Valheim 1.0: The Fastest Way Past the Black Forest and Bronze Age

Copper is the bottleneck of the Black Forest. Mining a deposit chunk by chunk with an Antler pickaxe burns through durability, daylight, and patience. There is a much faster approach: instead of chipping the node apart, you cut the ground out from under it and let the whole thing fall.

Quick answer: Dig a trench around a Copper Deposit down to bedrock, hollow out the earth beneath it, then break the last supports. The entire node collapses into ore and stone at once.

What you need before you start mining copper

Everything here assumes Eikthyr is dead and you have already done one round of Burial Chambers. The trip is only worth making once you can actually process what you dig up.

An Antler pickaxe, crafted from Eikthyr’s drop.
Surtling Cores from Burial Chambers — five per Smelter and five per Charcoal Kiln.
A hammer and enough wood for a workbench, a bed, a roof, and chests.
Coal or a Charcoal Kiln running, since smelting needs fuel.
A Cart or a Karve if your main base is far from the deposit.

Ore and metal bars cannot go through portals. Plan the route home before you fill your inventory.

How to collapse a copper deposit in one piece

Find a Copper Deposit in the Black Forest. These are the large rocky mounds sitting deeper in the biome, and the interact prompt names them outright when you get close.

A Copper Deposit labelled on screen as the player walks up to it in the Black Forest — The Copper Deposit prompt appears once you are close enough to mine it.

Clear the trees around the deposit. You need the open space to dig, and the wood pays for the camp you are about to build.

Put up a small operating base right next to the node. A raised platform with a thatch roof, a bed, a workbench, a campfire, and a couple of chests is enough. Claim the bed so your spawn point moves here — the game confirms it with a “Spawn point set” message.

Dig a trench all the way around the deposit until you hit bedrock. That tells you exactly where the copper ends and the dirt begins. Shape a set of dirt stairs on one side so you can walk out of the pit instead of being stuck in it.

Go back to the workbench and repair the pickaxe before it breaks. Repairs cost nothing, so top it up every time you pass by.

Start digging underneath the node so it ends up suspended in the air. The overhanging copper counts as cover, which means you get the “sheltered” status down there and can place a second workbench directly under the deposit for instant repairs.

Pickaxe equipped in hotbar slot five while digging into the earth beneath the copper node — Hollowing out the ground under the deposit with the pickaxe selected in the hotbar.

Break the last few pieces of rock still holding the node up. The whole structure drops at once and bursts into a pile of copper ore and stone on the floor of your pit. That collapse is the confirmation the technique worked — if the deposit is still standing, there is a support you have not cut yet.

Smelt the copper at the mine, not at home

Ore is heavy and cannot be teleported, so carrying raw copper across the map is the slowest part of the Bronze Age. Skip it. Drop a Charcoal Kiln and a Smelter in the space you just hollowed out and feed them while you keep mining.

Charcoal Kiln and Smelter placed in the hollowed-out pit beneath the suspended copper node — A kiln and smelter set up directly under the node so ore is processed as you dig.

Once the node is down, expand that into a proper little factory. Several kilns and smelters running side by side in the cleared pit will chew through a full deposit, and sleeping in the bed you already placed fast-forwards the night so the bars are waiting when you wake up. Expect the “You don’t feel rested anymore” prompt as the buff runs out — that is your cue to eat and sleep again if there is still ore in the queue.

When the last of the copper is smelted, open the hammer’s build menu and remove the kilns, smelters, and camp pieces to get the materials back. Surtling Cores are too scarce at this stage to leave behind in the woods.

The hammer build menu open with the repair option highlighted over a stone structure — The hammer’s build menu, used to repair structures and to tear the mining camp back down.

Where to find tin in the Black Forest

Tin never spawns inland. The small glinting deposits sit on the water’s edge — river banks and ocean shorelines inside the Black Forest — in the same places you would look for flint. They take seconds to break, so a single run along a coastline usually covers a full mining trip’s worth of copper.

The ratio matters when you decide how much to grab. One bronze bar takes 2 Copper and 1 Tin at the Forge, so copper is always the limiting ingredient.

What to craft first with bronze

Build a Forge as soon as the bars are home. It is the only place copper and tin become bronze, and it gates every metal tool and weapon in this tier.

The Forge with an on-screen use prompt as the player steps up to craft bronze gear — Interacting with the Forge to turn copper and tin into bronze and craft metal gear.

Craft	What it unlocks
Bronze Axe	Birch and oak trees, and Fine Wood
Cauldron	Better recipes such as Boar Jerky
Mead Ketill	Mead bases for potions
Fermenter	Finished meads
Cultivator	Tilled soil and carrot seeds
Cart	Bulk transport for ore and wood

The Bronze Axe is the single most important item on that list. Fine Wood feeds the rest of the tech tree, including portals, so cutting it early compounds. After that, the Cauldron and the Mead Ketill and Fermenter pair are what keep you alive later — the Swamp punishes anyone without cooked food and resistance meads.

For combat, a Bronze Sword plus a Bronze Buckler covers you, since the buckler is built for parrying. Upgrading to a Bronze Pickaxe is worth the metal too, because it is the tool you will need for the next tier of ore.

Troll Armor vs Bronze Armor: Which to wear

Set	Armor per piece	Movement penalty
Bronze Armor	8	Yes
Troll Armor	6	None

Bronze plate is the stronger set on paper, but it is also expensive and it slows you down. Troll Armor gives up two points of armor per piece, moves at full speed, and costs no metal at all — which leaves your bronze free for the axe, the pickaxe, and your weapons. For most runs through this stage, troll hide is the better trade.

Once the Forge is running, the axe is in hand, and you have a stack of meads and cooked food, the Black Forest has given you everything it owes. The Elder is the exit gate — his Swamp Key opens the Sunken Crypts — and a Karve is enough boat to get you there.