Valheim: How to Get Freeze Glands

Freeze Glands are the gate between you and some of Valheim’s best frost gear. The material feeds Frostner, Frost Arrows, the Staff of Frost, and one very useful food item, and there is exactly one creature in the whole game that carries it. That creature spends its entire life in the air above a snowy mountain, which makes this a ranged-weapon job from start to finish.

Quick answer: Kill Drakes in the Mountain biome with a bow. They are the only source of Freeze Glands, and every Drake drops at least one at a 100% rate.

What you need before climbing the Mountain

The Mountain biome is normally the step you take after Bonemass, the game’s third boss. The cold alone will kill you without protection, and Drakes are not the only thing up there. Wolves, Fenring, and Stone Golems all patrol the same slopes.

Frost protection, either the Wolf Armor Set or a Frost Resistance mead.
A bow and a healthy stack of arrows. Drakes never land, so melee weapons are useless against them.
Food buffs before you start the climb, since fighting on steep terrain drains stamina fast.
A large Mountain biome. Small patches of mountain rarely spawn Drakes.

Building a small outpost with a portal near the peaks turns this into a repeatable farm instead of a long one-way trek. Freeze Glands are teleportable, so you can carry them home through a portal.

How to find and kill Drakes

Head for the Mountain biome. Every world seed has a different map layout, so there is no fixed direction to walk. Look for high elevation and snow on the horizon, or check your map for white terrain ringed by Black Forest.

Climb toward the highest ground with your bow already equipped on the hotbar. Drakes concentrate around peaks and upper ridges, and the taller the area, the more of them you will see. A runestone sitting at the top of a mountain is a good sign you are in a spawn area.

Climbing a snowy Valheim mountain slope during a storm with the bow selected on the hotbar — Running up the snowy slopes with the bow already selected in hotbar slot two. Image: Iron Gate

Watch the sky rather than the ground. Drakes circle overhead and make a screeching noise when they spot you, then open with ranged frost attacks from a distance. They typically fire three shots in a row, so keep moving between volleys.

A Drake circling in the sky above a Valheim mountain peak — A Drake hovering near the peak, spotted before it starts firing frost projectiles. Image: Iron Gate

Draw your bow and shoot. A well-placed shot or two is often enough to bring one down. If the Drake has not noticed you yet, a sneak attack lands bonus damage and can end the fight in a single hit.

Player aiming a drawn bow at a Drake flying over the mountain — Lining up a bow shot on a Drake, the only way to fight a creature that never lands. Image: Iron Gate

Track where the body falls and go pick up the loot. Drakes burst apart when killed, and the drop lands on the terrain below, which on a mountain often means sliding down a rocky slope to reach it.

Collecting Freeze Gland loot from the rocks after a Drake is killed — Sliding down to collect the Freeze Glands dropped where the Drake fell. Image: Iron Gate

You know it worked when the pickup message appears on screen, reading Added Freeze Gland x2 or whatever quantity that Drake carried. The item will also show in your inventory with the description “This mysterious organ keeps a perfect temperature.”

How many Freeze Glands a Drake drops

The drop is guaranteed, so nothing here is luck-based. The only variable is the Drake’s star level, and a two-star Drake pays out four times what a plain one does.

Drake level	Freeze Glands	Drop rate
Level 1	1	100%
Level 2	2	100%
Level 3	4	100%

What Freeze Glands are used for

Three craftable items and one food recipe need the material. Frost Arrows are the most common reason to farm it, since a single gland yields a batch of 20 arrows that deal piercing and frost damage and slow whatever they hit.

Item	Freeze Glands	Other materials
Frost Arrow	1	Wood x8, Obsidian x4, Feathers x2
Frostner	5	Ancient Bark x10, Silver x30, Ymir Flesh x5
Staff of Frost	4	Yggdrasil Wood x20, Refined Eitr x16
Eyescream	1	Greydwarf Eye x2

Frostner is a blunt weapon that also deals frost damage and is built at a level 3 Forge, which makes it a strong pick against undead enemies. Eyescream is cooked in a Cauldron and raises your maximum health by 21 and maximum stamina by 65, so a stack of glands is worth keeping around purely for food.

Freeze Gland item stats and spawn code

Item type: Monster Part / Material
Weight: 0.5 per unit
Stack size: 50
Teleportable: yes, it passes through portals
Internal ID: FreezeGland

If you would rather skip the climb entirely, the item can be spawned from the developer console. Open the console with F5, enable cheats, then spawn the material.

devcommands
spawn FreezeGland

Farming this by hand is not difficult once you have the frost protection and a decent bow, it is just a matter of staying on high ground where Drakes actually spawn. Set up a portal near a peak, clear the wolves on your way in, and a few circuits will leave you with enough glands for a full stack of Frost Arrows and then some.