Valheim Portals: How to Craft a Portal and Fast Travel

Valheim is a survival game that boasts an expansive, procedurally-generated map that sometimes sees you traveling its lands and oceans at great distance in search of resources. While there is no true fast travel system in place, and your mighty longship will get you to your destination, there are portals to speed things up. Once you build a pair, you can travel from one point to another in an instant.

In this Valheim guide, we’re going to cover portals: how to build them, how they work, and what their limitations are.

How to Craft a Portal

You’ll find the recipe for building this fast travel device in the “Misc” tab of the crafting menu. It becomes available after you pick up your first piece of fine wood. 

To craft one, you will need:

• 10x Grewdwarf eyes
• 20x Fine wood
• 2x Surtling core

You get fine wood by using the bronze axe to chop down oak and birch trees in the Black Forest and Meadows biomes. Alternatively, you can chop up wood from any beached ships you come across. 

You’ll find greydwarf eyes by killing greydwarf enemies in the Black Forest, and surtling cores can be found in burial chambers/tombs in the same regions. 

It’s important to mention that these are the needed resources for one gate; you’ll need two of them to have a complete connection. You’ll also need to build the portal within the area of a workbench.

How Do Portal Tags Work? 

After you’ve gathered your resources and built your first portal at your main base, you now need to give it a tag.

The tag is the key that will connect your portals to one another and can be entered by pressing the “E” and typing in a tag. As long as two jump points share the same tag, they will be connected. 

For example, if you have one in the mountains tagged “mountains,” one in the swamp tagged “swamp,” and a third at your base, you can edit the base jump point tag to “mountains” or “swamp” depending on which location you want to travel to.

Additionally, you could also just build an additional portal at your base, having two pairs of dedicated fast travel points for the mountains and swamp active at all times. 

Your tags are also case sensitive, so if one is labeled “Mountains” and another is labeled “mountains,” they will not connect to each other. 

You Shall Not Pass!

Now, before you go willy-nilly building portals everywhere, you should know that they’re not without their drawbacks. Resources like copper and tin cannot be transported through a portal. In fact, none of the following items can:

• Tin ore/ingot
• Copper ore/ingot
• Bronze
• Iron ore/ingot
• Silver ore/ingot
• Black metal scraps

While it is unfortunate that portals can’t be used to streamline the procurement of metals, it doesn’t make them a pointless novelty. In a procedurally-generated world like Valheim, there can be vast distances between biomes and they can help shorten the gap. 

Instead of trudging through the swamp or slowly sailing your way across the ocean in this Early Access title from Coffee Stain Publishing and Iron Gate Studio, these gates help you get where you’re going faster and encourage you to build out settlements across the map like a true Viking! They’re especially helpful after you find Haldor the Merchant, providing a quick way to access his location and wares. If you’re new to playing Valheim, consider checking out our starter help guide, base construction guide, or article on why fishing is important.