iron or silver gear.
Lox and growths. Lox are huge grazing animals that leave you alone until provoked, then hit like a falling tree. Growths are black tar creatures around tar pits that spit tar, which slows you.
The biome also covers a lot of open ground, so creatures see you from far away. Groups that walk across the Plains in a line, with someone watching the sky, survive. Groups that scatter to pick barley do not.
Gear before the first visit#
| Item | Source | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Silver armour and wolf fur cape | Mountains | The best protection available before black metal |
| A shield and the habit of blocking | Iron or silver | Deathsquitos die if you block and counter |
| A bow with plenty of arrows | Draugr fang or finewood | Deathsquitos and shamans at range |
| Healing meads | Fermenter | Fuling fights are long |
| Three strong foods | Turnip stew, sausages, serpent stew | Health matters more than armour here |
| A pickaxe and an axe | Iron | Village walls, growths' tar, trees for the camp |
The Mountains and Moder group guide covers the silver gear and the dragon tears that build the artisan table. Bring the dragon tears or the table itself; the Plains is where you need it.
A walled base in the Plains#
A Plains base is not optional for most groups, because the crops that matter only grow in the Plains. Barley and flax can be planted with the cultivator in Plains soil; in other biomes the placement is shown as invalid. Cloudberries, which also grow wild there, cannot be planted at all.
Build it on the edge of the Plains, close to the coast if you can, with:
- A full wall. Stone walls from the stonecutter, a stakewall from core wood, or raised earth with a ditch dug outside it. Ditches and raised ground are cheap and work well: Fulings and lox do not cross a deep trench easily.
- A portal home, tagged clearly. Black metal will not go through it under default rules; people and crops will.
- Fires and a workbench inside the wall. Base pieces such as these stop creatures from spawning naturally within a radius of them, which keeps the farm quiet once it is enclosed.
- Beds under a roof. A death in a village is then a short walk back.
- Plenty of space for fields. A group needs a lot of barley and flax. Build the fields inside the wall from the start.
The wall keeps out Fulings and lox. It does not keep out Deathsquitos, which fly, so the farmers should carry a shield and keep their eyes up. A roofed field is overkill; awareness is enough.
On a server, the Plains base is usually where the group's busiest farm lives, and crops, fermenters and cooking stations are all objects the zone owner simulates. Keep the farm zone away from the main portal hub and from large tame pens. Shared farming and food covers how to lay out a farm for a group and split the cooking, and base placement for shared servers explains the zone cost of several busy bases. The Plains is also a heavy biome for clients, with long view distances and lots of grass and creatures in sight - performance by biome explains what that costs and on which side.
Fuling villages, black metal and totems#
Fuling villages are where the group's next tier comes from. Each village is ringed by a wall, has a few buildings and towers, and is guarded by Fulings, berserkers and shamans. Killing Fulings and searching the village gives black metal scrap and Fuling totems, along with other loot.
A village raid that works:
- Scout first. Walk around the outside, count berserkers and shamans, find a gap or a weak section of wall.
- Pull, do not charge. Shoot a Fuling from outside the wall and fight the ones that come out at the gap. A group fighting three Fulings at a time wins; a group in the middle of a village fighting twelve does not.
- Kill shamans first. They throw fire and put shields on their allies, which wastes your damage. Archers should prioritise them.
- Give berserkers space. They hit hard and slowly. Shield-holders block, everyone else hits from the sides.
- Clear, then loot. Search the village only when it is quiet, and do not leave a player looting alone while the rest wander off.
Black metal scrap is smelted in the blast furnace, not the ordinary smelter. Black metal makes the black metal sword, axe, atgeir, knife and shields - the next real weapon tier - and is used in later recipes. Like every metal, black metal scrap and black metal bars do not go through portals under default rules. Ship them home, or build the blast furnace at the Plains base. Ore logistics with ships and carts covers the routes, and portal rules and teleport restrictions has the portals modifier values for a group that would rather not sail.
Fuling totems are the item that needs a group decision. The blast furnace needs them to be built, and Yagluth needs five of them to be summoned. Put every totem in the shared boss chest and decide how many go to the furnace before anyone builds one. Two players each building their own blast furnace can quietly use up the totems the boss needed, and the group then has to raid another village.
Barley, flax and the Plains kitchen#
Barley and flax grow wild near Fuling villages. Picking them gives the seeds to plant your own, and the cultivator turns Plains ground into fields. A group farm can feed everyone for the rest of the game if it is big enough and someone replants after each harvest.
They need two crafting stations, both built with the artisan table from Moder's dragon tears:
| Station | Turns | Into | Used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windmill | Barley | Barley flour | Bread, lox meat pie, blood pudding, fish wraps |
| Spinning wheel | Flax | Linen thread | Padded armour and other Plains recipes |
Barley flour feeds the Plains kitchen. Bread and lox meat pie are baked in the stone oven; blood pudding and fish wraps come from the cauldron. These are the strongest foods so far, and the jump in health and stamina is noticeable. Barley also goes into fire resistance barley wine, made with cloudberries at the fermenter, which is exactly what the Yagluth fight wants.
Linen thread makes padded armour with iron. The padded set is the main armour of this stage and makes Deathsquitos and Fulings far less dangerous. Lox pelts, from killing or butchering lox, make the lox cape, which gives frost resistance and is popular for Mountains trips later.
Deathsquito needles make needle arrows, the strongest arrows of this stage. Tar, from growths and tar pits, goes into darkwood building pieces and other recipes.
Lox can be tamed with barley, cloudberries or flax, and ridden once you have a saddle. They are large creatures to simulate and to fit in a pen; tames, breeding and server load covers sensible limits before a lox pen becomes the laggiest place on the map.
The Yagluth fight#
Yagluth is summoned with five Fuling totems at his altar in the Plains, in a ring of stone ruins marked by a Vegvisir. As with every Vegvisir, reading it only marks the reader's map, so pin it and share the route.
He is a giant, legless torso that does not walk; he turns to face his targets and attacks from where he is. His attacks:
- A rain of meteors that falls across an area of the arena.
- A flame beam he sweeps across the ground in front of him.
- A ground slam that sends a shockwave around him.
Yagluth checklist- 5 Fuling totems (shared boss chest, after the furnace question is settled)- fire resistance barley wine for everyone, plus healing meads- black metal or silver weapons; bows with needle arrows- padded armour and a shield each- bread, lox meat pie or blood pudding, eaten just before summoning- a portal near the arena, beds at the Plains base- a world backup taken before the fightGroup tactics that work:
- Keep moving. The meteor rain lands where you stood. Players who stop to swing in one place get caught.
- Spread out. His beam sweeps a line and his slam hits everyone near him. A group bunched in front of him takes everything.
- Mix ranged and melee. Melee players get in under his attacks, ranged players chip away from different angles, and he can only face one direction at a time.
- Drink the barley wine. Most of his damage is fire. Fire resistance turns his worst attacks into survivable ones.
- Send the best connection first. As with every boss, the player with the steadiest connection should summon him and stand in the arena first, so the boss zone is simulated by them.
Bosses scale with the number of players near them, so a group of five meets a much tougher Yagluth - but five players spreading his attention beat one. Enemy scaling with player count explains how far the scaling goes, and boss summoning for groups covers arena prep and wipes in general.
He drops a torn spirit, which the Mistlands stage uses, and his trophy. Yagluth's power, taken at the starting stones, gives resistance to elemental damage for a short time. Each player selects it at the stone themselves; forsaken powers in multiplayer covers cooldowns and which power suits which fight.
Plains raids and base defence#
| Event | Message | Creatures | Enabled by | Retired by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
army_goblin | The horde is attacking | Fulings | defeated_dragon | defeated_goblinking |
army_gjall, army_seekers | They sought you out (seekers) | Gjall, ticks, seekers | defeated_goblinking | defeated_queen |
The Fuling raid is the first raid that can really destroy a base. It is enabled the moment Moder dies, so it can hit a base where a player is home while the group is still exploring the Plains. Fulings come in numbers, berserkers smash walls, and shamans throw fire at roofs.
What holds:
- Stone or raised earth, not plain wood. A wooden wall alone slows Fulings for a short while. Stone walls and a ditch outside raised ground stop them.
- A ditch they cannot cross. Dig a trench with the pickaxe around the base, deep and steep. Fulings path around it rather than through it, and the defenders shoot them while they look for a way in.
- Sharpened stakes at the gate. Stakes damage anything that walks into them and funnel attackers to one place.
- Archers on a platform. Two players with bows behind a wall do more than four in melee outside it.
- Tames. Tamed wolves and lox fight raiders and buy time, though they die in the process too.
Killing Yagluth retires the Fuling raid and enables the Mistlands raids - Gjall and seekers - with Gjall attacking from the air, which is a different problem again. The Mistlands and the Queen on a server post covers that stage. How the server picks a raid and a target, including the forty-metre base check, is in raids and events on servers.
If the Fuling raids are spoiling the game, the raids modifier turns them down or off on the next restart, and -setkey playerevents lets each player's raids follow their own progress. The second is especially useful in this stage, when some of the group are farming barley and others are still mining silver.
Server habits for the Plains#
- Back up before Yagluth. A backup before every boss fight is the cheapest insurance on a shared world. If the fight goes wrong, or one player summons him early with the furnace totems, the group can go back. Server backups and world corruption explains how.
- Agree on the totems. Decide in chat who builds the blast furnace and how many totems it takes before anyone puts one down.
- Watch the farm zone. Big fields, many fermenters and a lox pen in one zone make it heavy for whoever is nearest. Spread the work stations out.
- Force a save after big hauls. An admin can type
savein the console after a black metal delivery or a big harvest, and a shorter-saveintervallimits what a crash can cost. - Restart weekly. By the Plains stage, a world is large and well explored. A scheduled weekly restart keeps memory steady.
On RE:NODE, the backup before Yagluth is one button on the Backups tab and restoring it is another, with backups stored off the machine they protect. The Schedules tab runs the daily backup and the weekly restart, and if a large world reaches the plan's memory limit, the server is stopped and restarted clean rather than left to swap - one more reason to keep the save interval short.
FAQ#
Can we grow barley and flax at our main base?
Not in vanilla unless the main base is in the Plains. The cultivator only accepts them in Plains ground, so groups build a farm base there. The PlantEverything mod changes this, but it has to be installed on the server and on every client.
Why does our blast furnace use the totems we needed for Yagluth?
Both need Fuling totems. Building the blast furnace takes some, and Yagluth needs five more. Put every totem in a shared chest and agree how they are split before anyone builds the furnace.
What is the best defence against Deathsquitos?
Seeing them. Block or parry when they dive, then hit back, or shoot them on approach - they have very little health. Padded armour helps a lot. Walls do not, because they fly over.
Do we need to kill Yagluth to keep playing in the Plains?
No. You can stay in the Plains as long as you like. Killing him retires the Fuling raids and enables the Mistlands raids, so many groups farm black metal and build up the Plains base before they fight him.
Can black metal go through portals?
Not under the default rules. Black metal scrap and bars are metals, and portals refuse metals. Ship them, build the blast furnace at the Plains base, or switch the server to -modifier portals casual if the group agrees.
