Valheim Wood Chopping Tricks for Viking Lumberjacks

Greetings Viking brethren, today we do a quick dive into wood chopping in Valheim.

Why is this important? Because in the game you will have limited time, stamina, and eventually trees should you choose to engage in significant base building or large scale smelting.

We will cover:

– Basics
– Tools
– Extra tricks

I will attempt to make it succinct.

There are several basic tricks you will want to utilize:

The Big #1 – Always try to hit more than one wood item, therefor processing more wood per stamina:

An axe swing can hit up to three (or 4 if you’re godly) wood items per swing! Generally speaking though you want to float in a 2-3 wood item range.

Wood items can be: a tree, a log, a sapling, a stump, a bush (don’t take out those nearby rasp/blueberry bushes though!)

The smaller items like stumps, samplings and bushes may not be worth the stamina of an axe swing on its own, but if you can get the bonus wood just by positioning correctly in the first place you may as well do it.

#2 – Knock down a swath of trees at first:

Do not chop down and process them one by one. Valheim uses a sweet asset damage system where trees can damage and knock down other trees AND continue to process them into lumber for you if they continue taking enough damage. Seeing that sweet domino effect of trees falling never gets old. And it saves you a lot of time and stamina.

#3 – Make a decent wood storage: (Alternative Title: Use a Cart)

If you are planning any kind of main base, making coal or arrows, you WILL use up the wood. I like to bring a cart into the forest with me for packing back as much wood as possible at one time. I keep some in a chest for coal and then pack the cart again with wood and just leave it in there. Having a cart full of wood can also be nice for large scale constructions as its more mobile than running back and forth to a chest in my base.

#4 – Situational Awareness:

Various monsters will come to murder you while you are about your peaceful lumberjack business. If you have low HP or armor, try not to have zero stamina all the time so you can escape. This can also apply to health as your food buffs expire. This can also tie into using enemies to your advantage, having a troll chop down trees for you if you position them correctly.

If you have played Valheim yet, you know that better tier tools (stone to bronze axes, pickaxes, etc) produce better results, both in terms of # of swings per tree felled, or types of trees felled (when you need Fine or Core Wood or Ancient Bark).

The only thing I want to highlight here is durability upgrades. If you have the chance to upgrade your axe at a forge or workbench, you may notice that your damage numbers don’t increase that much. However, in a lot of cases your ax durability will increase from 150 to 200 or 175 to 225. These are BIG numbers for a day out in the forest. So if you are low on ores, it may be worth upgrading to a Bronze lvl 3 Axe and using that (45 slashing damage, 225 durability) and use your iron supply on armor or whatever instead of using an Iron Axe lvl 1 (55 slashing, 175 durability).

Notably your tree chopping damage is modified by your associated skill, but it may be worth examining how many swings you are getting out of something instead of using up your “Rare” ores if you have trouble with mining.

#1 – Portals:

Wood is portal transferable: You make a portal to a forest and chop the whole forest down, and transport all the wood to a cart on the other side of the portal. I like to just leave a chest on the forest side if I don’t have a cart there and stack all the wood in it for one big portal trip instead of doing lots of trips.

#2 – Server Swap:

In the same vein as above, you can make another server for harvesting wood, log into it, chop everything down, log out, and log into your home base server.

#3 – Power Selection:

Should I use the wood chopping power (The Elder)? I think this is an D or F tier power. I would choose Eikthyr power over Elder power almost EVERY time, unless you had a team of lumberjacks, where one was just chopping down trees and everyone else was processing behind them. Then I would use the Elder power for the primary chopper. If you’re on your own Eikthyr’s power will help more from running from tree to tree and back to carts/chests/portals etc.

#4 – Food Selection
For a day out in the forest I would choose food that gives additional stamina as the priority – Queen’s Jam, Carrot Soup, Bread, etc.