Skadi
Children of the mountains. Resistant to frost, at home in the freezing cold.
Skadi is the flying race. It starts as a quality-of-life pick — the Mountains stop being a gear check on day one — and ends with you as a skeletal dragon breathing ice from the sky.
It is also the most mechanically dense race in the mod: three separate transformation keys, each with its own attack set, its own cost model and its own duration rules.
Base kit (tier 1)
- Immune to the Cold status. No cape needed in the Mountains from the very start.
- 50% frost resistance — frost damage is halved.
- Bonus frost damage on every hit, scaling with your tier at +2 frost per tier.
Progression
| Boss | Unlock |
|---|---|
| Base | Cold immunity · 50% frost resistance · Bonus frost damage |
| Eikthyr | Cold Spell (Middle Mouse) |
| The Elder | Drake Form (G) — flight, but cannot attack |
| Bonemass | Winter's Welcome: Freezing becomes mere Cold · Drake Form gains Drake Breath |
| Moder | Moder Form (H) — 1 min duration, 10 min cooldown |
| Yagluth | Heart of Winter: full Freezing immunity · +50% eitr regen · Improved Cold Spell · Moder Form cooldown drops to 5 min |
| The Queen | Winter Incarnate: immune to frost damage · 3 m freezing aura · Moder Form becomes unlimited, no cooldown |
| Fader | Skeleton Dragon Form (J) |
Controls
| Key | Action | Available from |
|---|---|---|
| Middle Mouse | Cold Spell | Eikthyr |
| G | Drake Form | The Elder |
| H | Moder Form | Moder |
| J | Skeleton Dragon Form | Fader |
While transformed
| Input | Drake | Moder — on foot | Moder — airborne | Skeleton Dragon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Right Mouse | Toggle flight | Toggle flight | Toggle flight | Spinning tail sweep |
| W (in flight) | Power forward and climb | — | Power forward and climb | — |
| Shift + W (in flight) | Sprint — costs stamina | — | Sprint — costs stamina | — |
| S (in flight) | Beat backwards | — | Beat backwards | — |
| Left Mouse | Ice spit (Bonemass+) | Bite and claw | — | Bite and claw |
| Middle Mouse | — | Ice breath | Ice breath | Ice breath |
Drake Form and Moder Form take to the air. The Fader-tier Skeleton Dragon is a ground form — Right Mouse is its tail sweep, not a flight toggle.
Mechanics worth knowing
Cold Spell
Your first real ability, and it arrives at Eikthyr — much earlier than most races get anything. It hurls a shard of ice at whatever you are looking at.
Damage is 15 + 8 per tier, so it is worth roughly 31 frost at Eikthyr and 79 at Fader. Crucially it costs 20 stamina, not eitr, which is why it works from your very first winter with no magic gear at all.
At the Yagluth tier it upgrades: the spell scatters into ten shards in a spread in front of you. The wider cast needs about 4 seconds to gather itself between casts.
The spell is cast from chest height with a proper spellcasting gesture.
It will not cast while you are holding the hammer, hoe or cultivator — middle mouse is Remove in build mode, and on a gamepad the same button places or removes a piece, so before v1.4.20 every piece a pad player built also cast the spell and paid its stamina. On a pad the spell casts bare-handed only; with anything in hand the button belongs to that item's own secondary attack, as it does in vanilla. See Gamepad and the radial menu.
Your spells raise Elemental Magic
Until v1.4.12 they could not. Every one of Skadi's casts builds its damage by hand and left the skill field unset, and vanilla's skill code returns immediately on an unset skill — so the experience was not small, it was structurally impossible.
| Source | What it pays |
|---|---|
| Cold Spell, and all three dragon breaths | One cast's worth on a hit that lands — a ten-shard burst is worth one cast, not ten |
| A shot into a hillside | Nothing |
| Frost Aura | A fraction of a cast per tick that actually burned something, once per tick rather than once per enemy |
Both numbers live under Skadi - Elemental Magic Skill and either can be set to 0. The aura
deliberately pays a fraction: it ticks every second on its own, and a pack would otherwise take
the skill to cap in one fight. The dragon forms' melee stays on Unarmed, where it already
was, and the Crystal Golem stays a hammer piece paying Building.
Flight
Flight is aimed, not free-camera noclip. Once you press Right Mouse in Drake or Moder Form:
- You glide toward wherever you are aiming, pitch included.
- Hold W to power forward and climb.
- Hold Shift with W to sprint, for roughly twice the powered speed (Drake 10, Moder 15 stamina per second). Running out of stamina drops you back to normal speed, not out of the sky.
- Press S to beat backwards along your aim, pitch included. Look down and press it and you rise away from whatever you are watching, without turning to face away from it — which means your breath still points at what you are retreating from.
- Release everything and the form holds level for a moment (Drake 3 seconds, Moder 8) before settling into a gentle descent.
Your dragon turns to face the direction it is actually flying. Airborne Moder keeps its ranged attack on Middle Mouse, exactly as on the ground; there is no left-hand attack in the air, since the ground bite and claws cannot reach from up there.
Drake or Moder
Since v1.6.7 the two flying forms handle differently, so the Drake keeps a reason to exist after the Moder loses its time limit (Dissolution's suggestion):
| Drake | Moder | |
|---|---|---|
| Role | the scout | the freighter |
| Turn speed | 180°/s | 80°/s |
| Boost / sprint | 14 / 26 m/s | 10 / 18 m/s |
| Powered flight | free | 3 stamina per second |
| Sprint | 10 stamina per second | 15 stamina per second |
| Hover | 3 s | 8 s |
| Encumbered | will not take off; one that gets encumbered in the air glides down | flies, at 25% extra stamina |
The Drake's powered flight stays free on purpose: it arrives at The Elder, long before a Skadi has the stamina pool to pay for simply staying airborne. Encumbered, it still walks and fights.
Every number above is under Skadi - Dragon Forms, one key per form (Drake Turn Speed,
Moder Turn Speed, ...), along with Max Duration, Duration Per State and Cooldown for the
Drake, the Moder and the Fader. Duration and cooldown default to -1, which keeps the
boss-tier timings; 0 means none, any other number is seconds. Each form has its own cooldown and
icon, so one form's cooldown never blocks another. Until v1.6.6 both forms shared
Skadi - Directed Flight; values set there went back to default in v1.6.7.
On a gamepad (since v1.4.15): Block takes off, lands and cancels a landing, the left stick powers forward and back, the run button sprints, and the right stick steers the way the mouse does. The full table is on Gamepad and the radial menu.
That hotfix changed how the game reads the left stick and the drake was still asking the old way, which threw an error into the log on every airborne frame and stopped flight outright. Fixed in v1.4.18, against both versions of the game.
What other players see
Since v1.4.21 a remote dragon is built at its own size — Moder's shrink included. Before that every other client used the prefab's raw scale, so two Skadi who both turned into Moder each saw themselves correctly and the other one full-sized. The same release sent the attack animations: onlookers used to watch a dragon fly, walk and idle without ever swinging or breathing.
Water is not a trap
A flying form beats its way back out of the sea. Fly into water and you climb out of it under your own power, regardless of where the camera is pointing; to land on water deliberately, toggle flight off with Right Mouse and swim as normal.
Valheim hands a swimming character to its swimming code before it ever asks whether they are flying, so a dragon that touched the sea was stuck paddling with the flight controls doing nothing. The Aswid's bat escapes that check by a quirk of how it flies, which is why the bat could always take off from water and Moder could not. Fixed in 1.3.12.
Duration and cooldowns
Moder Form is on a timer for most of its life:
| Tier | Duration | Cooldown |
|---|---|---|
| Moder | 1 min | 10 min |
| Yagluth | 1 min | 5 min |
| The Queen | Unlimited | None |
Timed forms show their remaining seconds, and then their cooldown, as a Moder trophy icon with a live countdown beside the minimap. Drake Form and Skeleton Dragon Form have no timer.
Attack costs run on stamina, not eitr
Everything Skadi casts is paid for with stamina. This is deliberate: eitr food only exists from the Mistlands onward, while the Cold Spell unlocks at Eikthyr and the Drake at The Elder — an eitr cost would have been unpayable for most of the race's life.
- Melee is free. Bite, claw and the Skeleton Dragon's tail sweep cost nothing at all. They are the baseline attack that has to work at every tier.
- Ranged volleys are charged per projectile, so the sixty-shard breath does not cost the same as a three-shard spit. The total is capped so the widest cast stays castable.
- The Skeleton Dragon's breath hits about three times as hard as Moder's.
The Yagluth tier's +50% eitr regen therefore helps your magic gear, not your dragon.
Cooldowns on the HUD
Ability cooldowns each show their own icon with a live countdown beside the minimap — transformation cooldowns, the attack cooldown and the improved Cold Spell's 4-second gather.
Cold, Freezing and the mountain
The three cold-related unlocks are easy to confuse:
| Tier | What changes |
|---|---|
| Base | Immune to Cold. Freezing still applies |
| Bonemass | Freezing is converted to Cold — which you are immune to |
| Yagluth | Freezing cannot apply at all |
| The Queen | Frost damage can no longer wound you |
Skadi's own frost resistance used to make Valheim skip the cold check entirely, which meant the conversion silently did nothing. It is now correctly applied at the Bonemass tier.
Crystal Golem
A guardian cut at a stonecutter and bound to it — the mountain's own answer to a hired
crew. Costs a Golem Trophy, 10 Crystal and Moder's own drop, from the Moder tier on. Unlike
every other race station in the mod it is not a RaisedThrall: a golem cannot be named,
ordered or walked away with. It simply guards the stone that shaped it — patrolling a leash
around its stonecutter, ignoring player-built structures, never fleeing, and self-healing like
every other station creature. Up to two per stonecutter, ten per square mile, and it withers a
minute after its stonecutter is gone. Only Skadi can raise one. Skadi and Trol may both build
inside any troll cave, a change that shipped alongside the golem.
Where to find it: the golem is built with the Hammer, not crafted at the stonecutter. It sits under Crafting in the build menu, with the Crystal icon. Place it next to a stonecutter, which works as its required station the way a workbench does for wooden pieces. The entry shows greyed out with its price until you carry the materials.
Bone Cook
Skadi-only: a disarmed skeleton summoned at its own table who works the cooking stations and the fermenter within a 20 m circle, fetching material from any chest marked with a Bone Fragment and keeping the station fed without you standing there. Skadi can also raise the Bone Smith — the same system's Forge-family worker — which the Skeleton race has of its own; see Skeleton: Bone Servants for the shared mechanics, including why raising one costs materials once and a fallen one costs nothing to raise again.
See Stations for every race's chain side by side.
Abilities and open menus
Race abilities do not fire while the map, inventory, a chest, the chat or a menu is open. Clicking an item inside a container will not swing your transformed attack.