Would you like to know how to create Valheim portals and how they work? Valheim is a big open world, and without a traditional fast travel system, players can only run or sail to find their way around the sprawling map. It may take you a while to explore and then safely return to your home base.
However, there is a way to cover great distances in just a few seconds using portals. Portals are structures that you won’t find and build, and there are some important limits to what you can get through them.
How to make portals
Portals are craft items on the Miscellaneous tab of your hammer’s craft menu. To create a portal, a Workbench within reach and these resources in your inventory:
- 10 graydwarf eyes
- 20 fine wood
- 2 surfing colors
When you’ve created and placed a portal, interact with E to set a tag. An area opens in which you can enter.
You need to create another portal using the same tag to use the quick travel portal. For example, if you build a portal at your base and one in the swamp and label both as “swamp”, you can travel back and forth between these two portals by stepping through them.
Both portal tags must match so that the portals can be activated. Tags are case-sensitive. Any player can set or change a portal tag, even if they have not created the portal.
As long as two portals use the same tag, they will be connected. So if you have a portal in the levels with the tag “Levels” and a portal in the swamp with the tag “Swamp” and a third portal in your base, you can edit the tag of your base portal in “Levels” or “Swamp”, depending on which place you want to travel to. You can also create a fourth portal on your base so that two pairs of dedicated portals for Swamp and Plains are active at all times.
(Photo credit: Iron Gate Studios)
Some items cannot go through portals
Before you start believing that your travel problems are resolved, you should know that certain items cannot pass portals. If you placed a portal near a metal deposit and thought you could charge up and get back to base quickly – you can’t. Ore and metal bars cannot be passed through portals.
Here is the list of what you can’t get on a portal:
- Tin ore and tin
- Copper ore and copper
- bronze
- Iron ore and iron
- Silver ore and silver
- Black scrap metal
It seems a bit arbitrary considering that you can craft bronze into armor and weapons and pass them through a portal, but bronze bars can’t go through when they’re in your pocket. But I suspect the Valheim developers want you to travel on foot or by boat and have to haul your metal loot around in carts. Otherwise, it might just be too easy to get around Valheim when you’ve built a few portals.
But portals are incredibly useful even without being able to transport metals. In a procedurally created world with diverse biomes, including vast and dangerous oceans, traveling to a new part of the world can be a daunting journey on foot or by boat. Once you’ve reached a place far away, it is a blessing for any Viking to build a portal and travel there quickly and easily.
