How to Get Iron in Valheim: Sunken Crypts and Swamp Key

🎯 The core idea

Iron in Valheim comes almost entirely from Sunken Crypts, the green-lit stone dungeons scattered through the Swamp. Kill The Elder for the Swamp Key, find a crypt cluster, then mine every Muddy Scrap Pile inside with any pickaxe. Scrap iron can't go through a normal portal, so plan a short haul by boat or cart to a smelter you build near the swamp.

• free costs nothing
• cheap small cost
• setup needs preparation
• grind pays off slowly
• skip the thing to stop doing

Every way to get iron in Valheim 1.0

If you're asking how to get iron in Valheim, the short answer is the Swamp. The game has no mineable iron vein, so you find iron as rusty scrap and smelt it yourself. Here is every source the Valheim wiki lists, ranked by how much it is worth to a player who has just reached the Swamp:

skip Don't go looking for an iron ore vein. The wiki is clear that iron ore veins don't spawn in the game; the only iron ore you will see comes from fishing.

The Swamp Key comes from The Elder

Every crypt entrance is a locked iron gate, and the only key is the Swamp Key that drops from The Elder, the Black Forest boss. The video calls him "the ancient one"; it's the same boss. The wiki lists the drop as one key per player, so everyone in a group gets their own. If you haven't beaten him yet, our Elder boss guide covers the fight.

free The key is never used up. It only has to be in your inventory the first time you open each crypt gate; after that the gate stays open and you can walk back in without it. It weighs 0.1 and can go through a portal, so carry it everywhere once you reach the Swamp.

Where Sunken Crypts spawn in the Swamp

Sunken Crypts are the Swamp dungeon, and the Swamp is the only biome that has them. On the map the Swamp shows up as the dark brown, muddy patches (the video's map view above shows one squeezed between forest and coast). The wiki notes that a Swamp is uncommon on a starting continent, so you will often need a boat to reach one.

The wiki explains why some swamps have crypts and others don't: crypts generate in clusters of four at random points in the Swamp, and each crypt in a cluster only appears if its spot is deep enough inside the biome. A thin strip of swamp along a coastline often has none. A large, round swamp almost always has at least one cluster. That makes the bigger swamps the best crypt location to search first.

How to spot a crypt entrance

The video's main tip is simply to run through the swamp until you see one, and that does work because the entrance is easy to recognise. Look for a small square building made of mossy stone blocks with a stepped roof, a short flight of stairs up to a dark doorway, and a green-burning torch on each side of the door. In the fog and rain those two green torches are what you see first, often from much farther away than the stone itself.

free Sweep the swamp in daylight and on dry, raised ground where you can. You will be Wet the whole time (it always rains in the Swamp), which slows stamina regen, so short sprints between patches of high ground beat swimming through the bog.

Mark every crypt cluster on your map

The video ends on one habit that saves a lot of time: put a map pin on every entrance you find, as soon as you find it. Because crypts come in clusters, finding one usually means two or three more are close by. Pin each one with a short label so you can tell which crypts you've cleared. Once a crypt is empty it stays empty, because the wiki says metal deposits don't respawn. Your next iron run should go to a crypt you haven't opened yet.

Gear and supplies before you go in

setup The Swamp is designed as the game's first real difficulty wall, and the crypts are where it hits hardest. Bring:

The campfire tip matters most. Crypts count as sheltered, so a campfire inside gives you a fresh 10-minute Rested buff and dries off the Wet debuff from the swamp outside. The wiki puts the combined boost at a 115% increase in stamina regen, and you will spend a lot of stamina on mining and fighting.

Mining Muddy Scrap Piles inside the crypt

A crypt is a chain of rooms blocked by Muddy Scrap Piles: the brown, lumpy mud walls that fill doorways and corridors. You mine through them to move forward, and that mining is how you farm iron in Valheim. A pile inside a crypt has 30 segments, and each segment has a 14.29% chance to drop 1 scrap iron, 2.86% for Leather scraps and 2.86% for a Withered bone. That works out to about 4.3 scrap iron per pile on average. Unlike copper and tin, these nodes don't guarantee anything, so some piles will feel empty. That's normal.

grind Mine every pile, including the ones in side rooms and dead ends, because the average only pays off across many piles. A full crypt is a long session, not a quick raid.

Two wiki warnings worth knowing:

• Draugr can spawn inside a scrap pile and attack you from inside it until you dig them out.
• If part of a pile pokes outside the crypt walls, its drops can fall outside the crypt and land in the swamp below. After you clear a crypt, look around the outside for scrap iron, Leather scraps or Withered bones.

skip Don't hit the iron gates inside the crypt. The wiki says breaking one gives back no iron and only wears down your weapon. Also, careful with wide swings near the green torches: a hit can destroy them for good.

Draugr, blobs and body piles in the crypt

Crypts are home to Draugr, Draugr Elites, Blobs and Body Piles, and Skeletons often wander around the entrance, as you can see next to the stairs in the video. A Body Pile is a spawner, and the wiki puts its odds at 43% melee Draugr, 43% ranged Draugr and 14% Draugr Elite. A buzzing like flies usually means there is a Body Pile in the next room.

You can use the scrap piles to your advantage. Dig a gap just big enough to shoot through but too small for a Draugr to climb through, then kill the Body Pile from behind the wall. If you have a two-handed mace such as the Stagbreaker or Iron Sledge, the wiki notes its area attack hits enemies and Body Piles on the other side of a scrap pile without breaking the pile.

Chests, runestones and the Bonemass link

Not every room is just mud. Some rooms have Sunken Crypt chests. Each chest rolls 2–3 items, and scrap iron (10–20 at a time) is the most likely single item at 19%. Other possible items are Amber, Amber pearl, Ancient bark, Chain, Coins, Ironhead and Poison arrows, Rubies and a Withered bone.

Crypts can also hold a runestone that reveals the nearest Forsaken Altar of Bonemass, the Swamp boss. You summon him with 10 Withered bones, and crypt scrap piles and chests are where those bones come from. That's why crypt runs and the Bonemass boss fight go together. His drop, the Wishbone, is also the only practical way to find the buried scrap piles in the open Swamp.

Iron can't go through a portal

Scrap iron, iron ore and iron bars are all on the wiki's list of items a standard portal won't carry, the same rule as every other ore and metal (see our portal guide for the full list). You have to carry or ship them. Scrap iron also weighs 10 per piece and stacks to 30, so one stack is 300 weight. Plan your carry capacity before you go in.

setup The usual fix is a small forward base on dry land next to the swamp, with a portal, a workbench, a smelter and a charcoal kiln. Keep the portal for yourself, your food and your key, and haul only the short way from the crypt to the base. The late-game Stone portal from the Ashlands can teleport ores and metals, but by then you won't need much more Swamp iron.

free Iron nails are the exception. One iron bar makes 10 nails at the Forge, and nails can go through portals. If you're smelting at a forward base, turn spare iron into nails there before taking it home.

Smelting scrap iron into bars

Scrap iron goes into the Smelter you already built for copper and tin, fuelled with coal. The wiki's smelter iron numbers:

One scrap iron becomes one iron bar. Smelting also keeps going while you sleep, so load the smelter before bed.

What to spend your first iron on

Iron weapons and iron armor are the reason you're in the Swamp. Here's what the wiki lists for the main pieces at quality 1:

Each armor upgrade costs another 5, 10 and 15 iron, which raises the armor to 16, 18 and 20. Our armor guide compares the iron set with the alternatives. The iron pickaxe is the piece that actually moves you forward, because it is what you need for silver.

How this guide was fact-checked

The source is a 58-second video from PingPlayers Game Hosting (uploaded 2026-06-18, before Valheim 1.0). It shows only the outside of a Sunken Crypt, the Swamp on the map, and the map-marking habit. What it confirms on screen: the shape of the entrance, the two green torches, Skeletons near the stairs, and a map pin on a found crypt. Everything about the inside of a crypt (drop rates, chests, enemies, campfire, gates, torches), plus smelting, portals, nails and gear costs, comes from the Valheim wiki on Fandom: the Sunken Crypts page (last edited 2026-09-23, after 1.0) and the Muddy Scrap Pile, Scrap Iron, Swamp Key, Iron, Iron ore, Smelter, Charcoal Kiln, Portal, Body Pile, Oozer and iron armor and weapon pages (mostly last edited in August 2026).

The video says crypts are something you will "most likely find" by running through the swamp; the wiki adds the reason (clusters of four that only spawn deep in the biome), which is why thin swamps can have none. One tip in the video's narration (something placed on top of the entrance that only a ghost can break) is garbled in the captions and doesn't match anything on the wiki, so it was left out. The video's description promises loot and iron-farming tips that the clip itself doesn't show, so those parts are wiki-only.

On 1.0 currency: per the row's editorial notes and the wiki's version history, crypt mechanics didn't change in 1.0 or Deep North. Patch 1.0.20 (15 October 2026) changed pseudo-random drop logic so it no longer resets between sessions, for a fairer spread of rare drops. The wiki's scrap-pile percentages were last edited before 1.0 and still apply. The wiki doesn't say whether the new logic affects scrap piles. The Iron page's old total for a full set of Swamp-tier gear is marked outdated on the wiki, so we didn't include it.

What this guide doesn't answer

• The Bonemass fight itself: covered in the separate Bonemass boss guide.
• Seed-specific crypt coordinates: crypt placement depends on your world seed, so there's no universal map.
• Glitching into crypts without a key: the wiki lists a chair exploit, but it is unintended and may be patched, so we don't recommend it.
• Full iron cost for every weapon and building piece: the wiki lists more than 30 iron recipes; this guide covers the first pieces most players craft.
• Silver and the Mountains: the iron pickaxe opens that up, but silver is a separate guide.