Why am I excited about finding an infested mine?  because there is no gear advancement in the Mistlands without finding one.  Or several, more likely.

Valheim has always gated its gear progression behind some level of resource harvesting progression that is generally unlocked by slaying the boss of the previous biome.  You can’t mine any metal until you slay Eikthyr, for example, or unlock sunken crypts without besting The Elder.

It changes up a bit.  For example black metal in the plains just drops off of mobs, so the gate is the is the items from Bonemass that allow one to construct the blast furnace needed to refine black metal.  Either way, you could start upgrading gear before going too deep into previous biomes.

And then we get to the Mistlands which, as noted multiple times, is the first wholly new, post-early access launch, biome to be added into the game in its three years.  That took a while, though I don’t blame Iron Gate all that much.  They spent the initial period of early access just trying to cope with their success and improve the game.  Then Microsoft threw some money at them to do a version on XBox.  Game Pass gives them some small, but regular incomes.  And then, finally, they got around to the Mistlands.

It was at that point that they clearly thought “this game is too damn easy, we need to crank this up A LOT!” apparently not noticing that part of the enjoyment of the game for many was that it wasn’t completely brutal.  But Elden Ring infected a lot of game dev minds and this is what results.

Anyway, to get to my point, the drops from the plains boss, Yagluth, basically enable you to make some cute little things that stir the mist up a bit, but to actually upgrade your gear you need to dive into the mist, fight your way through as you explore, find an infested mine, the battle through that mine, in order to bring out some dark cores.  Those then allow one to make the black forge, the Galdr table, and the Eitr refinery, which are required to start in on the Mistlands level gear.

So finding an infested mine is pretty much a major gate on gear progression and you have to get there without any gear upgrades and through the infernal mist that plagues the biome.

As mentioned in my previous Valheim post, I finally decided to banish the mist with a mod.

The first side effect of that was to discover that the Mistlands are kind of a pretty biome, something very much hidden by the mist.

The second was to up my survivability in the Mistlands, because you can see hostile mobs before they have detected you and are attacking.

The third was to make navigation much easier.  The zone still has walls that channel you down open paths, but you can now at least navigate by picking an object in the distance and working your ways towards it, rather than just bumbling through the mist and ending up turned around half the time.

All good so far.  But the next item on the list was to find an infested mine.  And I am going to say right here that removing the mists made this, if not completely possible, at least considerably easier.

After another scouting expedition to the Mistlands I was headed back to where I had setup a portal close by a Dverger camp I had put on the map a while back, before I had removed the mist.  This time I saw something up on one of the hills that made up the walls of the valley that camp was in, and sure enough, there was an infested mine up there.

Looks like other Dvergr structures

Just to emphasize how close to where I had passed multiple times in the mist that this was, here is the Dvergr encampment, the screen shot take by just turning around from where I am standing above.

There are my Dvergr friends

Basically, the spikes around the structure became just visible without the mist, so I went to investigate.

The place was crawling with seekers, and I had to go clear them out.  That included getting some off the roof, which meant building a workbench and then some step to get up there, which you can just see in the picture.

Munin and Hugin, now acting as a comedy duo, had things to say once I had cleared things out.

Munin speaks first

Okay… some hints in there, dangerous place and all.

Hugin follows up

That was less helpful I suppose.

The first thing I did once the local area was clear was run down and deconstruct the portal I had set up in the area and move it right into the structure above the infested mine.  Might as well have it close to hand when I get in over my head and have to run back naked.

Then, with things set, I waited for a new day to start, ate some fresh food, and dove on in.

Like the banner says, infested mine

Generally speaking, infested mines look pretty darn good.  Easily the best dungeon look so far in the game I would say.

First peek into the infested mine

There are blocked passages that you need to break through which, among other things, hold back the seekers that are the main guardians.

Dancing with the seekers

By this point I have developed a strategy for dealing with multiple seekers attacking, which involves invoking the Bonemass buff, having health potions handy, and flailing like mad until either I or they are dead.  So far it has worked.  I haven’t had to get a corpse out of the one mine I have found so far.

The downside is that once the buff wears off, there is a 20 minute cool down until I can do it again.  So I tend to do some light exploring or head back to base to drop stuff off before I dive into another unexplored and guarded section of the mine.

Some atmosphere in the mine

Of course, what I was here to find were black cores, which are expertly secreted behind doors with glowing neon inlays that say “hidden door” in Dvergr and which reveal themselves the second you mouse over them.

So very hidden

Yeah, that wasn’t so tricky.  Inside there are chests with, so far, some pretty mundane items, like potions I already have upgrades to and food from the swamp biome tier.  But there were some black cores to be found.

A glowing pink black core!

Fortunately one of the settings we started with when we set out on this run was to double resources when harvested, so that was, in fact, TWO black cores.  And a good thing too, because I only found three of those to harvest so far.

Poking around I also found the rune that shows where Vegvisir the Queen, the Mistlands boss, is located.

The Queen’s address and home phone number

Isn’t Vegvisir some store brand version of Vegemite?

Anyway, having delved in a bit, found six black cores, and with my Biomass buff on cool down, I headed back to base to see what I could build.  The Black Forge was all that was in my options.  But I found a spot to squeeze it into our work room.

Another workbench in the shop

I was somewhat bemused to find that I could not begin to craft any armor, with only the crossbow and special bolts, along with a Dvergr lantern, being available from the new station.

So I dug around on the wiki and found that, for armor, I need refined Eitr, which requires the Eitr refinery, but to build that I need sap from ancient roots in the Mistlands, which requires a sap extractor, which requires a Dvergr extractor to make.

I have two Dvergr extractors at one of our Mistlands bases, but the cannot go through portals so I will have to sail them back to base, make the extractors, take them out to the Mistlands, harvest some sap, get some more black cores, and then build the refinery.

Then I will be able to craft armor and build the Galdr table, the other crafting station, at which you can craft the light armor that goes with the spell casting ability that I have yet to get to in the Mistlands.

All of which seems like a lot, but the fact that I can even see the path forwards now means that I am many steps ahead of where I was a week ago… all mostly because I got rid of the mist.