Originally posted by fondue111:

Everything in the swamp is way too overpowered for that stage of the game. After reading the forums here, it seems that everyone quits at that point in the game because if you die once, you legit cant get your crap back. Swamp needs an overhaul and a nerf. Legit made me hate this game. Garbage.

Typically, what happens is people just dont take it slow and patiently in the swamp. That's usually what kills them.

1. The hoe is one of the best things in the swamp, slowly level or raise the ground to make paths.

2. Mark the paths with camp fires even while wet they'll have white smoke like flares to help guide you. Also when the wood burns out the red ember coloring helps keep the path marked too.

3. In conjunction with 2, mark paths on your map with the circle icons and red x them out to help you differentiate.

4. Make paths to the crypts of course. On the top of the crypt's top level, put against the small raised edge at the top a Workbench. Put on the raised edge 2-3 wood walls and 2-3 roofs. Lastly put 1-2 wooden chests next to/under the workbench. You can jump to the top of the crypt from the lower back side of them.

5. Unlock the crypt and set down a campfire at the starting ledge and fill up the wood in it.

6. Do all these things during the day and never at night. If you're in a crypt and finish it and its night. Wait it out til day.

7. From the top of the crypt where you got your bench, abominations and non ranged creatures can't hit you. Even blobs cant jump up to attack you. Thus a bow with plenty of fire arrows is your best friend.

8. Until you kill enough abominations to make your root helmet, always keep a poison potion on you in the swamp and in the crypts.

9. Make a small base outside of the swamp. Not too close as to catch aggro from swamp denizens but close enough to your path into the swamp as to make it easier.

10. Alternatively, find a close grouping of the large indestructible trees. Raise the ground around the trees to make a wall with your entrance being where hopefully 2 trees have a small overlap(ie so you jump slightly to get in but draugr/skels cant get in. I recommend doing this only after you create the stone cutter table so you can thing about using stone to roof off the top of the grouping of trees but you could go wood. Just make the roof high enough so that smelters etc's smoke dissipates but still closed in.

11. While in the crypts, pickaxe only 1 side or so of a mudpile so that if the next room has baddies, you can either range them with your bow or use your stag 2h hammer(later the iron one is better) to aoe through the mud to creatures inside. This makes crypts very easy.

12. When you find a surtling fire spawn, dig out the ground around the fire at about 1 foundation out so that there is a watery ring 1 foundation wide or so around it. Surts will spawn hit the water and instantly die. Thus you'll have a coal/core farm from there. Mark them thus of course on your map.

13. When you see stone groupings or towers, range then to take out the spawners. This will cut down significantly on spawns in your swamp travels. If its too much/many, running and shooting is your friend and why making paths to everything as suggested in point 1 becomes much easier.

14. Since you made paths in point 1, leeches will never be a problem and easy to shoot from your paths.

15. An alternative method for killing abominations is keeping mats for a bonfire on you at all times and placing it down in front of you when it gets near you.

16. As you clear a crypt, put your iron scraps in the chests on the crypt along with other things you collected. Once the crypt is completely cleared, you can then make trips to drop it off at your smelting base from there.

Yes, all this takes considerable time to do but you'll make the swamp much easier to manage. I could go on but I hope it can give you some ideas on how to handle things with the swamps and not be discouraged.