Valheim 1.0: How to Mine the Petrified Gammeltroll for Bloodgold

Daniel Carter10/09/20265 min read

You’ve finally dropped Valheim’s biggest overworld enemy, the Gammeltroll, and it just… doesn’t fall down. Instead of collapsing into loot like every other kill in the game, the thirty-foot brute freezes solid into a statue called a Petrified Gammeltroll, and your pickaxe won’t touch it. PC Gamer confirmed the fix isn’t mining gear at all, it’s explosives, and getting there means backtracking into a biome you probably thought you were done with.

Why the Gammeltroll Won’t Just Fall Over

The Gammeltroll ships with Valheim 1.0’s new Deep North biome, which Iron Gate released on September 9, 2026 as the game’s final planned zone after more than five years in Early Access, according to XGamingServer’s launch guide. Deltia’s Gaming describes it as the largest creature Valheim has ever seen, and the lore behind it is oddly gentle for something that hurls entire tree trunks at your head: old trolls who have grown massive and traveled to the Deep North as part of their natural life cycle.

Kill one and it doesn’t ragdoll like a normal troll. Defeating the troll petrifies it in place, leaving a stone corpse that no ordinary tool can chip away at. We think that’s a smart bit of design for a biome built as the game’s send-off, it forces you to plan ahead instead of just swinging harder.

Players have been comparing notes on the puzzle since launch day, and a fair few clearly didn’t see it coming:

Crafting Ember Charges: A Chain That Starts Back in the Ashlands

The only thing that actually breaks the statue is an Ember Charge, and the recipe forces a round trip through the biome before the Deep North. Postmode’s guide lays out the chain: you need to lob Ember Charges at the Gammeltroll’s body to destroy chunks of it, from which you will receive the Petrified Tissue needed to smelt Bloodgold Ingots. Ember Charges require Seal Hide & Embers to craft.

Getting the ember half of that recipe means crafting the Eternal Pyre, a new Hammer-buildable station. To craft the Eternal Pyre, you need a Fader Relic and 10 Stone, as well as the Stonecutter station. The Fader Relic is what drops from Fader, the boss of the Ashlands. If you tossed that relic in a chest years ago and forgot about it, now’s the time to go dig it out.

PC Gamer’s own testing landed on a simple ratio: Use 1 ember and 2 seal pelts to create ember charges (10) at your workbench. Just make sure you’re hunting the right animal first. Kill seals in the Deep North. (Not baby seals! Adults, with whiskers!)

Where to Throw the Charges to Crack the Statue

Aim matters here. PC Gamer’s guide recommends going low: throw them at its ankles from point blank range, then run away before they explode. With this method, it only takes two ember charges, one for each ankle, to destroy the statue. That’s a far cry from the pile of gear you’d burn fighting the thing while it’s still alive.

Don’t bother trying to use the charges as a weapon on a living Gammeltroll either. I wouldn’t advise using ember charges as weapons against a living Gammeltroll. It’ll damage the troll, but not enough to be worth it. Save them for after the kill.

Once the statue comes apart, watch your inventory weight. Be warned, it’s very heavy so you can’t carry much, and it won’t pass through wooden portals, only stone ones. If your portal hub is still all wood from earlier biomes, you’ll need a stone one built specifically for hauling this stuff home.

What Petrified Tissue Turns Into: Bloodgold and Nord Gear

Petrified Tissue isn’t the end product, it’s a smelting input. When you defeat a Gammeltroll, its body petrifies. You can then mine the remains using an Ember Charge to obtain Petrified Tissue, which converts into Blood Gold at the Blast Furnace. Bloodgold is the ingot behind the Deep North’s entire new weapon and armor line.

From there the crafting loop gets genuinely unusual for Valheim. As All Things How put it, kill a Gammeltroll, blast its petrified corpse with Ember Charges to collect Petrified Tissue, smelt that into Bloodgold in a Blast Furnace, combine Bloodgold with a mold found in Winding Tunnels or the Gates of Mörkhalla to make a cast, then place the cast in a Frost Foundry and add Liquid Frost from a Frigid Kiln. It’s more steps than smelting Iron ever asked of you, but it’s the only route to the new Nord weapons and three armor sets tied to the biome.

You don’t have to blow the statue up at all, mind. Sportskeeda notes after defeating a Gammeltroll, it turns into a petrified troll. You can then use it as a massive base decoration or blow it up using Ember Charges to get Petrified Tissue. Our take: leave the first one you kill standing near your base as a trophy, and save the demolition work for every Gammeltroll after that.

Iron Gate’s Deep North also marked Valheim’s jump out of Early Access entirely at version 1.0, five years after the game first launched, bringing crossplay support alongside the new biome. The Gammeltroll grind is just the entry fee for the Bloodgold gear that follows.