• Guide

How to build portals and fast travel - Valheim

Learn how to craft portals and fast travel around the world in Valheim.

Josh Hawkins

February 22, 2021 2:00 PM

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Each world in Valheim is massive and getting places can be grueling—especially when you aren’t properly equipped to navigate the more difficult biomes. Luckily, you can craft special portals, which you can then link together to help make moving around the world much easier. This allows you to use a fast travel system similar to many other games, and you’ll find it exceptionally useful, especially as you expand your exploration efforts.

How to build Portals and fast travel - Valheim

Portals are a very important part of traveling in Valheim, especially if you don’t want to have to run long distances every time you need to visit another one of your bases or die while fighting powerful mobs in the different areas of the world. Thankfully, crafting a Portal isn’t all that difficult, though there are a couple of key items you’ll need to unlock along the way.

First, you’re going to need to get yourself a Bronze Axe. Bronze can be made by combining 2x Copper with 1x Tin. You’ll then need the following materials at a Forge to create a Bronze Axe:

• 4x Wood
• 8x Bronze
• 2x Leather Scraps

When you’ve crafted your Bronze Axe, you can then chop down Birch and Oak trees, which will reward you would Fine Wood. Gathering just one piece of Fine Wood will unlock the Portal recipe, allowing you to use a Hammer to place down Portals. Like most of the other crafting stations you can build, you’ll need to be within a Workshop’s range to build a Portal.

Building a Portal will require a variety of materials, which we’ve broken down below:

• 20x Fine Wood
• 2x Surtling Core (found in Burial chambers in the Black Forest)
• 10x Greydwarf Eye (found by killing Greydwarf mobs in the Blake Forest)

The important thing to remember here, though, is that you will need a second Portal in order to fast travel. Because of this, we recommend putting down a single Portal at your main base and then heading to the location that you want to set up a secondary Portal.

When you’ve built two Portals you can connect them in one of two ways—first, you can simply leave the name blank and it will connect to any other Portal that is currently uncategorized. If you want to name a Portal something specific—we usually name ours based on where they are in the world, for example, we have a portal named Bonemass because it takes us right to the swamp near the Bonemass Spawn in our world—then you can select the Portal by looking at it and enter the name. Just remember that the Portal back at your base will need to be named the same thing if you want to connect it.

This naming convention has led to many players setting up Portal hubs at the bases, which allows them to have one main Portal that they can always connect to, as well as different Portals named for their other Portals that they’ve set up around the world.

Now that you know how to build Portals and fast travel, make sure you check out our other Valheim guides like how to find Silver. It’s also worth nothing that there are certain items that can’t pass through Portals—like Ores and Metals—so you’re going to need to travel the old-fashioned way if you want to take those back to your base.

Josh Hawkins

Guides Editor

Joshua holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and has been exploring the world of video games for as long as he can remember. He enjoys everything from large-scale RPGs to small, bite-size indie gems and everything in between.