Valheim weapons and armor guide — Crafting your starter gear

Technically, your starter gear in Valheim would include rags. But, after learning about some tips for beginners and crafting basics, it’s time that we discuss the extra stuff you can create once you have a Workbench. Here’s our guide to help you out.

Note: Valheim is currently an Early Access title. As such, mechanics and content may change in due course. For more information, check out our Valheim guides and features hub.

Valheim: Weapons and armors for the early-game experience

Weapons

Flint Axe (4x wood and 6x flint) – Go to a shoreline or riverbank and look at the sand. You’ll find some flint here to make the flint axe. It’s a weapon you’ll often use for DPSing some of the early-game mobs and bosses.

Note: The Flint Axe is the only item here that can be crafted with a level 1 Workbench. The rest require a Chopping Block first (10x flint) so your Workbench can be upgraded to level 2.

Crude Bow (10x wood and 8x leather scraps) and Wood Arrows (8x wood for 20x arrows) – Leather scraps can be obtained from boars. They’re fairly aggressive, but you can sneak up behind them (clobber them when they’re not looking to deal increased damage). The crude bow will be your main source of ranged DPS, and it’s likely the only weapon that’ll let you shoot down deer and birds.

Note: Aiming with the bow can take a while to get used to due to how the arrow travels in the air. Try to aim a bit higher than what the crosshair suggests to accurately hit targets.

Armors

Leather Armor set – By sniping deer in the Meadows biome, you should have a lot of deer hide already. You don’t really need the full set, but it’d help for survivability:

• Leather Helmet – 6x deer hide
• Leather Tunic – 6x deer hide
• Leather Pants – 6x deer hide
• Deer Hide Cape – 4x deer hide and 5x bone fragments (these can drop from skeleton and draugr mobs that you’ll encounter a bit later in the game)

Shields

Wood Shield (10x wood, 4x leather scraps, and 4x resin dropped by greylings) or Wood Tower Shield (10x wood and 4x leather scraps) – The former is a round shield. This kind of shield has average block power, but you can parry attacks. The latter, given the name itself, is a tower shield. Tower shields prevent you from parrying strikes, but they have higher blocking capabilities.

Anyway, the brutal killing of deer and ransacking of the countryside should’ve filled your inventory with lots of materials already. If you want, you can learn about how to build your first base in Valheim.

Valheim is available on Steam as part of the Early Access program. For more information, check out our guides and features hub.