Valheim: How to Get Surtling Cores for the Smelter

Surtling Cores are the little red cubes that gate the entire middle of Valheim. Until you have them, you cannot smelt copper, you cannot make charcoal, and you cannot build a portal — which means every ore run is a walk. They are not rare, exactly, but they only live in two places, and both of them want to kill you.

Quick answer: Clear a Burial Chambers dungeon in the Black Forest and pick the glowing red cores off the little wooden stands inside. Five cores plus 20 Stone at a Workbench builds the Smelter.

Burial Chambers in the Black Forest: the earliest source

Burial Chambers are the small stone dungeons scattered through the Black Forest, marked by a low stone doorway leading underground. Skeletons wandering the trees are the giveaway — if something bony is swinging at you out in the open, there is almost certainly an entrance nearby. Mark it on your map, and mark the ones you have already stripped, because they all look identical from the outside.

Prep before you go in. Craft a couple of torches (1 Wood and 1 Resin each), bring a Club or a Flint Axe, repair your gear, and eat three different foods so your health bar is full. Skeletons shrug off arrows and swords but fold to blunt damage, so the Club is doing most of the work here.

Valheim HUD showing a food buff granting plus 35 Health and plus 12 Stamina — Eating three foods before the dungeon pushes your health and stamina up — here, +35 Health and +12 Stamina. Image: Iron Gate Studio

Clear the skeletons standing guard outside the entrance. Fight them in the open where you can circle and block, not in the doorway, and pick up the Bone Fragments they drop while you are there.

A skeleton guarding the Burial Chambers entrance, with the weapon slot selected on the hotbar. Shown at 00:08 in PazarGamingGuides’s video. Image: Iron Gate Studio

Head down and light a torch. Past the doorway you usually hit a central space with three hallways branching off it. Leave every door you open standing open — that is your breadcrumb trail back to the surface when the layout starts repeating on you.

Skeleton nameplate visible as the player swings mid-attack inside a dark dungeon corridor — Skeletons keep spawning in the corridors while you search for the core rooms. Image: Iron Gate Studio

Break the bone piles fast. Those shrines keep spawning skeletons for as long as they stand, so hitting them the moment you see one stops a corridor fight from turning into a siege. Expect ghosts and the elite Rancid Remains too — the elite hits harder and can poison you, so back off and heal rather than trading blows.

Blunt weapons are the answer to skeletons and the tougher Rancid Remains alike. Shown at 00:51 in PazarGamingGuides’s video. Image: Iron Gate Studio

Look for the glowing red cubes resting on small wooden stands, usually in dead-end rooms deep in the dungeon. They come in clusters, so once you find one stand, sweep the rest of that wing. Chests in these dungeons can hold cores as well, so open everything.

Valheim gameplay moment inside a burial chamber during a core run — A single good chamber can cover both the Smelter and the Charcoal Kiln. Image: Iron Gate Studio

Watch your weight and haul out. Each core weighs 5 and stacks to 10, so a big haul eats your carry capacity quickly. Dump them at base and go back for the rest of the dungeon rather than staggering home overloaded.

Dungeon contents are randomized, so one chamber might hand you eight cores and the next only two. Aim to clear two or three if you want portals on top of your first smelting setup.

Farm Surtlings for an unlimited supply of cores

The other source is the creature the item is named after. Surtlings are small fire elementals that spawn in packs around fire geysers — a few appear near geysers and rune stones in the Black Forest, but the Swamp is where they pour out endlessly. They throw fireballs that hurt through armor, so this is not a fight you want at melee range early on.

What makes them worth the trip is that they never run out. Every kill has a shot at a core, and higher-level Surtlings drop more.

Surtling level	Cores dropped	Drop rate
1	1	~50%
2	2	100%
3	4	100%

The trick everyone eventually builds: Surtlings die on contact with water. Rain does nothing, but a body of water kills them instantly. Dig out the ground around a Swamp geyser with a pickaxe until it floods, and the spawns drown themselves. Set the pit up from a distance, walk away, and come back later to collect the cores off the water line.

Note: build the pit, then step back. Standing next to a geyser waiting for spawns in the Swamp is how a core run ends in a corpse run.

Late-game sources: bonfires and Dvergr lanterns

Two more sources open up much later. Recycling the materials of bonfires in captured Fuling villages returns cores, and destroying naturally spawned Dvergr lanterns in the Mistlands has a chance to drop them. Neither is a realistic early-game plan, but both are worth knowing once you are already out there tearing structures down.

If you are testing on your own world and do not care about the hunt, cores can be spawned from the console. Open the console with F5, enable cheats with devcommands, then use spawn SurtlingCore.

How many Surtling Cores the Smelter and everything else needs

Ten cores covers the two builds that matter first. The Smelter turns ore into bars, the Charcoal Kiln turns wood into the coal that fuels it, and they should sit next to each other. Both are built with the Hammer inside a Workbench’s range.

Build or craft	Cores	Other materials
Smelter	5	Stone x20
Charcoal Kiln	5	Stone x20
Portal	2	Finewood x20, Greydwarf Eye x10
Ward	1	Finewood x5, Greydwarf Eye x5
Bonfire	1	Ancient Bark x5, Corewood x5, Finewood x5
Stone Oven	4	Iron x15, Stone x20
Blast Furnace	5	Finewood x20, Iron x10, Stone x20
Battering Ram	2	Flametal x10
Staff of Embers	4	—
Dvergr Lantern	1	Bronze x2, Crystal x1

Cores are teleportable, so unlike ore and bars you can carry them through a portal. Once portals exist, that turns every future core run into a quick round trip.

How to confirm the Smelter unlocked

You will know the moment it lands. Picking up your first cores fires off unlock messages in the corner of the screen — New build piece Smelter, New build piece Charcoal Kiln, along with the Coal Pile and Sign. After that, equip the Hammer and the Smelter appears in the Crafting tab of the build menu.

If the Smelter shows up but stays greyed out, it is one of two things. Either you are standing outside a Workbench’s build radius, or you are short on the 20 Stone. The recipe itself never unlocks a second time, so once those messages have appeared, the piece stays in your menu permanently.

One last use worth remembering: drop a core into a burning fire pit and it sends a bright signal into the sky, which is a cheap way to mark your position for other players on a server. Beyond that, just keep collecting. Ten cores gets you smelting, but portals eat two per end, and you will want a lot more of those than you think.