How to Tame a Boar in Valheim

You may have come across aggressive pigs or wild boars in your travels around Valheim. While they’re not the friendliest of creatures, they do have their uses. If you need food while wandering the Viking afterlife, boar meat is probably one of the first sources you’ll find. You can also make use of the leather scraps they drop when you kill them.

If you’re tired of waiting for your game to respawn boars or are planning on a project that requires a continuous supply of leather scraps, taming boars may be the way to go.

Domesticating boars in the Viking afterlife is at your fingertips. Keep reading to learn what you need to tame a boar and how the taming process works.

How To Tame a Boar in Valheim

Wander through the Meadows biome in Valheim and you’re bound to run into boars. They’re a great source of meat, especially if you’re just starting the game. Boars also drop those coveted leather scraps needed for crafting and building.

It is possible to run through your local supply of boars, though. Overhunting is a “thing” in the game, and you may find yourself “boar-less” when you need them most. To ensure that you always have boars when you need them, one of the best options in the game is to tame them as soon as possible.

Necessary Items

Before you set out to lure a boar into your settlement for domestication, there are a few things you need to have on-hand first:

· Wood for Wood Panels

Before beginning your boar domestication project, you’re going to need wood. Fortunately, this resource is relatively plentiful in the Viking afterlife. You can gather branches from the ground or chop down trees using a stone ax.

If you’re feeling a bit aggressive, you can also punch young Beech Trees to source wood for this project. Just be sure that the tree you’re punching is a young (read: small) one. You’ll need an ax to harvest wood from a full-grown tree.

How many panels will you need? It depends on how simple or elaborate you plan to make your boar pen.

For example, a simple version of a pen requires 3×3 walls. If you want to build this simple version, you’ll need two pieces of wood per wood wall. Altogether, you’ll need 18 pieces of wood to make a three-sided pen that’s three pieces long on each side.

· Valheim Workbench (Optional)

To clarify, you do need a Valheim workbench for this project. However, if you already have one in your inventory, you can skip to the next item on this resource list.

If you haven’t crafted a workbench yet, now’s the time to do it. You’ll need:

• 10x wood (workbench)
• 3x wood, 2x stone (hammer)
• Extra wood for a workbench shelter

It seems silly to say that you need a hammer to craft a workbench when you don’t have a workbench to craft a hammer, right? The developers of the game have a solution, though.

You don’t need a workbench to craft a hammer, just the necessary resources. The recipe is available when you first start the game. Crafting the hammer automatically unlocks the crafting recipe for a workbench.

Once you have a hammer and all the necessary pieces of wood, check out the process below to start crafting a workbench:

1. Equip your newly crafted hammer.
   
2. Right-click on the hammer to open the submenu.
   
3. Go to the “Crafting” tab and choose “Workbench” from the left menu pane.
   
4. Once your workbench is crafted, set it in your preferred location.
   

You’ll also need a roof or shelter for your workbench, or you won’t be able to use it. Some players build a small home to enclose their workbench along with survival basics like a campfire and bed. However, if you don’t want to get fancy with your building yet, a simple makeshift roof with wood walls and a thatched roof will suffice.

· Boar Food

You’re going to need some food for the boars you intend to tame. They don’t require elaborate meals, though. Simply gather some red mushrooms from the environment and keep them on hand. Or you can grow carrots from carrot seeds or turnips.

Not only do these ingredients provide nourishment for your little piggies, but they also calm their temperament a bit.

Building a Boar Pen

Building a boar pen doesn’t need to be an elaborate affair – unless you want it to be. As mentioned before, you can get by with a 3×3 wood panel structure with minimal resources, however, you’ll eventually have to separate the untamed and tame boars. They can’t be housed together.

You can also build boar pens from round pole fencing. It requires less wood to make each panel and boars can’t jump over them. Keep in mind, though, that these fences aren’t particularly durable, and most creatures can eventually destroy them.

Getting a Boar’s Attention

Getting a boar’s attention is as easy as going up to a boar in the wild and getting it aggravated (“aggro’d”) at you. You don’t have to do much. Usually seeing your character is enough to put a boar in a frenzy.

Luring a Boar Into a Pen

Once the boar sees you at a distance, it’s time to keep just enough distance to lure it back to the pen or homestead area. You will probably take some hits from the boar as you’re leading them away from the wild, so equipping leather armor for this step is a good idea.

Look back often as you’re luring the boar to make sure it’s still following you. You want enough distance where you won’t get trampled by it at every step but not so far that it loses interest in you. If it has decided that you’re not worth the effort of following, you’ve put too much distance between you and it.

There are a couple of ways that you can lure a boar into a pen:

• Lead it into a pre-built pen.
• Build a pen around you and the boar.
  

As you may imagine, building a pen around the boar (and you) is only for the bravest of Valheim warriors as these angry little piggies will try to take you down during the process. However, if you’re having problems leading a boar towards a certain direction, this may be an easier option. Just remember to make sure you can jump over the fence wall or leave an opening to exit out of once you have the boar properly penned in.

Taming a Boar

The way to a beast’s heart is through its stomach, and that’s no different in Valheim. Taming a boar simply requires you to throw its favorite food onto the ground in its pen. You can use red mushrooms gathered from the environment or cultivated carrots from your farm. Either of them is a good choice.

Boars are also partial to berries, particularly raspberries and blueberries. They may be gathered from the Meadows and Black Forest biomes, respectively.

It can take approximately 20 to 25 minutes to fully tame a boar, but some players report the taming process is a bit longer. Your new boar needs to feel comfortable before it’ll eat your tasty offerings and begin the taming process, so it’s best if you just let it alone for a bit.

However, if you’re impatient about taming, you shouldn’t leave the area completely. The taming process can go into stasis when you unload or leave the general area of the pens and continues where it left off when you return.

If you’re curious about how close a boar is to being tame, you can always hover your cursor over it to see a taming percentage.

Additional FAQs

How do I breed boars in Valheim?

Once you have a few tamed boars, it’s time to start breeding them. You can feed them any of their preferred foods like mushrooms, carrots, berries, or turnips to encourage amour between the pair. When a couple of tamed boars eat them, you’ll see the boars stand close to one another. You’ll also see pink hearts flutter around the new pair indicating that the mating process is occurring.

Keep in mind that an overcrowded pen doesn’t seem to encourage breeding. If you notice that your boars don’t want to make baby pigs it may be time for a bigger pen or to cull your collection.

A squealing sound is the sound of success in your new foray into husbandry and a new baby piggy (labeled “piggy”) will appear next to the pair. Unfortunately, you can’t interact with the babies until they’re adults, but they’ll grow into tame adults automatically.

Where can I find boars in the wild in Valheim?

Boars are commonly found in the Meadows biome. They like water and abandoned farmsteads, so look near these locations first if you’re on a hunt to lure more boars to your pen.

How do I keep the boars in Valheim healthy?

Boars, like any tamed pets in the game, get hungry. It’s up to you to feed them their preferred foods to keep them happy and healthy. Stock up on mushrooms, carrots, berries, and even turnips to keep those “love” hearts fluttering.

Taming the Wild Beast

Taming a boar is a relatively simple process. It’s more time-consuming to adequately prepare for your domesticated animals than it is to get them to love you. Just remember that forgetting to feed them not only makes them unhappy, but it can also lead to starvation and death. Make a habit of checking on them regularly to ensure their and your happiness throughout your playthrough.

What’s your favorite way to pen tamed boars? Do you go big and premade or wing it and build around them? Tell us about it in the comments section below.