How to craft a lox saddle in Valheim and ride those big wooly tanks

Valheim Viking riding a lox
(Image credit: Iron Gate Studios)

If you want to craft a Valheim lox saddle, I don't blame you. Lox, the big furry lizard monsters that roam the Plains biome of Valheim have always been tameable (with a whole lot of effort) but the Hearth and Home update added a lox saddle as a new item. Now you don't have to settle for just farming a lox, you can actually ride one. Giddy-up!

There's a bit of work to do first, however. Below, we've got everything you need to know about how to craft a lox saddle (plus a bit about taming) so you can start riding those big wolly tanks around and conquer the Plains.

 Valheim Lox Saddle: How to craft it 

You'll need a few things to craft your lox saddle at your workbench:

  • 10 leather scraps
  • 20 linen thread
  • 15 black metal

With the saddle crafted, you'll also need to tame a lox if you haven't yet. Lox are tamed like boars or wolves, by tricking them into entering a pen (in this case, one made of stone or earth walls on the Plains) and trapping them inside, then feeding them barley, flax, or cloudberries. Do this long enough and they'll love you for it.

Place the saddle into one of your numbered hotkey slots, approach the tamed lox, and you'll see a prompt to saddle and ride them. Unfortunately, you can't fight with melee weapons while riding, or even use your bow. If you're attacked, your tamed lox won't attack your enemy unless you dismount first. But still, riding a lox around is pretty darn cool, and you'll see an increase in the new Riding skill added in Hearth and Home, too.

If you need a little help with how to gather the lox saddle ingredients listed above, keep on reading.

Leather scraps are dropped by boars when you kill them. Linen thread is made from flax, which can be collected from gardens in some fuling villages. To grow more, you'll need to replant it, and flax only grows in the Plains biome so you'll need a base and farm there to grow a flax crop. (If you're taming lox, you're probably already at this stage of the game.)

Once you have enough flax, you'll need to use a spinning wheel to create linen thread. The spinning wheel can be crafted with the following:

  • 20 fine wood
  • 10 iron nails
  • 5 leather scraps

As a reminder, iron nails can be crafted at a forge from iron ingots, with each ingot producing 10 nails.

Black metal, meanwhile, can be made from black metal scrap (in a blast furnace, unlocked after killing Moder and acquiring the artisan table). Black metal scrap is dropped by fulings and can also sometimes be found in chests in the Plains biome.

That's everything. Happy trails!

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.