Did someone say dungeon? I’m there and ready to clear it. It was hard enough not instantly going inside the first dungeon my eyes fell upon. I however now know there are several dungeons in the area and today it was my mission to start clearing them out for Surtling Cores.
This however would not be easy. I mostly just have a spear and a flint knife. Along with my leather armor, I’d just be a couple of hits away from certain death. Thankfully there are some tricks I know that you can get away with in Burial Chambers.
As far as dungeons go in Valheim Burial Chambers are not my favorite dungeon. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them. For the most part, they tend to be rather quick to clear and you not getting the ores you need to make new armor. You are just getting the items needed for crafting the forge, smelter, smithing upgrades, and other stuff. So it feels like you are not making as much progress as you wish you were.
The plan when things would go sideways in these dungeons and they sure would is to make it back to the entrance. There is this edge of a lip that keeps skeletons at bay for the most part. You only then have to worry about ranged skeletons as they can still finish you off.
There is however usually some other stuff they get stuck on or that helps block their ranged attacks. As long as I’m careful I can sit here and just pop out behind the wall that is protecting me and get an arrow shot or two off before needing to hide again.
If all else fails I made sure to do a decent job at clearing around the dungeon at the outside. So I should unless it’s dark or something respawns be able to dip outside and regen some health before going back in. That is usually only required if I’m dealing with ranged attacks.
This place is also quite dark. While having a shield to deal with attacks and arrows would be nice. I rather prefer running these with a torch. Some mushrooms give light off as well. At some point, I’ll be coming back to collect them. For now, I’ll leave them be as Burial Chambers become quite dark without at least them as a light source on top of having a torch.
I always check to see which of the three doors at the start of the dungeon are already open. I find it best to just clear that out first in case anything is wandering around. I’d hate to need to run back just to get trapped by something wandering by from a different section of the dungeon.
I then slowly started to clear out any skeletons I would run into. For the most part, those are not what will end up giving me trouble inside this dungeon at least not in the way you think. It will be running into the skeleton spawn that will spawn them in quicker than I can clear them which will be an issue. At least for now till I upgrade my weapon and gear.
As you can see here at one point I ran into a few more skeletons than I wanted to try and fight off. While there are a couple of coke points such as doors and certain hallways I could use to try and get a one and one fight. I’d rather just stand in safety picking them off with arrow shots since I did not need to worry about ranged damage off these two skeletons.
After some further clearing, I made it to my first room that had Surtling Cores in it. This unlocked my ability to craft the smelter and charcoal kiln. Thankfully I don’t need the kiln right away as I know of a little trick to get around it. So my main focus for the time being was getting enough cores to make the smelter for the ores.
I was at least hoping to pick up enough cores out of my first dungeon run to make the smelter. The game however had different plans for me. When I went to explore the other two areas of this dungeon I ran into skeleton spawners.
That should not have been an issue. However, one was right next to a door creating quite the choke point. By the time I’d kill off one skeleton, another one would spawn and that was even before I could kill the second skeleton. The other one was just as bad of a location. I lacked the damage and the ability to tank damage to get back to it or even hit it with arrows. I did attempt it just did not work out on both of them.
So I ran off to the next Burial Chambers I had marked on the map. This one was loaded with skeletons. Some of them were quite harder than the first dungeon I ran as they were spawning in as a one-star. Thankfully the entryway trick worked to weed out most of them.
This place also had some ranged attackers as well. So I had to play a waiting game of regening some health, popping out to shoot some arrows, and ducking in cover again. Repeating the process a couple of times.
As you might be able to tell I even had a death in this one. Thankfully my corpse was not that hard to recover. The first one was not. I ended up getting killed a second time and that one was in a far more tricky spot.
I had one scary corpse run that required me to go down some stairs into a room of skeletons that had a spawn not that far away that was feeding into the mess. I also had the misfortune of running into a troll without any gear right as I was about to turn into the dungeon itself just getting back in the first place.
All I can say is I’m thankful you have a short period where after you die there is no skill loss. I needed this time around. To make matters even worse this dungeon was quite a way into the Black Forest.
Thankfully I was able to get the cores I needed from this run to get a smelter going. The issue then became having some coal to feed into it to get it to go. That one was easy to resolve since I already had a massive stockpile of something else.
When you leave food too long to cook it burns and turns into coal. I can then could it in the smelter. Since I’ve done way too much hunting I could at least for now get away with being able to refine up some tin and copper ores.
Final Thoughts
I did end up hitting up a third Burial Chamber to pick up some more cores. I ended up having the same issue I had with the first one. There were some nasty skeleton spawners in there that I could not kill off fast enough.
I enjoyed some time before it got too dark off in the meadows hiding from a troll. It looks like it was just not in the cards, for now, to go and find yet another dungeon to check out. Once I’m able to craft up a better weapon clearing out the dungeons I had sections I had to skip it should not be an issue at all.
Other Content
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Valheim.
