Two Valheim portals connect when they carry exactly the same tag, and only two: a third portal with that tag stays dark. A portal moves you and what is in your inventory, nothing else - not your cart, not your boat, not your wolf - and by default it refuses to move you at all while you carry ore, metal bars or dragon eggs. On a dedicated server the portals world modifier changes that last rule: casual lets everything through, hard restricts portals around boss fights, and veryhard takes portals out of the game. That is nearly the whole system. The rest of this post is how it behaves when ten people share one world, which is where nearly every portal problem actually comes from.
If the server is not running yet, the Valheim dedicated server guide covers setup. Whether your group should change the portal rules at all is a values question as much as a technical one; Valheim world modifiers and presets argues that case and this post sticks to the mechanics.
Building a portal#
The portal is a building piece, placed with the hammer like a wall. The standard recipe:
| Material | Amount | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Fine wood | 20 | Birch and oak, which need a bronze axe |
| Surtling core | 2 | Burial chambers in the Black Forest, surtlings in the Swamp |
| Greydwarf eye | 10 | Greydwarfs in the Meadows and Black Forest |
The fine wood is the real gate. You cannot fell birch or oak with the first axe, so in practice portals arrive once the group has a bronze axe: copper and tin mined with Eikthyr's antler pickaxe, smelted with surtling cores, then turned into bronze. Most groups have their first portal pair somewhere in the Black Forest stage, often just before or after the Elder.
A portal is a structure with health, so it can be damaged by raids and by monsters. It also needs to stand on something: it obeys the same structural support rules as any other piece. A portal built on a raft of floor pieces over water is a portal that eventually falls in.
Tags and how portals pair#
Interact with a placed portal and you get a small text field: the tag. Two portals with the same tag link to each other, wherever they are in the world. Distance does not matter, and neither does biome. There is no portal network and no menu of destinations in the vanilla game: each portal has exactly one partner or none.
What actually happens when you type a tag:
- The tag is stored on the portal object in the world.
- The server periodically looks for portals that have no partner and pairs any two unconnected portals whose tags match exactly.
- Once paired, the two remember each other. The pair holds until one of them is renamed or destroyed.
- When a player comes near a connected portal, its swirl lights up. An unconnected portal stays dark.
That third point is the one that matters on a shared server. Pairing is not "always connect to the newest portal called home"; it is a link made once, between two portals that were both free at the time. Renaming one of a pair breaks the link and frees both ends.
Treat tags as exact strings. Home, home and home with a trailing space are not something you want to depend on matching each other. Pick a convention and stick to it.
An empty tag is still a tag
A freshly built portal has an empty tag, and two portals with empty tags are a matching pair. This is how people end up teleporting into someone else's half-built outpost: two players each built an untagged portal on the same evening, and the server joined them. Name every portal as soon as it is placed.
Duplicate tags on a shared server#
Ten players and one world means tag collisions. Everybody calls their first portal home, everybody calls the one at the swamp swamp. The rule above explains what follows.
- Two portals with the same tag: they pair. Fine.
- Three with the same tag: two of them pair, the third stays dark. Which two is decided by the server's search order, not by who built first or who is closest, so from the players' point of view it looks random.
- Four: possibly two separate pairs with the same name, each working, each leading somewhere different from what the builder intended.
- One of a pair destroyed, and an older unpaired portal with the same tag exists: the survivor pairs with the old one. A raid knocks down your portal at the swamp, and suddenly your base portal leads to somebody else's abandoned camp from three weeks ago.
Base B's portal in that picture is not broken. It is waiting for a partner that will never come while the other two are paired. The fix is not to rebuild it but to rename it.
House rules that prevent all of this:
- Prefix with the owner.
dk-home,ana-swamp,main-plains. Collisions vanish. - Shared destinations get a shared name. A group portal hub uses names everyone agrees on and nobody reuses.
- Rename before you dismantle. When you abandon an outpost, change the tag on its portal to something unique, or deconstruct both ends, so a future portal with the old name cannot inherit the link.
- Keep a list. A sign beside a portal hub with each tag on it is the low-tech version of a portal menu, and it is how a new player finds out what already exists.
What cannot go through a portal#
Teleporting moves your character and inventory. It refuses to start if you carry anything the game marks as not teleportable. The standard list:
| Category | Items |
|---|---|
| Ores | Copper ore, tin ore, iron scrap, silver ore, black metal scrap, flametal ore |
| Metal bars | Copper, tin, bronze, iron, silver, black metal, flametal |
| Other | Dragon eggs |
The pattern is simple: raw and refined metal, plus Moder's eggs. Things made from metal - tools, weapons, armour, nails - teleport fine, as do coins, gems and the valuable treasures you sell to the trader. If a later update adds a new metal, assume it follows the same rule until you have seen otherwise.
Things that are not in your inventory never go with you, under any modifier:
- Carts and their contents. A cart is a vehicle in the world, not an item.
- Boats and their cargo. Same reason.
- Tamed animals. Wolves, boars, lox and the rest stay where they are.
- Other players. Each person walks through on their own.
This is the design intention behind portals, and it is worth understanding before deciding to override it. Valheim's progression is built so that metal has to travel the long way: by cart down a road, by longship along a coast. That is what makes outposts, harbours and roads exist. Portals carry people and food; metal goes by sea.
The portals modifier#
On a dedicated server the portal rules are set by a launch argument and stored in the world:
# Everything, including ore and bars, can be teleported-modifier portals casual# The default rules-modifier portals normal# Restricted around boss fights-modifier portals hard# No portals-modifier portals veryhard| Value | What it does |
|---|---|
casual | Removes the item restriction. Ore, bars and dragon eggs go through |
normal | The default. Metal and dragon eggs are blocked |
hard | Normal rules, plus portals are restricted around boss fights |
veryhard | No portals at all |
A few things about how this behaves in practice.
It is a server rule, not a client rule. Players do not choose it; the world has it. On a panel host it goes in the extra-arguments field on the Startup tab, and takes effect at the next restart. Remember that -modifier takes two separate tokens: -modifier portals casual, not -modifier "portals casual". A malformed modifier is silently ignored, and the first sign of it is somebody saying the ore still will not go through.
The `immersive` preset implies `veryhard` portals. If a group started with -preset immersive and now wants portals, an explicit -modifier portals normal after the preset overrides that one value. Presets set all the modifiers first and individual -modifier arguments override them.
`hard` is the least understood value. Its purpose is to stop people using portals as an escape hatch from boss fights. The in-game modifier screen gives the current description; check it there before relying on the exact radius or behaviour, because this is the value most likely to be tuned in a patch.
`veryhard` on an existing world needs a test. Changing a world that already has a portal network to veryhard is a big step. Before doing it to a live world, restore a copy onto a test server and look at what the existing portals do, so you are not surprised in front of the group.
Portals and server performance#
A portal does nothing while nobody is near it. The cost comes from the trip.
When you teleport, your client unloads the area you left and loads the area you arrive in: the terrain, every building piece and object in the surrounding zones, every creature. The loading screen you see is your machine catching up. A destination in the middle of a huge base is a heavier arrival than one in a small clearing outside it, which is why portalling home to a mature base often stalls for several seconds while the same trip into the wilderness is quick.
Ownership moves with you. If nobody else was at the destination, you become the owner of the objects there and your machine starts simulating them - the fires, the smelters, the animals. If someone else was already there, they stay the owner. Valheim server lag: zone ownership and desync explains why that matters; for portals, the practical lesson is that the hub should not sit inside the heaviest part of the base.
A sensible layout for a group:
- A hub a short walk from the main base, not in the middle of it. Arrivals load the hub area plus the edge of the base, not the whole thing.
- One portal per destination, each tagged with where it goes and labelled with a sign.
- Return portals at each destination tagged the same, so pairing has one possible match.
- Nothing heavy around the hub. No animal pens, no smelting row, no dozens of torches. It is a station, not a living room.
Where to put bases relative to each other and to the hub is a bigger topic, covered in base placement on shared Valheim servers.
Mods that change portals#
The vanilla modifier covers the most common request - teleporting ore - so far fewer servers need a portal mod than before world modifiers existed. What mods still add is mostly about choosing destinations: portals that open a map of every other portal and let you pick one, instead of one fixed partner. TargetPortal by Smoothbrain is the well-known example.
Anything that changes what a portal does is a mod both the server and every client need, because the client is the one teleporting. That makes it PC-only, since Xbox players cannot install mods, and it means everyone must keep the same version. Valheim server mods with BepInEx covers installing a mod on both sides and keeping the set in step. Read the mod's own page for its current requirements before installing; this is exactly the kind of mod that needs updating after a game patch.
On RE:NODE, mods are uploaded through the file manager or SFTP into the server's BepInEx/plugins folder; there is no list of allowed mods, and a backup before you try one is a button on the Backups tab.
Troubleshooting#
The portal does not light up. It has no partner. Check that another portal has exactly the same tag, and that the other one is not already paired with a third portal of the same name. Renaming both ends to a fresh, unique tag is the quickest fix.
It sends me somewhere I did not expect. A duplicate tag. Somewhere in the world there is another portal with the same name that the server paired first. Rename yours with a prefix.
A message that something cannot be teleported when stepping in. You are carrying ore, bars or a dragon egg. Put them in a chest or a cart. If the server is meant to be on portals casual, check the startup line for the two-token form and restart.
The portal worked yesterday and is dark today. Its partner was destroyed or renamed - raids are the common cause. Rebuild or rename the other end.
Long freeze after teleporting home. The base is heavy to load. Move the hub portal to the edge of the base, and see the performance post linked above for what makes a base expensive.
Ore goes through for some players and not others. All players on one server share the world's modifier, so a split like this is almost always a mod installed on some clients and not others. Check every player's mod list matches the server's.
FAQ#
Can more than two Valheim portals share a tag?
They can carry the same tag, but only two of them connect. The server pairs two free portals with matching tags and leaves the rest unconnected. Give every portal a unique name and the problem disappears.
Can I teleport ore on a dedicated server?
Yes, with -modifier portals casual in the launch arguments. It applies to the whole world for everyone, and a restart is needed for the change to take effect. Without it, ore, bars and dragon eggs are blocked.
Do portals work across the whole map?
Yes. Distance and biome make no difference to whether two portals connect. A longer trip only means more to load at the other end if the destination area is busy.
Can tamed animals or carts go through portals?
No, under any setting. Portals move the player and their inventory. Animals, carts and boats have to travel the long way or be replaced at the destination.
Why does a new portal connect to somebody else's?
Both were left with the same tag, often the empty default tag. Name each portal as soon as it is built, and use a personal prefix on a shared server.
Does portals casual work for Xbox players on a crossplay server?
Yes. It is a world modifier set on the server, not a mod, so every platform gets the same rule. That is one of the few portal changes console players can share in.
