After the fall of Moder, I figured I was entering the unfinished part of the game. You know, the long tail where stuff is sort of just there and you make do. Well… Yes and No.

The Plains are a death trap, simply put. You cannot survive there if you’re not always rocking 100+hp. Deathsquitoes come from nowhere, fulings can crit for 90+, and lox are really bulldozers. Everything out there is out to kill you. And to continue Valheim’s penchant for punishing nights, you’re going to get fuling patrols at night, which are hella hard to see.

The twist here is that of all the stuff that drops in the plains, you need an artisan table to use. And you can only craft that at base. So it’s entirely possible to farm all the mats as soon as you start the game (which is insane, but you could), and yet without that table you’d just be filling chests. The part I think isn’t working is the amount of Iron you need to craft the armor. Somewhere around 110 for all of it, and after you’ve come down from the mountains you aren’t looking to go back to the swamps. I wonder if they will use the Black Metal drops instead in the future.

Anyhow, I decided to build myself a nice abobe – more on that in a future post – and really try to figure out how the plains work.

Plains Basics

Each biome has a place you need to raid to get stuff, and the plains are similar. You raid villages, and these are full of, well, fulings. They come in a bunch of flavors, with the ranged spear throwers the worst of the bunch as they hit at weird angles. Shaman are annoying as they shield everyone. Beserkers are smaller trolls, but hit harder. These villages come in different sizes and makeups, though most have 12 or so fulings to clear. You’ll get flax, barley, and black metal here. Used to make armor, food, and weapons respectively.

The challenge with villages is that a) they are uncommon, b) they are insanely dense in enemies, and c) these enemies hit fast. Melee is not going to be an option as you’ll get swarmed. Bow it is, and you will come to appreciate a high (>40) bow skill.

You will spend most of your time in a ship, scanning the coast for villages, taking shore, putting up a portal, eating a buffet, and then going to work clearing out a village. All that’s missing here is mead and it really is the stereotypical viking raid!

And one extra bit worth mention, the fuling shamans shoot fireballs and sometimes you get hit by a torch – so get used to being on fire. At least there are potions here – but you should be able to avoid nearly all of it anyhow.

Finding Yagluth

I am going to just put this out here, but this part stinks. It stunk for Moder and it stinks here. You need to find a tiny runestone in massive biomes that you are scanning from shore. You’re looking out for stone structures similar to Stonehenge to have a chance to find one. I found quite a few stone structures in my travels. It turned out to be a single arch that had a stone right next to it… nearly impossible to see if I hadn’t died to a damn mosquito next to it.

Fine. Yagluth was due north from my base.

Summoning Yagluth

This part wasn’t clear to me as even with killing the villages I couldn’t see what it was I should be using. For the other bosses it was super obvious – either it dropped like candy or flashed (Moder’s eggs). Here, not so much. It took a while but I did eventually figure out it was Fuling Totems. I thought they were shaman trophies at first, since that’s when I got my first one. But I eventually noticed in another camp that they put the totem on a stick and it emitted an eerie light. One I found Yagluth’s area, it said I needed 5 of these things.

Of course even after 10 villages I only had 3. Instead of taking out the village for the fun of it, I started being super selective and only bothered attacking if it had a clearly visible totem. 5 in hand, I headed back to the altar.

You can’t see it here, but where that big tree is on the left there? Yeah, that’s a huge fuling village. More on that in a bit.

I showed up to the altar with max Frostner, Porcupine, Draugr Bow, Black Metal Shield, fire resist potions, medium healing potions, and having just gulped Lox Pie, Blood Pudding, and Turning Stew.

The Battle

Yagluth is a damn cool looking boss – feels like it’s straight out of a JRPG. A half corpse skeleton that shoots fire. He has 3 moves and no real cooldowns.

Lifting his right (your left) hand, he smashes down for a blast of fire damage and then some blue fire on the ground. You can avoid the blast, but you’ll need to be in the fire to damage him.

Lifting his left (your right) hand, he summons meteors that deal substantial fire damage. You need to run in a straight line as they home in on your location.

If you are too far away, he will shoot a fire beam at you that tracks your location. Easy enough to dodge, and it eats through stone.

If you’re just you vs him, then it’s not too painful. Use Frostner (since it deals extra damage to undead), avoid the meteors and fire beam. Face tank the rest, if you have decent food. But ya know what? Life don’t work that way in the plains!

About 15% of the way into the fight, an ENTIRE fuling village joined in the fun. Shamans and all! I needed to run circles around Yagluth while I used his AE fire attacks to whittle down the fulings. That worked until I hit a stone that was cracked and stumbled. Long enough for 3 fulings to spear me to death together.

Corpe runs to bosses are stressful enough. Corpse runs to a boss and a dozen fulings is just another level. I took a nap, fed myself, put on my old mountain armor and took a shield to town. Sleeping had caused half the fulings to leave, but caused 3 deathsquitos to show. Ugh. Corpse run then back to the portal – chucking the black metal on the way so I could actually use the portal.

Reset all my gear, psyched myself up and went back to town.

I took nearly 30 minutes from start to end, death run included, to take him down. It is really hard to explain the sense of joy that comes from taking down a boss that was hard to find, hard to summon, and hard to kill. And a boss that you can’t cheese (Bonemass archery towers, or Moder’s really bad pathing). If you aren’t going in with the best food, best armor, a good weapon, and some fire resist, you’re just not going to beat this thing.

And with another boss down, there’s only 1 thing left to do!

Steam says I have 91 hours in here. It doesn’t feel even close to that, as I never felt a minute was wasted. The devs are working on the home crafting for the next big patch. That makes a lot of sense. I love my castle, but some more tools to improve it would go a long way. Including some terraforming processing improvements. My FPS can drop sometimes, and the autosave takes nearly 4 seconds. Which it did while fighting Yagluth no less!

While all the bosses are down, I’ve got a few more bits I want to flesh out around my home base.

And all this for $20!