Quick answer
And these are just the minimum distances, so you may have to travel way farther than that. I canvassed the internet, Google searched, AI summarized, deep dove into Reddit, and even asked my own community to find the craziest and sometime useful seeds that you need to try in Valheim. Both onion and turnup seeds are commonly difficult to find. Carrot seeds can be a bit difficult to find since they are not very common, only spawning in this biome.
Kale seeds are one of them. Birch seeds and acorns can now be planted to regrow the tree. At base level the scythe will allow you when swung to harvest crops and seeds within a 1.5 meter radius which increases to 2.5 meters at level 100. Chickens, or more accurately, hens will eat barley, dandelions, and also a range of seeds, including beach seeds, birch seeds, carrot seeds, turnip seeds, and onion seeds.
Kale, whose seeds can be picked from sprouts and can seemingly be planted and grown in most of Valheim's biomes. These provide turnup seeds, which are needed to grow turnipss used in some new recipes. Fifth, ivy seeds purchased can be planted and function like the vineberry seeds from the ashlands. They have a chance to contain a mountain chest with a bunch of awesome loot like obsidian and onion seeds used to grow onions.
Seed basics
Stop playing on seeds you hate Valheim is a procedurally generated game and what that means is that no world is exactly like any other. Search chests in ruins as unlike the black forest and swamp, onion seeds are found within chests and unlock much improved food recipes which will be critical for overcoming this biome. Like bosses, minibosses have a 100% drop rate so her trophy will be simple to acquire.And lastly, the Elder after summoning with 3 ancient seeds, again with a perfect drop rate. But after realizing that even if the turnups got done that I would have to replant them for more seeds, I just decided to go for bone mass with what I had.
Carry some ancient seeds to the altar. The Mistlands, for example, doesn't enter into world generation until about 6,000 m from the center. In most seeds in Valheim, you start very close to the world center, but this one flips that on its head. Onion seeds, for instance, can only be found in chests across the mountains overworld and come with a tiny loot chance of a mere 12 1/2% chance.
The good news is the Black Forest has everything you need to start producing bronze, so you can get your farm started pretty quickly, and you definitely should once you found carrot seeds. Now with the oat seeds, you can actually uh put these into the windmill. Its worth noting that that bonus resources will be rewarded from farming planted seeds, crops but also foraging mushrooms and berries in the wild as well. And third and fourth, pot eitr and oat seeds can only be found inside barrels at these specific storage huts, also containing the occasional weapon cast.
How to use seeds
I suggest trying to find onion seeds as fast as you can because onions are used in recipes to craft some powerful foods like onion soup only requiring three onions and providing a whopping 60 stamina. We're still on the hunt for onion seeds. So, it will be a while before you find its alt biomes. But, we'll get to some better seeds for that in a bit.
Turnup seeds, on the other hand, are not found in a chest, but rather growing in the swamp's biome. Onion seeds are more challenging to find because they require RNG. So, it's added in 10 of those oat seeds, and let's wait for them to process. The oat seeds in particular, like barley before them, must be ground up at a windmill for flour before unlocking all kinds of the Deep North food recipes.
How many ivy seeds did I get? But for starters, we'll begin much closer to home with the Meadows, which has nine possible variations like the raspberry, dandelion, and mushroom that has a massive density of those resources. Of course, you will still need to sail to both the north and ashlands, but that's the case in all seeds. With the swamp being covered with so much water, the turnup seeds spawn far less frequently than carrots in the Black Forest for comparison.
Best seed choices
And once you find the seeds, all three can be grown safely back at base. And so, you see there, we processed the oat seeds into oats. Okay, we're going to drop the seeds for now. And you can find these as early as 500 m from spawn.
Of all the seeds I researched for this video, no other seed has all three so close together. If you're ever having trouble finding them, consider typing print seeds into your chat box. It might even be worth it to brave the deep north early on to see if you can quickly grab some kale seeds to take back to your farm. On our walk, I encountered two new crops in lingan berries, kale, and kale seeds, which will undoubtedly be key ingredients in many of the foods that have been teased in previous blog posts.
We're going to keep the seeds. The mushroom variant, specifically, can also be found in the Black Forest. Of all all seeds I came across, this one has the closest tetra location, except maybe one of the seeds with a huge mountain that we'll get to shortly. Maples, unlike other seasonal items, can occur naturally on some seeds in Meadows villages, but it's not guaranteed, making it one of the most elusive items in the game.
Map tools
At the same distance of 500 m, you could also encounter a birch or small tree Meadows. In Valheim, there is a master seed in which all other seeds are derived. The birch, like previously, will consist of a normal Meadows, but with way more birch trees than normal, while small tree will be absolutely covered in saplings. And again, this is an oversimplification of the process, but can explain why you may encounter similar shaped landmasses on completely different and unique seeds.
What's really interesting about these alt biomes is that many of them can overlap to make really wacky combinations. In this case, I found an absolute gold mine in a Meadows instance that is composed of both a birch, small tree, raspberry, mushrooms, and dandelions all in one. I imagine these are incredibly rare, but considering how many players complain about not being able to plant mushrooms and berries, finding these and placing a portal there would basically solve their problems. Further from the world center, the alt biomes get more interesting at 750 m with the menhir alt biome.
These add a series of almost horn-shaped bones and supposedly add spawning skeletons, but I didn't happen to see any. You can also encounter this alt biome type in the Plains. Next, at 1,000 m, you can find peaceful Meadows that will likely make for the optimal base location. However, the indication is subtle that you're in one.
Tips
Keep an eye out for blue fireflies in the air, more easily spotted at night, and you might notice a higher density of deer and boar. What's special about this one is that it blocks 11 other hostile creatures from spawning. It's not clear which creatures it blocks, but I imagine it prevents the more dangerous night spawning creatures that begin to appear in the meadows as you progress the game defeating bosses. And lastly, there's also a white deer in the game files that I spawned in.
Beyond that, occurring at 1900 m are the dark meadows. Here you'll find Draugr villages predominantly on lower terrain and have more hostile weather conditions. The only other alt biome reference in the game files is one known as lantern which states it could occur in any biome from meadows to mistlands, but I couldn't find a single one. I was able to spawn in this lantern structure that I can only assume was intended to be found in these alt biomes and used as a beacon for the deep north you eventually travel to.
Again, like the white deer, this could be a feature cut from the final delivery or maybe a bug not yet patched in the press version I played. The black forest, like the meadows, has nine possible variations including many of my personal favorites. Starting at 500 m you can encounter locations of resources like we saw in the meadows, but this case massive blueberry patches and dense pockets of red mushrooms. Also at 500 m are the kallig patches which take the typical black forest and strip it of all trees and ramp up the number of stones you can find.