Keep looking, they're out there. If you sail by a swamp outside the wet weather radius, you can still see clearly inside. Look for the green torches as you go. Watch out for swamp creatures coming out to greet you.

But, if at all possible, find a swamp where you can walk in from a safe biome. The swamp is very unkind to boats, especially in a new area that hasn't been cleared yet.

If you don't want map spoilers, but really want to know where to find a good swamp, you can post your seed and someone can look for you and point you in a direction.

The mountains aren't that much more difficult than the swamp. You can usually avoid golems and you might as well because their drops aren't necessary. An atgeir will stun wolves before they stun you, and drakes don't hit that hard and can be brought down with bows. Frost potion, or just regular fire, takes care of the cold until you get a wolf cape or chest piece. Not saying the mountain is easy, but it's not as big of a difficulty jump as the swamp. (Unless you get a hunted event, but those don't happen all the time.) Frost caves can be a little more challenging but they are optional, depending on whether you want the fenris set which has speed bonuses.

Looking for crypts (and many other things) is far better done by sailing. The biome border actually extends well past the waterline, so crypts should still sometimes appear very close to shore.

I found my 1st crypt on the very edge of the water. Dropped a workbench and used about 200 stone to make a pier out into the water and a small island for a shack with a portal and some chests (not a base!). Dock the boat on the backside. For some reason the leaches would spawn around the boat but not touch it.

There were 7 crypts within reach of that little camp, so I thought it was worth the effort.

And yes. Many swamp areas are too small, thin, or just plain don't have crypts. Getting a little farther out from the spawn stones does seem to help. I probably found a dozen empty swamps before I found a crypt. Most were very small.

Though I think there are many good and helpful hints here, and zillions on utube, you may just be playing a game that doesn't fit your style. This is not a run real fast, kill each boss, get a bit of stuff and on to the next biome/boss. Get to the end and complain there's nothing to do. This game is played best for the journey for most. ((Yes indeed there are speed runners but they are usually folks that have played other seeds for many hours and are playing a seed with personal rules.))

Not every game works for every player. I can just sense you chomping at the bit, wanting it to get goin fast so you can go do something else. That's cool, but know that the game doesn't work very well that way and it will punish you painfully for your impatience & lack of preparation. Just how it is.
Each one of you will need hundreds of iron, hundreds of silver, lots of copper and tin, hundreds of black metal, tons of hides, wood, stone, etc., etc. Can't have just one guy with armor and weapons, leveled up. Most need a base, or many bases to rest for buffs. Then there is the farming for food, bees for honey, it's very fun for some, stupid terrible for others. But that IS the game.

Your mission, should you accept it is to just play the game, not thinking about how fast you're not going and when you finish with a biome, have allll or most all the gear, all the new foods, kill the boss then go to the next biome, get your collective ashes handed to you, rinse and repeat.

Fun times!

The swamp is, in my opinion, the largest difficulty spike of the game. You have limited tools to deal with its challenges, and, especially when considering the power of "Starred" enemies (Two Star Archers can very much one shot you even in Fully Upgraded bronze) the confluence of obstacles is a good gatekeeper to chase away the people who thought this game was casual.

The swamp teaches you several critical lessons all at once, and these lessons you need to get, in order to be successful for the rest of the game.

First and Foremost: Choose your battles well: If you run gung-ho at every mob you see, you will eventually find yourself floating helpelessly in chest-high water, while leeches, blobs and archers kill you in the most frustrating manner. Finding an Abomination in a bad spot will also spell certain doom, as they can knock you into deep waters making you easy prey.

The lesson: Bait enemies to you. Just because you're the aggressor doesn't mean you have to be the pursuer. You can control the engagement location, do not surrender this critical advantage to the enemy

Lesson 2: The right tool for the right job. More than any other Biome, the Swamp plays into resistances and weaknesses. Many enemies are weak to Blunt, including the zone boss, and virtually everything will be resistant to fire because of the connstant wetness status effect. When in crypts, DPS becomes a critical element, because you may be up against multiple enemy spawners. The longer these spawners remain, the more likely they are to push out a deadly two-star enemy.

Advanced Tip: Learning the mechanics of the game can save you, Monster Spawners will only spawn 2 enemies within a certain radius. If there are already 2 weak enemies up, you should prioritize killing the SPAWNER and not the mobs, as its spawn slots have been taken by weak enemies. What you do not want, is to struggle your way into the spawn room by killing one by one, only to have a two star Draugr, or worse, Draugr Archer pop right on you.

The Lesson: Knowledge is power; Know your foe, exploit his weaknesses, he will assuredly exploit any of yours.

Lesson 3: Preparation is key: Emblematic of this core lesson is the ubiquitous nature of poison in the swamp. While not impossible to survive without poison mead, it comes highly recommended, especially for your first bronze-clad expedition. Properly leveled foodstuffs (At this stage you should have access to Sausages via the Draugr Entrails, which are exceptional food) make a huge difference between getting one-shotted, and surviving with enough HP to flee and regroup. Additionally, you will become intimate with the Rested Buff, or have an exceedingly miserable time. The rested buff is THE MOST POWERFUL BUFF IN THE GAME AND SHOULD BE PERPETUATED WITH 100% UPTIME IF AT ALL POSSIBLE. This means carrying materials for a campfire, but it also means understanding when and where you can camp. Since it's constantly raining in the swamp, you may need to repurpose an abandoned structure, put the fire (And yourself) under a log, or even camp at the entrance of a crypt. You can also bring portal materials to teleport home to have a longer duration rested buff. The cold will also be your enemy, as it's the antithesis to the rested buff. Being cold and unrested is a death sentence in the swamp. You have almost no stamina or health regen under this circumstance.

The Lesson: Tactics win battles, Logistics win Wars, and the swamp is a War of attrition.

There is quite a bit of RNG in map creation. "Clearning" the first thing you see, you are leaving yourself exposed to maximum randomness. Get a boat and sail till you actually see 2-3 crypts.

Also circle around the biome a little, good things usually need some space to spawn (and some distance from center).

Valheim is a game of food and gameknowleage. You dont need better gear you need info. People often play in troll armor till much later.

If you havent already, find turnip seeds and then swamp becomes MUCH more reasonable.

You can go mountain, placing campfires, finding caves to fight in. Its not an uncommon strat. Problem is that if you are pepega enough to get stuck here, its not gonna get better up there either.

these maps are very large and trust me you have massive swaths of swamp that are full of crypts yet to explore.
That said I bailed on my first map because of the lack of crypts. Some maps push the swamps out too far for what the player is ready for.

Swamps is the first major difficulty spike in the game, but not the only one. Trying to find the plains boss can seem like trying to find a needle among several haystacks sometimes (or you can get super lucky and find an altar in the first huge plains you find, never know). If you don't mind "cheating" then the map option can be a great one for you. You could leave it set to only show you biomes so you can target a larger swamp without completely removing the exploration aspect, or you can outright have it tell you where the crypts and boss altars should be instead.

If you still want to do this entirely legit, sail east-west for now. North and south may see you finding swamps as well, but also increase your chances of finding biomes you can't really do anything with right now. There's a good chance you could be sailing for a bit before you find a decent sized swamp that is also relatively safe to make your way into (finding a proper swamp can be a pain already, finding one that happens to be near a meadows you an make a nice cozy forward base in is just slightly harder than that). If you do find swamps, even the small ones, keep an eye out for ruins. Ruins can also sometimes contain that stone i can never spell right that tells you where that biomes nearest boss altar is, and a swamp with a bonemass altar is almost always large enough to have several crypts in it as well, so even the tin swamps can help you find a good swamp sometimes.

As far as potentially skipping swamp/bonemass, it might technically be possible but it'll make your life a whole lot harder, and you'll almost certainly want one of the AoE groundsmash weapons (stagbreaker is the first, Iron sledge is the version you can get around swamp tier) to compensate. They don't make the best actual weapons because of their slow swing, but that ground-pound attack both those weapons do can reveal underground deposits to you, which is a feature you may need without the item bonemass drops. it could also help you get some iron from swamps that dont have crypts either, but don't expect to get a whole lot quickly with this method. The basic principle is you run around the area that may have hidden ore, and use the ground pound attack. If you see it tick "too hard" for damage with nothing visibly apparent to explain it (like ancient trees will also show as "too hard" for these weapons), start digging. That "too hard" that pops up is what reveals the underground ore node for you to find just slightly easier. Same principle can be applied to mountain and it's hidden ore, but you are going to need some iron for pretty much all of the good stuff in game (including the large boat you can eventually make that will make these kinds of trips a lot less stressful).

head southish from world starter area, normally find a big swamp south. at least i do.

Crypts cannot spawn too close to the edge of the swamp biome. What that means is that smaller swamps and swamps that are long but narrow cannot have crypts. You need to find larger area swamps.

If you want, you can plug your game world into this website[valheim-map.world] and get a map of the entire world (with the option to show all crypts). Doing that would ruin the fun of exploration for me, but at the point you are at (considering leaving the game), it seems a viable option.

Originally posted by MaximumSquid:

Just seems like a chore now. . .

First swamp took 2+ hours to clear and we found only 1 rare mob and no crypts.

Second swamp is mostly explored, no crypts, and we crafted 1 wood set hat.

Don't know where the 3rd swamp is.
Should we just bail on this game before it gets too painful?
I'm guessing mountains would just destroy us and we probably aren't skilled enough skip.
Plains biome gear can't be crafted until you have Moder down it looks like.

What should we do?

"bail"?? no man, just jump on your ship and explore further out, i guarantee you will eventually land in a large swamp area with a bunch of crypts in it.

or just do what the guy above me suggested and essentially cheat :P
but hey, fret not. lots of people casually cheat in this game because its not really a big deal unless you and your friends made a no-cheating pact.