Its a lot like real life. You cruising a long and then eventually get in over your head and just have to muddle through best you can.

tbf a simple club and a wooden shield will keep you alive throughout the burial chambers.
you don't need to max your leather crap out either, that's bad advice from that poster.

when you say "goblins" are you talking about the greydwarfs or fulings? because if you're talking about the fulings; you're not suppose to even be near those guys in the early game :D

my advice would be to make some troll leather gear (cloak, chest, legs) and then make a bronze helm (that way you maintain movement speed and gain decent armor) once you get your smelter up; get your bronze pickaxe, axe, cultivator and a butchers knife - do not spend bronze on making bronze chest and legs, you'll be fine in troll leather stuff until at least the crypts (swamp) assuming you bring enough poison resistance potions.

get a skeletal boneshield (or towershield, whichever it is) its cheap to make, and you can't really use the bone fragment for much else anyway, other than the troll armor upgrades.
use your bronze axe as your main weapon along with a bronze mace or a simple club to deal with draugrs, greydwarfs and skeletons.
get a crude/finewood bow as soon as possible and use it to kite and kill trolls.

avoid the "plains" and "mountains" biome at all costs until you got at least iron tier items, because those zones are ruthless.

You're going to want to throw together a Blunt weapon as soon as you can. Skellies hate being smashed.

Eat with meat, and once you can, create a cookpot instead of just roasting your meat on a spit. Meat is the HP Food.

Your goal is to get your metal production going; Ideally close to some ore deposits.

you can tell the dwarves apart by their eye color from a long way off. Green ones do the toxic cloud. Red are the big strong ones. Blue are normal.
the green ones are very, very slow. they run up close, then stand there thinking about it, then cast the cloud. If you circle them, it will miss, and then they can't do anything for 5 seconds or so -- kill them asap after avoiding the cloud. You can also shoot them as a priority target.

trolls killed with bows at this point in the game.
the burial sites have a lot of skeletons. go slowly, and use the halls and walls and corners to your advantage to avoid bow shots and break them up one by one.

Valheim is usually split up in to different 'Biomes'. The bosses for each Biome are meant to be a flag/checkpoint to let the player know that they have progressed far enough to move on to the next zone. But just because you CAN start exploring the new zone, that doesn't mean it'll be easy. Here is a few tips...

1.) When you first start exploring a new Biome, only explore during the day. (Mob spawns TRIPLE at night.)
2.) Things in crypts/burial chambers do NOT respawn, so once you kill it it's dead for good.
3.) Shields will be your best friend in a dungeon, always progress forward with it raised in the 'Guard Position'.
4.) You can use the doors built into the dungeon to separate skeleton packs. Try and bait one of the skeletons out into the hall and close the door behind him, then if need be back to a more open area to fight in.

Originally posted by Nightweaver20xx:

... I guess I'll pull out the bow I used to kill Eikthyr with and try that, thanks.

For the trolls, try to craft (wood+resin+feathers) fire arrows, trolls don't like fire.

Definitely take your time and get your gear and workbench leveled up, snipe at trolls through trees, that will let you make the troll armor, a full set gives a bonus to stealth.

All weapons use a different stat, might want to specialize in one melee along with your bow, I suggest a club weapon for a first run, since you'll have defaulted with that early on anyways, plus it comes in handy for the third boss... I still use my iron mace almost exclusively.

In any case, once you're geared up, you can start hitting the Burial Crypts, they will each probably yield several cores; the number you want initially is 10.. you need 5 for a kiln, and 5 for a furnace.

Then it's time to grab your antler pickaxe and start looking in the Black Forest for tin (found along the beaches) and copper (found in large nodes)

Just remember not to rush, eat the foods relevant to what you're doing and your style of play.

Pickax for metal
Cores needed to get coal and smelt ore into metal bars
Metal bars for making upgraded stuffs

This will give you the ability to plant seeds you find to farm better food items

That is basically how black forest progression works.

Yes, Greydwarf brutes (red eyes) are a pain, but once you get a L4 troll armour, you can survive a few hits. Their timing to parry and stagger them is very short, like just when you hear them initiating their attack.

Never forget that fleeing is an option, and to the least, a good way to segregate a group of enemies and kill them one by one.

About burrial chambers, don't forget that you can disassemble and reassemble crafting items at no cost, so 10 surtling cores is all that you need for quite a long time. Also, if you havent many chambers in your current location, try and use one of them as a farming site for bones (should you want e.g. upgrade a spare leather suit), that is, don't destroy its evil bone pile, the item that spawns skeletons, or only after having collected one or two full inventory slots of bones.

For early game dealing with skeletons and general swarms of things the Stag Breaker was pretty solid, slow but solid.

Just upgrade it a couple times,

You can try ranging a troll down with fire arrows with the basic bow or wait till you have the metal to make the bronze ax to cut trees for fine wood for the 2nd tier bow.

If I recall correctly Leather armor and the Stagbreaker was OK for running dungeons. Just have to be ontop of things like poison skells and spawn piles.

After that the bronze mace was better at dispatching skells and greylings for me so I shelved the stagbreaker.

Surtling cores are used to make portals to make it easier to travel as well as to build certain items like furnaces to cook metal ores to upgrade your weapons. You need to upgrade your weapons as much as possible before going into the tombs. Make sure your workbench is as fully upgraded as possible (You build additions to the stock workbench that must be placed near it to upgrade it). You should find the items needed to build these upgrades when you pull out your hammer. The first tombs will be hard but once you get a core you can upgrade and build furnaces so you can mine the tin and copper deposits and process them into bronze and make further upgrades to your weapons. Rince and repeat until you are ready to go to the next biome (mountains) and find silver. Each biome will allow you to upgrade stuff further.

The key to survive every aspect of this game is gear, weapons and tools. Upgrade your armor and weponry, and those "goblins" and skeletons won't be hard to kill at all. This can be done by killing trolls, which is easy with a bow. However, Valheim is not an easy game (despite the looks), so don't expect an easy ride through.

The game loop of Valheim is pretty simple, yet rewarding and enjoyable: collect the main ore/resource of the current biome, upgrade your stuff and kill the boss. Proceed to the next biome and repeat. The further you go, the more complex stuff you can build and craft.

You shouldn't be running into goblins yet, those guys are from a plains biome which 3 levels above, you won't stand a chance, avoid plains. If your talking about the greydwarves and trolls in black forest then you want to get bow and arrows to take the troll out as pretty hard to go melee with early game.

Yes go to black forest and find burial entrances and seek out surtlings cores, you will be able to make coal and smelt ore to make things with metal. Skeletons are weak to blunt damage so if you take a little time to make a stag breaker (you may need to chop a pine tree down in black forest to get core wood to unlock it's recipe) this weapon hits as a shockwave and works good in tight corridors of the burials as it hits through walls and doors with blunt damage.

start is at the meadows - take your time to build and gear up
next stop should be the black forest
avoid the plains when you started freshly those buddys will eat you alive no matter what you try

Oh yeah sorry I meant greydwarves and trolls. There's these mage trolls that cast AOE poison on me which I don't like, and the big trolls that melee me hard enough to break my armor and send me home crying. I guess I'll pull out the bow I used to kill Eikthyr with and try that, thanks.