Valheim: How to Get Tin Ore in the Black Forest

Tin is one of the two metals that lift you out of the stone age in Valheim, and unlike most resources it hides in one very specific place. Tin deposits only generate in the Black Forest, and only right up against water. Miss that detail and you can spend an entire in-game day wandering through pine trees without seeing a single node.

Quick answer: Defeat Eikthyr for Hard Antler, craft an Antler pickaxe at a workbench, then swing it at the small pale rocks labelled “Tin deposit” along Black Forest shorelines, riverbanks, and inland lake edges. Each deposit drops 2–4 Tin Ore plus Stone.

Tin Ore requirements: pickaxe, biome, and gear

The hard gate is the pickaxe. Tin deposits cannot be harvested with an axe, a hammer, or your fists, so the Antler pickaxe is the real unlock. You get Hard Antler by killing Eikthyr, the first boss, summoned at a mystical altar with two Deer trophies. Once the antler is in your inventory, the pickaxe recipe appears at any workbench.

If the pickaxe wears down while you are out mining, you do not need to fight Eikthyr again. Stand next to a workbench, open the repair tab, and the tool goes back to full durability for free. A portable workbench near a productive stretch of coast saves a lot of walking.

Bring a weapon too. The Black Forest is home to Greydwarves and the occasional Troll, and mining locks you into a slow animation with your back turned. A shield and a spear or club are enough at this stage.

Where tin deposits spawn in the Black Forest

Tin deposits sit on the ground beside water inside the Black Forest biome. That means ocean coastlines, river shorelines, and the banks of small inland lakes. Deep inside the forest, away from water, there is nothing to find, so the fastest route is to follow the water’s edge and let the coastline do the searching for you.

Confirm the biome before you commit. The biome name flashes on screen when you cross a boundary, and the map colours the Black Forest a much darker green than the Meadows. A shoreline that looks promising in the Meadows will never produce tin.

The nodes themselves are small, low, and noticeably lighter and shinier than the grey boulders scattered around them. To be certain, aim at one from melee range. If the hover text reads “Tin deposit”, it is mineable. If no label appears, it is ordinary rock and not worth the durability.

How to mine a tin deposit

You will know it worked immediately. The first pickup triggers a “New material” popup, and the item feed logs each batch as “Added Tin ore x2” or “Added Tin ore x3”. Your Mining skill also climbs with every swing, and higher levels mean each hit does more damage to the node, so later deposits break faster than your first one did.

Getting Tin Ore before you beat Eikthyr

There are two ways around the pickaxe requirement, and both are situational rather than reliable. Trolls hit hard enough to shatter terrain, so if you can lure one onto a cluster of tin deposits and dodge its swings, its attacks will break the nodes for you and leave the ore on the ground. It is risky at low gear, but it works before the first boss is dead.

The second option is looting. Barrels around the stone ruins scattered through the Black Forest sometimes contain Tin Ore, which means you can find and smelt tin without owning a pickaxe at all. The quantities are small, so treat it as a bonus rather than a farming route.

Tin Ore stats and how to haul it home

Tin Ore is heavy and it cannot go through a portal, which shapes every mining trip. Empty your inventory before you set out, and either sail a raft or karve along the coast or build a small outpost with a chest near the deposits and ferry loads back later. Becoming over-encumbered slows you to a crawl.

Note: the same restriction applies to the smelted Tin bars, so refining the ore at your base does not solve the transport problem. Plan the trip around a boat or a road, not a portal.

Smelting Tin Ore into Tin

Raw Tin Ore has no direct use. Its item description spells it out: “Unrefined tin. Needs to be refined in a smelter.” Building a Smelter requires Surtling Cores, which come from the burial chambers and dungeons of the Black Forest, so most players collect cores and ore on the same expeditions.

Feed the ore into one side of the Smelter and Coal into the other. Hovering over each opening tells you which input it accepts. Coal comes from a charcoal kiln or from food you leave on the fire too long. Each Tin Ore produces one Tin bar, which pops out of the front of the Smelter once it finishes.

Tin is not only a bronze ingredient. It builds the Cauldron and the Mead ketill, which open up the cooking and mead recipes that carry you through the swamp, and it goes into the Butcher knife. Bronze itself unlocks the next tier of tools, armour, weapons, and the karve.

Spawning Tin Ore with a console command

If you are testing a build or playing a world where cheats are fine, Tin Ore can be spawned directly. Open the console with F5, enable cheats, then spawn the item by its internal ID.

devcommands
spawn TinOre

Once you have a rhythm going, tin stops being a bottleneck. One long sail along a Black Forest coast with an empty pack usually returns enough ore for a Cauldron and a first set of bronze gear, and the deposits keep generating in unexplored parts of the map for whenever you need more.