A tip for playing safe and spend less time travelling, is to make a lot of outposts. Mostly for sleeping and storage.
Secure them with fence if needed.
In Swamp, look around, listen and be aware of your surroundings and possible dangerous creatures.
Here you can see a short clip from yesterday from swamp: https://medal.tv/clips/55781588/d1337kqDOyn1

Me and my partner both lost interest around the black metal stage. We forced ourselves to plough through it for a while but we went from spending pretty much all of our gaming time in Valheim to logging on for a few hours and thinking, "Meh, let's play something else".

I think the problem with Valheim boils down to one thing - The grind doesn't lessen with time.

I've played a ton of survival games with thousands of hours in some of them, and the ones that I keep coming back to are the ones that at least reward you with taking away the grind in some way. Whatever mechanic it is, whether it's easier transport, or easier collection, not having to deal with trash enemies, etc. But Valheim doesn't do that to any significant degree.

Sure, I can make better armour, and my collecting tools get better and my stamina increases, but in the scheme of things that makes almost no difference to the amount of time I spend grinding; I still have to spend ages replanting crops, I still have to spend lots of time collecting wood for charcoal and building, I still have spend tons of time collecting stone for walls and terraforming, etc. Even with the boss skills, it doesn't really change.

Contrast that to something like, say.. Ark, where I do have to spend lots of time collecting, and I would say in some ways Valheim beats Ark hands down, but I can get Dinos to do that for me. Running around collecting for hours becomes a matter of minutes. Travelling becomes trivial. It makes me want to push myself to build cool stuff, take on tougher enemies, explore different elements of the game.

I actually think Ark is a good example of how to do dungeons well. There's certain restrictions for them, so they remain challenging even when you're at the high end of the spectrum, until you get ridiculously overpowered. At which point you don't need to run them anyway and you're going for the bosses.

7 Days To Die is another example (although I haven't played that for a few alphas) - Making better quality weapons and increasing my skill makes collecting a ton faster. Dealing with trash becomes easy, I can concentrate on the big stuff like hordes finding blueprints.

Valheim seems to lack that though. The reward you get for putting the time in and grinding is to just grind in the same way in different places. A lot of it could be fixed though with some minor changes. A big problem is, quite frankly, the community. There's a pretty hardcore elitist bunch that jump into any thread and tell people to basically git gud because someone thinks the game would benefit from being a bit more streamlined. I just hope the devs listen to people who actually want the game to be better rather than some weird epeen flex.

Edit: I should add that this was talking about both our SP experience and our Co-op experience combined, that's why it's on this thread as I know the OP asked for SP. We had the same feelings with both game modes.

Edit 2: Thanks for the award whoever the kind stranger is :D Even if it was joke, thanks anyway :D (You never can tell on steam lol)

Thanks for all the input, some very good points made. I have been considering either using the ore through portals mod or trying a new seed; I just really wanted to avoid 'cheesing' the game and triumph over its tricky aspects. I think the issue is I'm just not patient enough for that lol

I do make lots of outposts, I just dont fully build/upgrade all the workstations/forge/smithing stuff in each as it takes too long and I start to get bored. Due to this I'd still have to make looong manual journeys to smith any iron once I finally found it.
I know I could make it easier with more patience and efficient planning etc. I just dont get enough reward for progression to motivate me into investing the time.

Cheers for all the tips though. :) glad other people are still enjoying it.

Nope. I am someone who likes to grind~. I haven't played MMO's for years for nothing x).
The thing that made me lose interest in the end is the little content. Because the game has, if you take away the grind, not really much content. And the grind is not really rewarding in my eyes.

But, even though I'm not a fan of this sentence. This is an EA title that hasn't been out for that long. And for what it has to offer, it gave me a good time and I'm eagerly awaiting what's to come.

I was pretty much the opposite. I put 40 hours into the game in less than 2 weeks and was close to getting burnt out, plus the swamp biome was absolutely kicking my ass. Came here, got some tips from helpful Vikings, got myself a bit of iron ore.

As soon as I seen the recipes that unlocked, I had a newfound interest. Soon, I'll fight Bonemass and then take a trip up one of those mountains. Maybe build a watchtower up there or something. I've still got a lot left I want to do and the first update hasn't even dropped yet. Maybe you'll come back eventually when the game is more refined. You never know.

I just finished off bonemass and am starting to explore the mountain regions. It hasn't gotten old and I actually love the sailing and exploration part of the game.
It would be helpful to have some unique spots or hidden treasures scattered around to make the exploration more rewarding. The vendor was a nice add in this direction, but the game could really use more along those lines.
It is a big world. It would be a shame to only have one unique npc or location to find.

A tip for playing safe and spend less time travelling, is to make a lot of outposts. Mostly for sleeping and storage.
Secure them with fence if needed.
In Swamp, look around, listen and be aware of your surroundings and possible dangerous creatures.
Here you can see a short clip from yesterday from swamp: https://medal.tv/clips/55781588/d1337kqDOyn1

First to answer the question , no.

The part about the boat getting destroyed and all that concerned me.

You scout your swamp, preferable one you can see crypts from the shore. You park in a safe place in the morning (you wait in your boat for morning if you have to).

You carefully make your way to the closest crypt and build a small base with teleport on top.

You break your boat down , take it back through the port and put it in a box.

You harvest your iron, put it boxes at your swamp base and when you are ready to take it home you port home , get your boat mats, then port back. Build your boat, load it up and take it home.

also , in the beginning when you are in the swamp in copper ( some people wear troll i have no idea why) you should always have poison resist active.

You really had some bad luck with the crypts. The first swamp I found was tiny and had no crypts. The next one was quite large and had five crypts. Then I found a massive swamp and it about eight crypts. Sure it's still a chore since you have to mine and haul all that iron back, but it didn't take me that long really to amass enough iron to make all the things I needed. You can keep mining and hauling the ore back to the boat. Just mine one crypt, then sail back with a nice haul to your base. Smelt some iron, build a long boat, and sail back. Now you have huge storage and can park your boat and mine the hell out of the other crypts for several game days, then sail back with an enormous load.

Basically. I played with a friend and was having a blast for several days. Then the chores set it and it was fun but you see the rinse and repeat of it. I sadly found out he was using them cheats to spawn stuff and I forced us to reset and not cheese and idk, these survival games always get stale no matter the spin off for me. This one just takes longer with the distance and sheer luck/unluck of the RNG.

You see the trick here is to not over invest in one base.
Typically what I do is look for a swamp with crypts near a black forest and make an outpost to refine the iron there. This will cut down the sailing back part.

Tough luck on your crypt search though. Hard to think of having a huge swamp with no crypts. Setting up on a copper node near the shore of a black forest will easily get you the materials you need for the forge and you can make what you need there.

Personally I am on a seed where finding silver was rough. Had to look around for a while for a black forest near a large mountain... now my problem is getting enough iron there to upgrade the forge and make a silver sword.

I've also had games/seeds where I never found the trader and had to live with the reduced carry weight. That was a bit rough, but I was able to manage.

Nah. Iron opens up most of the game and i was pretty excited to get more of it.

Seems you got an unlucky seed. This can make or break a player's experience IMO. I entered a seed pattern of my own and luckily it turned out to be a great one. I'll share it here with you and you are welcome to give it another go with this one.

Seed: 00OxXXxO00

Without revealing too much, but to give you hope...from the spawn point there are swamps in two places which you don't need a boat to get to. FULL of crypts. I've probably pulled 500 Iron from them so far and still have plenty to plunder.

It requires a little bit of swimming (Small chunks of land between two continents, but completely doable). Both are west of the spawn. Both after the above mentioned land hopping/swim to the other continent. Also to note a trader spawn is there. Hope you can use this map and find reason to continue on and enjoy the game.

I also thought hauling iron across the ocean way tedious. So I downloaded the mod that allows ores to go through portals. So glad I did, it made the game way more fun for me.
I don't totally cheese it and build a portal next to each crypt but just build a small satellite base and explore from there.

personally, no

I was pretty lucky in that I found a small swamp near my main island with a single crypt, but that gave me enough iron to make an iron pickaxe and a longboat. With both of these, I sailed across the seas looking for another swamp and after a few hours I found a pretty big swamp with 9 crypts... they were in every direction! After visiting just 4 crypts I managed to get like 500 iron, I hauled it all on my longboat and took it home to smelt it over several days, it wasn't too bad.