Brynjar, whom we should call “Brynjar the Builder,” was looking around for ways to speed up resource harvesting for our various projects. It can take time to go out and chop wood and even more so to dig out stone. But he found a video that shows how to farm the Greydwarf population. A Greydwarf, Greydwarf Shaman, or Greydwarf Brute all drop wood and stone and resin and a few other things when they die, so slaying them en masse turns out to be a harvesting alternative.
The first thing you need is a Greydwarf spawner. You can find those all over the Black Forest biomes. Unfortunately, because they are generally a source of annoyance, we had been pretty vicious in rooting them out any place close to home. So we had to go find one elsewhere.
Brynjar and I set sail in a Karve, headed for an island we had seen with a lot of Black Forest coverage. We had the supplies to build a portal and had a connecting portal all set up back at out main portal hub.
As we pulled close to shore, basically the first place we looked, there was a Greydwarf spawner right there, visible from the water. We were in business. We built a workbench, put up the portal and got it connected, then set to work.
The spawner found
What you apparently need to do is put down floor pieces from the building construction pieces around the spawner. We set about doing that while carefully slaying any Greydwarf that spawned, studiously avoiding damaging the spawner.
It took a while, but we managed to get the boards laid out in a grid that seemed to, if not halt spawns, at least keep them down to a very slow rate.
The floor laid
Sometimes it is hard to tell because they will also wander up out of the woods while you’re working.
The next task was then to dig out a pit below the spawner.
The pit takes form… also, it finally stopped raining
You end up mining out a nice pit with a spire of rock left to support the spawner. Then you build hearths down at the bottom of the pit… which was the step where we realized that we hadn’t brought some iron with us in order to build a stone cutter. You can’t take that through a portal, so it was back to a base where we had smelted some iron, then another sailing trip back to our work site.
All Vikings love to sail, right?
Stone cutter built, Brynjar began laying out the hearths on the ground around the spire supporting the spawner. Then a one high wall around the hearths, which is enough to keep the Greys from getting out of the fire.
The Grey Hell of the Pit
Once in action, the loot began to pile up in the pit.
Down in the pit
The easiest way to collect it is to do some fire walking and run around the pit to vacuum everything up.
It isn’t perfect. Things collect slowly and you have to keep the hearths fed with wood… though wood is one of the outputs, so you at least have that covered. And the hearths and the walls take damage when a Greydwarf thrashes around in the pit, so you have to jump in and repair them fairly regularly.
My sign to remind
Brynjar finished things up by building a little station there to house the stone cutter and work bench and portal and a few chests to hold things.
There is even an observation deck
It isn’t exactly a Minecraft level of operation… there is no auto sort into chests… but it was an interesting experiment with the mechanics of the game.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
That has to be a much slower and less eficient way to farm wood than just chopping down trees, surely? Although I guess it depends how much you enjoy chopping down trees. I find it dangerously addictive to the point that I almost go into a trance state. I’d quite like a version of Valheim where chopping down trees was the core activity – just chopping them down, not actually using the wood for anything.
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@Bhagpuss – For wood it isn’t all that efficient, and especially if you chop close to your base then replant trees, so travel doesn’t become a factor. For stone, at least before the mountain biomes come into play, it is better, but still not efficient. For resin and greydwarf eyes though, both of which can be used to fuel torches, it solved the problem of our dwindling resin supply.
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