Valheim Swamp and Bonemass guide for groups on a server

The Swamp is where a Valheim group either learns to work together or starts dying one at a time. The plan that works is simple: one player holds the swamp key and opens sunken crypts, two or three clear them with blunt weapons while one mines muddy scrap piles, and the iron goes home by boat or cart because portals will not take it. Build a raised forward camp with a portal on solid ground at the Swamp's edge, brew poison resistance mead before anyone goes in, and fight Bonemass as a full group with maces, not swords or arrows. His wishbone is what lets you find silver in the Mountains. Kill him only when everyone is ready, because the drake raids start the moment he dies.

What the Swamp asks of a group#

The Swamp is the first biome that punishes a group for drifting apart. Visibility is poor, it rains often, the ground is waterlogged and broken by deep pools, and the creatures come in mixed packs: draugr with swords and bows, leeches in the water, blobs that poison, and at night wraiths. A lone player in bronze armour is a tombstone waiting to happen. Four players moving together, with someone covering the rear, are fine.

It is also the first biome where the reward cannot simply be portalled home. Iron is the point of the Swamp, and under default rules iron does not go through portals. That turns the Swamp from a dungeon crawl into a logistics problem, which is where a group's division of labour really pays off.

Before anyone sets out, check three things:

1. The swamp key. The Elder drops it, and it opens every sunken crypt. It is not consumed, but it is one item in one inventory. If two teams want to work crypts at the same time, summon The Elder again for a second key. The Meadows and Black Forest group start covers that fight.
2. A boat. Swamps are rarely next to the starting area. A Karve, built with bronze nails, carries two people and a useful load of ore; the Longship needs iron nails and ancient bark from the Swamp itself, so it comes after your first runs.
3. The portal rule. Agree now whether the server runs the default rules, where metal walks home, or -modifier portals casual, which lets ore and metal through. It is a launch argument and changes this whole guide; portal rules and teleport restrictions has the detail.

Gear and food before the first trip#

Going into the Swamp in Black Forest gear works, but only with care. A sensible minimum for each player:

Poison resistance mead comes from the fermenter, which needs bronze to build. The mead base is made at the cauldron and then left to ferment, which takes time, so brew a batch for the whole group a session before the first crypt run. The same goes for healing meads. Food in this stage is mostly what the Black Forest gave you - deer stew, boar jerky, queens jam, carrot soup - with sausages, black soup and turnip stew arriving once you start bringing swamp ingredients home: entrails from draugr, bloodbags from leeches, and turnip seeds, which grow in the Swamp.

A forward camp at the Swamp edge#

Do not try to run the Swamp from the main base. Build a forward camp where the Swamp meets a calmer biome, ideally on the coast where the boat lands:

• A portal, tagged clearly (for example swamp1 on both ends), so people can travel in and out. Players can always teleport; only their ore stays behind.
• A workbench and a repair station, because swamp fights wear gear down quickly.
• Beds and a fire under a roof, so a death in a crypt means a short run back rather than a trip home.
• A chest for scrap iron, so the boat can load from one place.
• Optionally a smelter and kiln, if the group would rather ship bars than ore. Iron bars are no more portal-friendly than scrap, but a forward smelter means the main base does not need to be on the coast.

Build on solid ground or on a raised wooden platform. Swamp creatures spawn freely in open swamp at night, and a camp in the middle of it is raided by the biome itself. A camp just outside the Swamp's edge is quiet.

On a server, the forward camp is also a zone that someone has to simulate. If it is small and nobody leaves fires and smelters running there unattended, it costs almost nothing; a camp that grows into a second main base becomes one more busy zone. Base placement for shared servers covers the trade-offs, and portal hub design is worth reading before you have twelve portals called swamp.

Sunken crypts as a team#

Sunken crypts are half-submerged stone buildings with a heavy door that only opens with the swamp key in someone's inventory. Inside are corridors and rooms with draugr, skeletons and blobs, body piles that keep spawning draugr until destroyed, chests, and the reason you came: muddy scrap piles, which give scrap iron when mined with a pickaxe. Bring a bronze pickaxe at least.

A crypt is a dungeon. When you go through the door you are moved into a separate interior space, which has two consequences on a server. Raids never target a player inside a dungeon, so a group in a crypt is safe from base raids for the duration. And whoever enters first simulates the interior, so the player with the most stable connection should open the door and walk in first.

A crypt team of four works well like this:

1. Key holder and lead. Opens the door, carries torches, takes the front with a shield. Parries draugr and calls out body piles.
2. Second melee. Blunt weapon, stays beside the lead, kills skeletons and destroys body piles as soon as they are found.
3. Miner. Follows behind, mines every scrap pile the moment a room is clear. Carries the pickaxe and leaves the fighting to the others.
4. Rear guard. Bow and a shield, watches the corridor behind, pulls aggro from anything that spawns behind the group.

Clear rooms fully before mining. A miner swinging a pickaxe with a draugr at their back loses more than a bar of iron. When the miner's inventory is heavy, the group walks out together, unloads at the forward camp, and goes back in.

Crypts also hold withered bones, which Bonemass's altar needs - collect every one you find, in the shared boss chest, until you have ten.

Iron runs without portals#

Scrap iron comes out of the crypt as ore and has to become iron bars at a smelter. Under default rules, none of it can be teleported. The choices:

• Boat. The usual answer. A Karve carries a modest load; the Longship, once built, carries far more and has room for the crew. One player sails, one watches for serpents in deep water, and the rest stay at the crypts. Sailing and ships in multiplayer covers ownership and rubber-banding at sea.
• Cart. Fine for a Swamp that borders the base's own landmass. Carts need a cleared, fairly level path, and the Swamp's pools make them awkward over the last stretch.
• Forward smelter. Smelt at the Swamp edge, then ship bars. This does not solve the portal problem, but it means one smelter does the work while miners keep mining.
• `portals casual`. Lets scrap iron and bars straight through. It turns iron runs into a short walk; whether that is a fix or a loss of the game's character is a group decision, not a technical one.

A boat carrying the group's iron is a single point of failure. Unload into chests at the main base promptly, do not leave a loaded boat moored at sea overnight, and if a boat sinks with ore aboard, the cargo floats as a crate for a while - another reason to sail with two. Ore logistics with ships and carts goes deeper on staging, routes and when the effort stops being worth it.

Iron brings the iron pickaxe, which you will need to mine silver, iron weapons and the iron armour set, and the iron nails the Longship needs. Ancient bark, from the ancient trees in the Swamp, is the other Longship ingredient and needs at least a bronze axe.

The Bonemass fight#

Bonemass is summoned with ten withered bones at his altar in the Swamp. His location is revealed by a Vegvisir, often found in or near a sunken crypt; as with every Vegvisir, reading it marks only the reader's map, so pin it and share the route.

He is a huge, slow mass of bone and slime. He poisons everything near him, hits hard at close range, and spawns blobs and skeletons around the arena. He is immune to poison, resists slash and pierce damage strongly, and is weak to blunt. That last fact is the whole fight: swords and arrows tickle him, maces and sledges do the work.

Bonemass checklist- 10 withered bones (shared boss chest)- iron or bronze mace for every melee player; a sledge if you have one- poison resistance mead for everyone, plus healing meads- best three foods, eaten just before summoning- iron armour if possible; at least bronze- portal to the forward camp, beds there, a spare set of gear in a chest- a world backup taken before the fight

Group tactics that work:

• Clear the adds. One or two players with blunt weapons deal with the skeletons and blobs he spawns, so the maces on Bonemass are not interrupted. Skeletons die quickly to blunt too.
• Rotate on the poison. His poison is the real damage. Players on him should drink mead before engaging, step back to heal when their health drops, and come back in rather than trading blows until they die.
• Use the terrain. The altar sits in swampy ground. Watch your footing; getting knocked into a pool with leeches nearby is the classic death.
• Send the best connection first. As with every boss, the player with the steadiest connection should be the one who places the bones and stands in the arena, so the boss zone is simulated by them.

Bonemass scales with the number of players near him, like every boss, so a group of five meets a much tougher Bonemass than a solo player - but five maces still beat one. How enemies scale with player count explains how far that goes.

He drops the wishbone and his trophy. The trophy, hung at the starting stones, gives Bonemass's power: a large reduction in physical damage for a short time, which makes it the best power for a hard fight. Each player selects it at the stone themselves, as described in forsaken powers in multiplayer.

The wishbone is worn and pings when you are near something buried: silver veins in the Mountains and buried treasure. It is the key to the next stage, and one wishbone is only one player. If the group wants two mining teams in the Mountains, summon Bonemass again.

Swamp raids and the drakes that follow#

The raid table changes twice in this stage, and both changes matter.

From the moment The Elder dies, the draugr raid can arrive at any base where a player is home. Draugr hit harder than greydwarfs and come with archers; a wooden wall slows them but does not stop them. A raised earth ring dug with the hoe, a stone wall where you can afford it, and two players with bows on a platform make it manageable. Side events from this era, such as skeletons and blobs, can appear too; the exact list has shifted between versions, and the raids and events on servers post covers how they are rolled.

Killing Bonemass retires the swamp raids and enables the drake raid. Drakes fly, ignore walls and spit frost, and a base with no archers is helpless against them. That is the honest reason to wait for the whole group before the Bonemass fight: the player who missed it comes home to a world where drakes now visit their house.

For a group that wants the Swamp without the pressure, the raids modifier turns raids down or off, and -setkey playerevents makes each player's raid fit their own progress. Both are set at launch and take effect on the next restart.

Death, tombstones and corpse runs in the Swamp#

The Swamp is where most groups first lose a tombstone. When you die, your tombstone holds everything you carried, and you respawn at your bed with nothing. In the Swamp the tombstone is often in a crypt corridor, a pool, or the middle of a draugr camp.

A few rules keep this from becoming an evening-ender:

• Keep a spare kit at the forward camp. A set of bronze armour, a mace and some food in a chest means the dead player can come back armed.
• Recover together. A corpse run is a group job. The dead player cannot fight; the others escort them.
• Do not log off with a tombstone out if you can help it. The tombstone stays in the world either way, but the longer it sits in a busy area the harder it is to reach, and the group may have moved on by the time you are back.
• Know the death penalty. By default a death costs a share of your skill levels, followed by a short grace period in which another death costs no more. The deathpenalty world modifier changes how harsh that is, from casual to hardcore; agree on it before the Swamp, not after the first bad night.

Death penalty and tombstones covers the modifier values, and if a tombstone is truly lost, admin tools for lost tombstones covers what an admin with a devcommands mod can do.

Server habits for this stage#

The Swamp is where a server's housekeeping starts to matter.

1. Back up before Bonemass. Taking a backup before every boss fight is the cheapest insurance you have. If the fight goes wrong, or someone kills him early, the group can go back. Server backups and world corruption explains why the backup has to live somewhere other than the world folder.
2. Shorten the save interval. Long crypt sessions mean a lot of progress between saves. -saveinterval 600 keeps a crash from costing more than ten minutes.
3. Watch memory as the map grows. By the time a group is running iron, the world has a lot of explored zones and several bases. A scheduled weekly restart keeps memory flat on a long-running world.
4. Use the admin `save` command before risky moments. An admin can type save in the console to force a world save immediately, which is a good habit just before a boss summon and after a big iron delivery.

On RE:NODE the backup before Bonemass is one button on the Backups tab, restoring it is another, and backups are stored off the machine they protect. The Schedules tab can run a daily backup and a weekly restart at an hour when nobody is mid-crypt.

The next stage, with silver, frost and flying drakes, is in the Mountains and Moder group guide.

FAQ#

Does every player need a swamp key?

No. The door opens for whoever has the key in their inventory, and the key is not used up. The group can follow the key holder in. A second key, from summoning The Elder again, is only needed when two teams want to run crypts separately.

Why are our arrows doing nothing to Bonemass?

He strongly resists pierce and slash damage. Switch to blunt weapons - a mace or a sledge - and use bows only to deal with the skeletons and blobs he spawns.

Can we carry scrap iron through a portal if we put it in a cart?

No. The restriction is on the item, not the way it is carried, and a cart cannot go through a portal anyway. Either ship it, cart it overland, or change the portals modifier to casual on the server.

Do we all need to be at Bonemass to use his power?

No. The power is taken from his trophy at the starting stones, and each player selects it there. But everyone's base starts getting drake raids the moment he dies, so it is fair to wait for the whole group.

How many crypts does a group need for a full set of iron gear?

It varies with the crypt layouts and how many scrap piles each holds. Plan on several crypts for a group of four or five, and remember that crypts do not refill once mined. On an old world, the nearest crypts may already be empty - resource depletion on long-running servers covers what to do about that.