Draugh
Undead warriors of the swamps. Accustomed to damp and decay.
The Draugh trades Valheim's entire cooking layer for a diet of raw flesh and a body that shrugs off weapons but hates fire. It has no ability keys at all — everything is passive, which makes it the easiest race to pick up and one of the hardest to feed.
Its progression is the most defensive in the mod. By the end you are effectively very hard to kill outright: a fatal blow puts you into a ghost state instead, and a single kill in that state brings you all the way back.
Base kit (tier 1)
Damage profile
| Damage type | Modifier |
|---|---|
| Blunt · Slash · Pierce | −20% taken |
| Fire · Spirit | +50% taken |
Poison is not on this list — it stays completely ordinary until the Bonemass tier, where it becomes full immunity in one step (see Progression below). At base tier a Draugh is no more poison-resistant than anyone else.
A flat 20% reduction against the three physical types is a large, always-on defensive bonus that applies to almost everything in the game. The tradeoff is real though: surtlings, fire arrows, the Ashlands as a whole, and every wraith and ghost hit you half again as hard.
The swamp is home
Skeletons, draugr, ghosts and wraiths never treat you as an enemy. Swamp crypts and sunken graves stop being fights, from tier 1, with no unlock required.
Appearance
Your skin turns a sickly corpse green, and your hair and beard are desaturated and darkened to match. You are permanently surrounded by the draugr's own ambient effects — drifting green miasma and flies — scaled up so they read clearly around a player-sized model.
The miasma and the flies used to exist only on your own screen. In multiplayer every other player saw an ordinary, unrotted Viking; each client now grows them for every Draugh it can see.
Diet
The Draugh cannot eat cooked food. Try, and you get told:
Draugr consume only raw flesh, eyes, entrails or blood.
What you can eat is the raw ingredient version of it. The mod builds an edible variant of each of these, keeping the raw item's name and icon:
| Raw item | Behaves as |
|---|---|
| Raw meat | Cooked meat |
| Neck tail | Grilled neck tail |
| Raw fish | Cooked fish |
| Lox meat | Cooked lox meat |
| Serpent meat | Cooked serpent meat |
| Wolf meat | Cooked wolf meat |
| Deer meat | Cooked deer meat |
| Hare meat | Cooked hare meat |
| Chicken meat | Cooked chicken meat |
| Bug meat | Cooked bug meat |
| Volture meat | Roasted volture meat |
| Greydwarf eye | Deer stew |
| Entrails | Sausages |
| Blood bag | Blood pudding |
Two things to note:
- Raw food lasts 50% longer for you than the cooked version would for anyone else.
- Eating is seamless — right-click the raw item in your inventory as normal. The swap happens under the hood.
You have the standard 3 stomach slots. If they are all full and you eat something you are already digesting, the buff is refreshed rather than rejected.
Progression
| Boss | Unlock |
|---|---|
| Base | Born Dead, Buried Alive — physical resistance, fire/spirit vulnerability, raw diet, swamp undead ignore you |
| Eikthyr | Slowly We Rot — Wet no longer drains stamina regen and instead speeds up health regen while wet or swimming |
| The Elder | Rotting Edge — physical attacks add poison damage; a successful parry also splashes poison onto the attacker |
| Bonemass | Undead Fortitude — full Poison immunity, +30% damage to staggered enemies, no more skill XP lost on death, and any player's death within 100m drops Human Meat for you |
| Moder | Grave Chill — full Frost immunity, and a parry's poison splash now also triggers a frost nova (own 20 s cooldown) |
| Yagluth | Zombie Ritual — fatal damage no longer kills you, burning Eitr instead, on a 10-minute cooldown |
| The Queen | Swarm of Terror — being struck in melee spawns 2 friendly Seeker Broods (9.5 s lifetime, 10 s cooldown) |
| Fader | Steal Their Breath — a kill while in the Zombie Ritual ghost state restores 25% health and cancels the death |
Controls
The Draugh has no ability keys.
Mechanics worth knowing
Slowly We Rot (Eikthyr)
Wet no longer drains your stamina regeneration, and instead of doing nothing for you it heals you — regen runs 25% faster while you're wet or swimming. Wet itself still applies (the status still shows and still affects anything else that reads it); this only flips what it does to your stamina and health. The Swamp stops being a chore to wade through.
Rotting Edge (The Elder)
Every physical hit you land carries extra poison damage worth 20% of what you dealt. Land a successful parry and you also splash a flat 40 poison damage onto whoever you parried — on top of, not instead of, the on-hit poison.
Undead Fortitude (Bonemass)
Four things land at once here:
- Full Poison immunity — the Resistant tag from earlier tiers is gone, this is 0 damage.
- +30% physical damage against staggered enemies — hit something that's reeling and the extra bite is automatic.
- Death no longer costs you skill experience. Vanilla's post-death skill penalty simply doesn't apply to a Draugh from this tier on.
- Human Meat drops on nearby death. Whenever any player dies within 100m of a Bonemass-tier-or-higher Draugh — including the Draugh's own death — a piece of Human Meat appears at the corpse, edible only by a Draugh.
There is no "Corpse Run" buff anywhere in this kit — that was a documentation error, not a real mechanic. What you actually keep from a death is the XP.
Grave Chill (Moder)
Full Frost immunity, the same way Poison went from resistant to immune the tier before. Riding on the same parry that triggers Rotting Edge's poison splash, you also unleash a freezing nova: everything within 8m takes frost damage and gets knocked back, on its own 20-second cooldown separate from the poison splash (which fires on every parry, no cooldown of its own).
It rewards a blocking, shield-forward playstyle, which is exactly what the race's physical resistance already pushes you toward.
Zombie Ritual (Yagluth)
When you take fatal damage you do not die. Instead you enter a ghostly state:
- Immune to all damage.
- Your eitr drains rapidly.
- If eitr reaches zero, you die for real.
It is a timer, not a reprieve — you have as long as your eitr pool lasts to change the situation. Which is why the same tier finally gives you an eitr source: your raw food starts providing eitr equal to half its food value. Once it saves you, it needs 10 minutes before it can trigger again — a second fatal hit in that window kills you for real.
Until Yagluth, a Draugh has no eitr food whatsoever, because every eitr food in the game is cooked or crafted. Magic is effectively locked off for the first five tiers and then opens completely.
Steal Their Breath (Fader)
The other half of Zombie Ritual. Land a killing blow while in the ghost state and you instantly restore 25% of your maximum health, the eitr drain stops, and you return fully to the living.
Together the two turn a death into an opportunity: drop, pick a target, kill it, come back.
Stations
Cursed Body Pile
Anyone can build it, but only a Draugh gives its garrison orders — for everyone else it is just a grave that defends its own ten metres.
Build: 1 Cursed Bone, 10 Entrails, 20 Bone Fragments, at the Hammer. Owning a Cursed Bone is what puts the piece in the menu in the first place.
Feed it any raw flesh and it banks the total; 100 units of flesh queues one Draugr Thrall. A Draugr trophy banks a full batch in one click — roughly a 1-in-10 drop from killing draugr — and an Elite trophy banks one Elite officer directly, once the pile is upgraded. A Greater Cursed Bone, available from Bonemass on, upgrades the pile permanently.
| Base | Upgraded | |
|---|---|---|
| Alive Draugr Thralls | 5 | 7 |
| Alive Draugr Elite Thralls | 0 | 3 |
| Queued (reserve) regulars / elites | 5 / 3 | 5 / 3 |
One queued unit rises every 60 seconds as long as there's room and stock, officers before regulars. Thralls patrol within 10 m of the pile when idle; up to 3 regulars and 1 elite can follow one player at a time and carry no loot on death. Destroy the pile and every bound thrall dies 60 seconds later unless it's rebuilt on the same spot — even thralls that were out following you. Up to 5 piles per 1.6 km².
See Stations for every race's chain side by side.
Playing one
- Skip the cauldron entirely. Your food chain is hunting, and nothing else.
- Greydwarf eyes and entrails are genuinely valuable — two of your best early food sources, both from enemies you were killing anyway.
- Learn to parry before Moder. Half your kit assumes you already do.
- Treat the Ashlands with real caution. +50% fire damage taken in the biome built entirely out of fire is the sharpest downside of any race in the mod.