Skills are weird in Valheim. Your skill increases the more you use certain types of weapons — the skill system basically works like Skyrim. If you block with your shield, you’ll level up your Block skill. If you use your pickaxe a lot, you’ll level up the pickaxe. If you run around a lot, you’ll increase your Run skill.
Not all skills are equal, and some are straight-up useless in this current build of the game. Running? Don’t even bother. Any fighting skills give you a decent boost, and Bows become incredibly powerful the more you level up. That’s why you just might want to start grinding skills in your home base. It’s easy and possible with a little help from friends — some skills take dozens of hours to increase. These methods will get you the same results in twenty minutes.
More Valheim guides:
12 Tips The Game Doesn’t Explain | Beginner’s Guide | How To Tame & Breed Boars | Comprehensive Healing Potion Crafting Guide | 4 Tips To Improve FPS Performance | 9 Tips To Survive The Swamps | How To Summon All Bosses | Best Mods List | How To Move Loot Easier | Inventory Guide | How To Unlock & Craft Portals | How To Find Haldor The Trader | How To Unlock The Best Weapons
There are a couple ways to boost your skills — some require friends, but most can be done completely solo. Grinding skill is a deeply repetitive activity, so put on a video, watch some TV, listen to a podcast — just do something to stay away. You’ll get results in 20~ minutes.
Boosting Melee Weapon Skills
Use large stones for endless grinding. These huge stones are normally unbreakable with melee weapons — and that’s exactly what we want. Build a structure around the stones, then you can simply attack them forever with your preferred weapon. Normal weapons don’t break stones. That’s what the Pickaxe is for. But, normal weapons still do a fraction of damage, so you can continue to train (and repair as necessary) in your base.
Boosting Axe / Pickaxe Skills
The Pickaxe and Woodcutting Axe skill can be leveled up with Birch Tree logs. These incredibly hard logs are found in the Meadows / Plains biomes. Just look for the white trees. They’re very tough, and if you’re willing to roll the logs back into your base, you can smack them with axes / pickaxes lower than Bronze tier to grind your skills without breaking the log itself.
Boosting Block Skill
Very simple. Turn on PVP in your multiplayer server and invite a friend to smack your shield while you block. Like the previous entries, you can do this in the Sacrificial Stone area to negate all damage. This is easily the best way to increase Block — even after playing for dozens of hours, it’s likely your Block skill won’t be very high. 20 minutes of grinding with a friend will change that.
Make sure to equip the weakest weapons (and strongest shields) you can before grinding. Block is one of the better skills in the game, and becomes incredibly useful in the Plains biome.