Skeleton
Undead warriors. Immune to poison, but brittle against blunt trauma.
The Skeleton removes two of Valheim's core systems rather than adding to them. There is no stamina bar and no cooking. What is left is a character who can swing, run and block forever, but whose survivability is entirely on rails: it goes up when a boss goes down, and at no other time.
Base kit (tier 1)
- Stamina-less combat. Skeletons do not consume stamina and do not display a stamina bar. Sprinting, attacking, blocking and jumping are all free.
- Undead diet. You cannot eat the food of the living. No cooking, no farming, no food buffs, no stomach management.
- +50 max health to start compensating for the missing food buffs.
Occasionally you will still get a flicker of "you could eat another bite". It is deliberate — a reminder of what the food of the living used to be like. It has no mechanical effect.
Progression
The Skeleton's entire power curve is health and lifesteal. Both scale hard.
| Boss | Unlock |
|---|---|
| Base | +50 max health · Undead diet · No stamina bar |
| Eikthyr | Poison skeleton model · Poison immunity · 5% lifesteal · +80 max health |
| The Elder | 10% lifesteal · Auto-stun on first hit · +110 max health |
| Bonemass | 15% lifesteal · Poison attacks · +140 max health |
| Moder | Fire skeleton model · burning skull · 20% lifesteal · Fire aura · Enhanced regeneration · +170 max health |
| Yagluth | 25% lifesteal · Auto-resurrect · +200 max health |
| The Queen | 30% lifesteal · Summon a skeleton on kill (max 3) · +230 max health |
| Fader | 35% lifesteal · Max 5 summons · 15% larger · +275 max health |
Health values are the bonus at that tier, not cumulative additions on top of each other. Your maximum health is exactly 25 + the bonus above — a Bonemass Skeleton has 165.
The mod's own tiers had drifted a long way from this list: poison immunity arrived at Bonemass rather than Eikthyr, auto-stun at The Queen rather than The Elder, and lifesteal jumped 20/30/40% instead of climbing in fives. As of 1.3.12 the code matches the table boss for boss.
Controls
The Skeleton has no active ability keys. Everything is passive.
Mechanics worth knowing
Lifesteal is your only healing
With no food and no rested-style regeneration to lean on, lifesteal is how you stay alive. Before Eikthyr you have none at all, which makes the opening hours the hardest part of the race by a wide margin. Play the pre-Eikthyr window carefully and be ready to disengage.
Auto-resurrect (Yagluth)
At the Yagluth tier a lethal blow does not necessarily end the run. Treat it as a safety net with a cooldown, not as immortality.
Summons (The Queen / Fader)
Kills start raising skeletons that fight for you, capped at 3 at the Queen tier and 5 at Fader. They are strongest in drawn-out fights against groups, where you have bodies to convert; they do very little in a single-target boss fight.
Model changes
The Skeleton's appearance shifts twice, and both are synced to other players:
- Eikthyr — the poison skeleton, sickly green.
- Moder — Hildir's bones, with your skull permanently alight. The flame is cosmetic: it deals nothing and blocks nothing. The Fire Aura that arrives at the same tier is the part that actually burns anything nearby.
At Fader you also stand 15% larger. That scale is applied to your whole character rather than only the mesh, so your hitbox and camera height grow with you — worth knowing indoors.
Undead Fortitude
Every one of the Skeleton's damage modifiers — the pierce and slash resistance, the weakness to blunt, and poison immunity from Eikthyr on — is carried by a single status effect called Undead Fortitude. You should always have it.
It used to be applied only at the moment you picked the race from the menu, and Valheim does not save status effects with a character — so from your next death or login onward you silently had none of it. Poison landed on a poison-immune Skeleton, and the physical resistances were gone too. It is now kept on you, and a boss killed mid-session takes effect immediately rather than waiting for a respawn.
Stations
Bone Servants
Two disarmed skeletons, each summoned at its own table, that work a 20 m circle around themselves without you standing there: fetch material from any chest marked with a Bone Fragment, feed the stations inside their circle, and collect what those stations finish making.
| Servant | Works | Available to |
|---|---|---|
| Bone Smith | The Forge family — smelter, blast furnace, charcoal kiln, windmill, spinning wheel, eitr refinery | Skeleton and Skadi |
| Bone Cook | Cooking stations and the fermenter | Skadi only |
Raising one costs its table's build materials once. After that, pressing E on an empty table
raises a fallen servant again for free — there is no automatic re-summon and no pause switch,
so an empty table simply waits until you notice and press the key. Each servant self-heals over
time the same way every other station creature in the mod does, and cannot be provoked into
fighting: the game's own monster AI is disabled on it outright, so there is nothing to pull it
off its job.
Bound Bone Pile
A crypt bone pile that raises a standing garrison, built from a Cursed Skull, 30 Bone Fragments and 10 Ooze. Its whole economy runs backwards from the Draugh's own body pile: you pay once per slot — 20 Bone Fragments buys one permanent slot, melee first and then archers — and that slot refills itself forever afterward, respawning a fallen guard on a timer (20 seconds, dropping to 15 once upgraded) rather than needing to be paid for again.
A Greater Cursed Skull, from the Bonemass tier, upgrades the pile: faster respawns and two
Rancid Remains slots, bought outright with a Poison Skeleton trophy each rather than with
fragments. Pressing E with empty hands commands the whole garrison at once — follow, or hold
position — the way a line of soldiers is ordered rather than one at a time. Destroying the pile
kills its garrison instantly, unlike the body pile's minute of grace, because a garrison that
rebuilds itself for free forever has to have an equally immediate off switch.
Bound Sentry
A single bound archer, built with the Hammer rather than raised at a pile: a Soul Stone (50 coin, sold by the Skeleton's own bench), a Skeleton Trophy and 10 Bone Fragments. It cannot walk — it stands exactly where it is placed and shoots what comes near — but it regenerates on its own after 10 seconds unhurt, and it is the one skeleton in the whole mod that drops anything: killed, it hands back everything it cost, at full chance. Every other bound creature has its drop table stripped specifically so a free-respawning garrison can't be farmed; the sentry doesn't respawn on its own; giving its materials back when it falls is safe.
See Stations for every race's chain side by side.