How to make a butcher knife to carve up your delicious Valheim pets

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A change in friendly fire settings means traditional weapons won't hurt your animal companions.

Valheim butcher knife and boar
(Image credit: Iron Gate Studios)

Valheim's butcher knife has a special purpose. It was added in the Hearth and Home update specifically for killing the animals who have fallen in love with you. I know that sounds terrible, but players tame and farm boars, wolves, and lox not just for companionship but for resources. I'm not saying we don't love our pets, but we also love to turn them into food, clothing, and crafting components, especially since the update added more uses for them.

It used to be that you could kill tamed animals with any old weapon, but that led to a lot of accidental animal deaths during fights with monsters. The Hearth and Home update requires you to turn friendly fire on or your weapons will do zero damage to tamed creatures. And since most people play with friendly fire off, you might want to craft a butcher knife for when it's time to harvest your flock.

Valheim butcher knife: How to make one

The butcher knife recipe is pretty simple:

  • 2 wood
  • 4 tin
  • A forge

If you've been away from the game for a while, you can find tin deposits in the Black Forest biome along riverbanks or the edge of lakes or the ocean. Dig them up with pickaxe and and smelt it into tin ingots in your furnace. And we've got instructions on how to craft and upgrade a Valheim forge here.

With your new butcher knife it doesn't matter if friendly fire is off or on, you can kill your tamed creatures and make stuff out of 'em. Harsh, yes. But useful and quite tasty.

Christopher Livingston
Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.