Unfortunately, the best way to find the big swamps is to go out farther. There are plenty of black forest and even meadows out farther, you just have to watch for them.

Try sailing out father from the center and first looking for black forest (or meadows) that you can land on to establish yourself out there, then explore from there, making sure that you can get back there if a big storm comes in or before night. You'll probably see other safe areas to land while you're exploring that you can go to if you get in trouble.

If you haven't used some of your iron to make a longship, I highly recommend it for such travels. It's much safer and easier to sail in the open ocean.

You can use the wish bone to find buried iron in the swamps without needing a
crypt.

Some seeds are way worse/better than others sadly

Originally posted by Ghevd:

Do you have the wishbone? You can find iron without finding crypts.

Stagbreaker is an alternative but a bit exploity.

The idea is nice, and i appreciate the alternative options, but to be clear here... biggest sources of iron by far are chests, and i dont think those spawn in the random bone piles (could be wrong, uneathed like 2-3 only)

if you are doing the work and getting the metal than its not cheating. make a new world, bring mats to build boat and sail around. you could even move bases to the new world if you like it. Your character isn't connected to that world do what you like.

Tenacity and perseverance are what make the adventure.

My world seed were barren of iron and took me almost 200days to find my first swamp. My first two swamps (Medium) had no Iron. My second swamp (Large) had just barely enough iron to make 1 Iron Pickaxe. From then on, I actually found more Silver Veins in my travels than I did Iron.

It wasn't until about day 4xx that I would find a swamp with crypts which yielded an amazing 300+ iron.

The trip was exhausting, as my travelling boat then was a simple Karve, one that had survived many attacks from rogue Deathsquito's chasing me out to sea.

Fishing for a better seed isn't cheating, but it is counter-intuitive to the spirit of the game.

The struggle is what gives success meaning. It's what creates stories. Think about any memories you make from this game, what would you hold onto as more dear? "Oh, I found a swamp crypt 2ft from spawn, ez iron" or "My epic quest for Iron lead me across 4 continents, I had to kill 10 serpents and destroyed my boat on a small island, facing a scramble against nightfall to retrieve the materials, harried constantly by the wayward rocks of Greydwarfs. On the fifth day I shared a rest with a two star cave troll, I'll make this for later as right now I am ill equipped to deal with this challenge. Finally, after many days at sea, my persistence and tenacity paid off, a swamp with over a dozen crypts."

Like, maybe I'm just speaking from my own perspective, but I don't remember the 50 other times I've killed Yagluth or the Queen, but I do remember the first, when I had no idea what I was doing, being brought down to single-digit HP and using every resource I had to persevere.

Do you have the wishbone? You can find iron without finding crypts.

Stagbreaker is an alternative but a bit exploity.

Originally posted by Ghevd:

Do you have the wishbone? You can find iron without finding crypts.

Stagbreaker is an alternative but a bit exploity.

I'm divided on the Stagbreaker method. It's very clever, and to be perfectly honest, it doesn't really give you a huge advantage or let you skip much of the game (With a little luck, it's not uncommon to find exposed scrap piles anyway if you know where to look, similar to silver). It's mostly used for alternate progress challenges and in fact, makes the game more difficult (One crypt is likely to yield an order of magnitude more iron than several hours stagbreaker sweeping)

lmao....

Don't ask if it is cheating. You will get a wide variety of answers and your thread will be bloated with them.

There should be a lot more than three crypts on the map though. If you really want help you could tell us your seed and someone can point you in the general direction of a decent swamp. That way you can get going again without having the whole map spoiled.

So long as you're offline, anything you do in an open world survival is legit.

Just ditch this world and start a new one. Half the fun is starting fresh.

long skinny swamps are very low on crypts. The best ones are at least several min walk across it in both directions (N/S and E/W). And if its screwy shaped, the wide parts are where its at, avoid skinny offshoots.

every map has hundreds of crypts. they are not always easy to locate when you need that first find, though. I left my first world over it, and checked the seed later and it was covered in them... everywhere I hadn't looked.

It does not get much more difficult going away from spawn. Except there are chances of spawning like draug villages in far away meadows and stuff like that. But there is plenty of calm places too. So you can keep exploring. There will DEFINITELY be swamps plentiful with crypts on your world.

Whether you will explore a new world or old one makes little difference, which is why i'd recommend staying on this one.

I am curious thou, what is your world seed name? (people might start giving you info on where crypts are, so dont say if you dont want that)

Some swamps just don't have many sunken crypts while others have them all over the place. I'm sure you'll find a good one and if not, yea, make a second world and farm that one. No worries at all. Happy hunting!

You probably have some mega swamps in your world then. Like a swamp with 15+ sunken crypts.