Valheim guide: Portals

Valheim’s world is big, and lugging your resources from place to place can get exhausting — even with boats like karves and longships. Luckily, Valheim allows you to build portals and link two locations with a teleporter.

This guide will tell you what you need to build a portal and teach you how they work.

Building portals

Picking up your first piece of fine wood unlocks the ability to build portals (10 greydwarf eyes, 20 fine wood, 2 surtling cores).

• Greydwarf eyes are drops when you kill greydwarfs in the meadows, black forest, and swamp biomes.
• Fine wood comes from birch trees in meadows and black forest biomes. You need a bronze axe or better to cut them down.
• Surtling cores are found in burial chambers in the black forest biome.

Since portals need to be paired, we recommend always building one near your favorite base camp, and then exploring with enough resources to build a second. That way you’ve got a quick way home to regroup or a quick way back to the frontier when you die.

Linking portals

Portals have a direction. The front — the side you’ll exit from — has runes carved into it. There’s also a branch sticking out one side that’s a little lower. Put that lower branch on your right, and you will be facing the portal’s opening.

When you place a portal, interact with it to tag it. Type a word or name you’ll remember — this is what will link two portals to one another. Try to make it something descriptive and specific. Tags are case sensitive.

Image: Iron Gate Studio/Coffee Stain Publishing via Polygon

Add a marker to your map with a portal’s tag. That way, you’ve got an easy reference when you inevitably forget.

When you build a second portal, tag it with the same word. After a second, it will link to your first one, glow bright orange, and you can teleport. (If it doesn’t seem to update, take a step back and approach it again.

Only two portals can share the same tag. If you tag a third portal with the same word, one of the first two will be disconnected. Based on our testing, the one that disconnects seems random.

Metal prevents you from using portals

Image: Iron Gate Studio/Coffee Stain Publishing via Polygon

Some items — specifically raw metal and ores — can’t be teleported. Think of it as going through an airport scanner or, you know, Terminator rules. After a metal has been turned into another item like a weapon or armor, it’s safe to travel with.

You can see what items can and can’t go through a portal in your inventory. Items that won’t teleport have a little portal icon with a red X through it in the upper right corner of their slot. There will also be a note in the item description.