Neck

Neck

A four-eyed water lizard, and probably the first thing you ever killed.
Biome	Meadows
Alignment	Aggressive
Faction	Forest
Health	5
Damage	Bite: 6 Slash
Weak To	Fire
Resistant To	Poison
Immune To	Spirit
Stagger	50%
Tameable	No
Trophy	Neck trophy
Spawn ID	`spawn Neck`

For most players, the first kill in Valheim is a Neck: a small four-eyed lizard with lily pads sprouting from its back, dozing at the edge of a pond in the Meadows. With five points of health and a bite worth six, it is less a threat than a food item that runs away. It still deserves a little respect on day one, when six damage is a real slice of your health bar and there is almost never just one of them.

Behaviour

Necks live between land and water and are at home in both. They paddle across ponds and rivers with their heads held up, and scurry ashore in a low, quick, side-to-side scramble. They are aggressive on sight and will swim across open water to reach you instead of losing interest. Once they are just over a metre away they snap with a short horizontal bite for slash damage, again every few seconds for as long as you stay in range. They do not hunt as an organised pack or call for help, but a pond holds several, so a fight with one Neck usually becomes a fight with two or three arriving one after another. They are also a quiet threat to farms. A Neck that wanders into a planted field eats the crop, onions very much included, which is why anyone building beside water eventually puts up a fence, for reasons that have nothing to do with danger.

Where to Find It

Any part of the Meadows with standing water will have Necks: pond edges, river banks, coastal shallows, the marshy dip between two hills. They are common near water at every hour and very common in rain. Then they spawn across any low-lying ground under roughly ten metres of altitude instead of sticking to the waterline, so a wet night can put them in places that are bone dry the rest of the week. One-star and two-star variants both exist, and both stay trivial, with a little more health and a slightly harder bite. The one special case is Eikthyr's rally event, which sends them at you in pairs. It only happens before Eikthyr has been killed, which makes it one of the very first scripted events most players survive.

Where and When	At Once	How Often	Stars
Anywhere near water in Meadows	6	-	After 800 meters from the world center
Anywhere below 10 meter altitude in Meadows when raining	8	Very common	After 800 meters from the world center
During "Eikthyr rallies the creatures of the forest" event before defeating Eikthyr	2	Very common	No

Strengths and Weaknesses

Anything in your hands kills a Neck, so the fight needs no technique: a stone axe, a flint knife, a club, a torch, one arrow of any kind. They take half damage from poison and half again from fire. Against five health that hardly matters, but it does mean a torch swing kills one in a single hit on the very first morning, when you own nothing else. You do not need to block, and parrying is showing off; step back as it lunges and swing while it recovers. The only time a Neck becomes a real problem is in deep water, where your stamina drains, you cannot draw your weapons at all, and three of them can nibble a swimming player to death. If you are in the water and they follow you, get to the bank first and fight on dry ground. On land, any gear at all, even none, makes this safe.

It takes extra damage from Fire.
It resists Poison.
It is immune to Spirit.

Drops

Neck tails are the only reason to bother. They are cheap early meat that cooks on any fire and carries you through the first few days.

Item	Image	Base	1 Star	2 Star
Neck tail		70%	2	4
Neck trophy		5%	5%	5%

Level Variants

A creature can spawn at one of three levels, shown as stars beside its name. Each level is rolled separately at spawn, so a two-star is rarer than a one-star. The difference goes beyond the numbers: a starred neck is recoloured or larger, so you can see it coming.

Level	Stars	Health	Damage	Drops
1	-	5	100%	x1
2	⭐	10	150%	x2
3	⭐⭐	15	200%	x4

Notes

The Runestone describes Necks as lizard-like creatures, but they also look like frogs, with lily pads on their bodies and a habit of hanging around marshy ponds. That habit points to their mythological counterpart, a humanoid, shapeshifting water spirit.
Necks usually stay near shorelines, but in rainy weather they can show up further inland.
They can eat planted crops such as onions, so be careful growing anything where necks can spawn.

All Creature Categories

All Meadows Creatures

Name	Image	Biome	Alignment	Health	Very Weak To	Weak To	Resistant To	Very Resistant To	Immune To	Drops	Level Variants	Spawn ID
Greyling		Meadows	Aggressive	20	Fire	-	Poison	-	Spirit	Resin	-	`spawn Greyling`
Neck		Meadows	Aggressive	5	-	Fire	Poison	-	Spirit	Neck tail, Neck trophy	⭐ ⭐⭐	`spawn Neck`

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