One of the reasons I’ve had to search through so many mountains was finding a spawn location for Moder. It ended up being a lot harder than it should have been. At the very least I had a location it was at.
From my best guess I think it was so hard for me to find a mountain range with Moder on it I had yet to discover the exact location before the game got patched. As a result, I had some areas that had three eggs at them but I did not fully search yet.
When the game patches or has an update from my understanding anything that has yet to be searched gets rerolled under the new rules of the game. As they add in new areas those new areas have to be found on the randomly generated map. So that could be my issue in why I had to go so far away to find Moder.
The other possibility is I was just so unlucky in having one spawn near where I was searching. I had found quite a few mountains and I’m quite certain there are no Moder spawn locations on them. At the very least the new mountain I found last time had a bunch of new stuff and most importantly the boss I want to take out to move forward.
I was still not quite ready for the fight yet. One area I’ve been slacking on for quite some time is having some better food. That would require going out and gathering some crafting materials to make a cultivator and the upgrades for the cooking cauldron.
After that, I planted some carrots and onions. To be able to make some better foods I was going to need better ingredients. I reserved some of them to replant as seeds so I could just keep this garden going without having to find further stuff in the wild.
I even went out looking around for bee hives. I ended up finding two bee queens and making two bee hives back at my base. While I ended up not needing the honey for the time being I’m sure there will be a time where I want a stockpile of it on hand to use.
It was then time to return to the mountain. In my past exploration of the area, I had marked down the location of all the eggs I could find. Each one weight 200 so unless you are almost empty you are only going to be carrying one at a time anyway.
This mountain is also quite a pain in the you-know-what to get around. Lots of steep areas. So even if I wanted to go around picking up all the eggs at once there was no way I’d make it back. As such I went around picking one up at a time and dropping them off at the boss spawn location.
I ended up not placing the final third egg on the placeholder. I waited till the area was ready and I was going to fight the boss itself. While some boss fights I got away without doing much to the area around me. This one I’d rather be over-prepared for than not at all.
Moder has an issue hitting targets that are under it. It also tends to leave you alone if it loses line of sight. As such the plan was to dig an area around the spawning platform that slopped down. With the back half covered that would have some extra supplies and provide a safe area to regen health as needed.
For whatever reason drakes seem to be rather protective of this area. I ended up wasting well over 100 fire arrows dealing with what felt like a never-ending attack of them on me. This slowed down the work I was doing. I also needed to go back and craft up more fire arrows.
I ended up having around 300 fire arrows and 300 normal wooden arrows. Fire arrows would be my main choice to use. I did have somewhat of a concern that my upgraded bow would still end up breaking with how long this fight was so I brought a backup.
I also made sure to put down a lot of flooring in the back half where I wanted it to be sheltered. I fully expected since it was just wood to take on some damage during this fight. I was hoping with there being a few layers that would end up not being a huge issue.
This fight to my shock ended up being a lot easier than I was expecting. It turns out Moder has become quite lazy over the years. Perhaps it’s because it took forever to find. Either way, a fight I was not looking forward to ended up being not as bad as I was expecting.
Once everything was ready I placed the final egg and had Moder the boss spawn in. After just landing a couple of shots to my shock the dragon went and flew off to a nearby mountain peak and stood there. I have no idea what it was thinking. I however knew what I was going to do about it. I opened up a barrage of arrows.
Every once in a while it seemed Moder got bored of me pelting arrows on it and it would come flying down. It would breathe some ice shards at me and I’d just simply get out of the way. I’d trade some blows back with the creature. It then would go back to another area and land in.
Despite that, this still ended up being quite a long fight. It also really looked like my better bow would end up breaking before I took Moder down. The shelter I had built mostly went unused.
This fight went back and forth like that for quite some time. This had to be at least a 45-minute fight if not longer. This is not a fight you just start for a casual thing to do.
At one point Moder the dragon did something really stupid. It went to land on another spot that was within easy range of me jumping onto it. I was not going to pass up my opportunity to get full sword hits on the beast if I could help myself.
I just did my best to stay under and out of the way of attacks. Sometimes I’d take a slight hit of something. The bigger issue was running out of stamina and trying to not roll off this little ledge I now found myself having a melee fight with a dragon on.
After removing quite a decent chunk of the health of this creature it flew off again. Needless to say, it was not going to make that last mistake again. The final parts of the fight were perhaps the more challenging ones. It did a lot less resting and a lot more being in a position where its attacks were not getting blocked by terrain.
I do feel like I lucked out on this fight. I could see this fight raging on forever and requiring a lot more arrows than I used if the mountain Moder kept landing on was not blocking all its ranged attacks.
Final Thoughts
With the creature now defeated I had ten Dragon’s Tears to use. I returned to my base to craft up an Artisan table, blast forge, and mount the Moder trophy. This is one of those things I’m glad to have out of the way. Next up it would be off to the plains for me and I already have a couple of locations marked off to go check on the map.
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Valheim.
