In Valheim, you will need to travel across large distances to progress as you face enemies, collect resources, and defeat bosses.
It can be inconvenient at times as the time it takes to get from one location to another can vary and you will find yourself eating away at the time as you move back and forth.
Thankfully, there is a buildable portal that allows you to teleport, which provides you with the benefit of fast traveling from one spot to another.
What Is a Portal?
A Portal is a structure that connects to another portal which allows any player who walks into it to teleport to the other side.
This feature provides players with the advantage that allows them to cut down on the time it takes to get around the map.
Players can use the portals as much as they like with no cooldown whatsoever once it is built and there are no additional costs to maintain its function.
How to Unlock Portal?
You can unlock the Portal recipe by picking up Fine Wood and it will register once you have it in your inventory.
Fine Wood is obtainable by destroying Birch Trees and Oak trees which require a Bronze Axe or higher variant to destroy.
There is however another way to obtain Fine Wood at an earlier point in the game which includes making use of the game’s collision system.
Unlocking Portal Early Game
If you have to play through the game for a while now, you may have noticed that the trees that have been chopped down may deal damage when they collide with other objects.
What you can do is push one of the fallen trees into the Birch Tree or Oak Tree repeatedly until enough damage is done.
Dealing enough damage by pushing a tree to the trees that drop Fine Wood will eventually destroy them and yield the resource.
How to Use Portal?
Using a portal is relatively easy as all you need to do is set the tag on each portal which will connect the portals.
To set the tag for a portal, you must walk up to it and interact with it, which prompts you to set its tag but you also need to do this with the other one for them to connect.
Your portals must have the same tag, which is case sensitive and will power up once the connection is successful.
Portal Materials
To craft a portal, you will need 10 Greydwarf Eye, 20 Fine Wood, and 2 Startling Cores which is doubled If you include its connected portal.
Greydwarf Eyes can be farmed by killing variants of the Greydwarfs that are commonly found in the Meadows and Black forest.
Fine Wood can be farmed later on with a Bronze Axe or higher tier ax but you can also resort to using another tree to destroy a Birch Tree or Oak Tree to get Fine Wood early game.
Startling Cores can easily be found by going into the Black Forest and entering Burial Chambers to loot them.
Transporting Metal with Portal
The restrictions of the portal involve transferring metal as it will prevent you from doing so and will not activate if you have ore or processed metal.
A workaround for this is to create another world and move your character to that world to stash the metals that you have.
After storing the metals, head back to your main world and move your character to where you need to bring the metal.
Your character will log in at the previous place you left them which will allow you to pick up the metal again from the newly created world and bring it to your base after you move your character through the portal.
Verdict
Portals play a key role in Valheim because they allow players to go back and forth between places which is convenient when you need to go to different biomes or if you have multiple bases.
While the restrictions of metal transfer can be an issue for some, other workarounds can be used such as creating a new world or even the use of a Cart to haul items.
The sooner you get your hands on the materials for a portal, it would be a good idea to build them to save the time of having to sprint around the map.
