I highly recommend this game and to play it without looking up shit.
Be prepared to die many times as you learn the mechanics and quirks of every biome, mob and boss.
Progression is smooth and at your own pace. You can play and building basic houses for months without the game getting harder.
Or you can rush all the best gear/boss kills you want.
Or expoit the AI and make a mob mine/chop copper or fancy wood for you before you unlock it. (Too hard to hit without a tool).
Or skip ahead a few biomes where you can get one shot to gather some mats way ahead of time.
Beat the game normally and install a overhaul mod for new game plus. Or add new magic to the game.
And it’s all even more fun with friends. When you die together and struggle to retrieve your lost loot.
I can’t agree with this comment enough.
I finally picked this game up about six months ago. I get very little time to play, but I sneak in a short session when I can.I told myself from the start that I wouldn’t look up any information, just let the game take me where it goes, and I’ve had a blast. Even times when it’s been an absolute bitch running back to collect my gear after getting stomped on.
I bought a copy for a cousin who never gets to game. Told him not to look up anything. He tries solo.
So he starts. Makes a club. Stealth kills a few deer. Then summons the boss.
Now he’s got the first boss chasing him when he never figured out the work bench. Running away wielding a club and no pants.
Dies. Respawns. Boss finds him at spawn. Spawn camps him.
Calls me up. I’m dying.
I told him to start over, make the hammer, and listen to the crow.
I’ve heard good things about valheim but only in the context of playing with multiple people. Is solo much different / is the game built for solo or teams?
Solo play is great. Team play just offers some amazing moments and game play.
There’s lots to do so in a team it’s divide and conquer.
1 goes to gather wood.
1 goes to gather food.
1 goes to gather ores.
Build new big thing.
Team up to explore new area together.
Big fight happen.
No one knows what to do.
Someone dies.
2 run away. 1 dies. 1 gets away.
1 helps other 2 get thier drops back.Lots died but we’re laughing and having a good time?
Good game.
Valheim can be completed solo, and many prefer it. There is really no pressure to play co-op if you don’t enjoy it, and you can do both in the same playthrough; co-op is seamless, friends can join your solo world (crossplatform PC and Xbox) with their existing characters, and you can join any other world with your existing characters. Some restraint is needed as this can be exploited, skipping progression by “smuggling” advanced materials and gear. There are mods to prevent this if you want.
Enemies scale in difficulty when multiple players are in proximity of each other.
You can tweak the difficulty settings on existing worlds from the main menu, no commitment. Tailor the experience to what you find enjoyable. The most common complaint is that resource gathering is a little slow solo, so you can turn up a multiplier that makes it faster if you like.
1000 hours, AMA.
If you like open ended grinding based games, get it, but I’m burned out. I did not enjoy this game.
I played just enough to be denied a refund. Not my cup of tea at all.
Totally worth it at full price, so this is even better!
It is also the only survival game I enjoy. You can’t starve to death, the starting area is not crazy difficult, and the art style makes finding the things you need easy.
The difficulty does ramp up as you go through the biomes, which is where it can get brutal if you are caught off guard. I honestly love the first five or so biomes and there is a ton of replayability with exploring, building bases and outposts, and just seeing what you can do.
Also one of the rare games where I leave the ambient music on.
Man. I’ve been playing forever. Holy shit some biomes get hard.
Actually the real hard mode is to not look up guides and just try to figure it out.
Can anyone comment on the inventory management in this game? I really dig the aesthetics and have seen the positive reviews, but I always seem to struggle with this genre. It starts out being fun until I need to scan through 10 chests to craft every little thing.
I haven’t played in a bit but vanilla inventory pisses me off.
Not the size but the lack of quick stuff. I hear they patched QuickStore so you can quickly dump matching items from inventory to a chest you’re looking at.
Gather wood. Hit carry weight limit.
Walk to build site. Build workbench and chest. Open chest. Put away wood.
Repeat more trips to chop more wood and open chest to store. Build a few more. Chests and fill those. (I do 2 - 4 chests)
House time. Take out wood. Build. Repeat small reload mat trips until done with build.Crafting? Gather all the mats you need from chests and hit the workstation.
I use mods.
Quickstore - press a key and matching items from your inventory auto store into nearby chests. Go adventure and come home, hit a key to dump inv into matching chests and sleep/save/quit.
CraftFromContainers - auto pull resources from nearby containers for building, crafting, cooking and more.
They’re just QoL mods that save me organizational time and let me play the game. It’s been a year tho.
I used to use a few other QoL mods. Vanilla gameplay with GUI or time saving bits.
Weight based encumbrance with slots, but you’ll generally cap out weight before slots. Depending on your wold seed and/or base building tolerance level, it’s either a constant struggle or not bad to deal with - juggling stamina and food is the bigger grind imo.
Tbh as a busy adult, there’s a select few quality of life mods that make it less tedious but still keeps the reward:challenge payoff. Some of the much more useful items can’t be taken through portals, and I’d highly recommend modding that OUT for sanity/time sink reasons.
I’d highly recommend modding that OUT for sanity/time sink reasons.
No mods needed anymore! That’s just a slider now in ‘world modifiers’. It’s quite nice.
I don’t mind the portal mats lockout. It forces you to explore more.
I did get a mod that unlocks mats as you beat bosses. So you can’t teleport mats until you basically unlock the tier above.
Unlock silver and you can teleport iron. As we all know you can never have enough iron.
Relevant to both topics there is a chest sorting mod and a craft from storage mod, both are great for exactly this.
There are mods that alleviate its problems, but in Vanilla Valheim (Vanilheim, if you will)… ehhh.
I always managed to organize chests into somewhat sensible categories, but in the first half of the game’s progression chests are tiny.You do get to yeet carts full of ore from mountaintops, though.
On the upside you rarely need a large number of different mats to make aomething, but it can be annoying to organize and since you can build better chests that hold more over time you might end up needing to reorganize stuff every couple biomes if you collect a lot of extra stuff as you go.
But you don’t have to do it all at once either. Just make the new containers as needed and remove the old ones when space is needed. You can always build more house!
Disclaimer: have not played in a few years. So this answer is only true for a state of game from before the mistlands update (November/December 2022)
You will have a lot of chests with a lot of stuff. Inventory management is part of the game. You can not carry metal (heavy and important) through portals and are forced to transport them yourself. You will have limited inventory space. You will basically move through tiers of materials (woods, metals etc), but low tier materials will never be obsolete, so you need to store a lot.
That being said: it is all worth it. Your stuff can be destroyed you drop your stuff on death and it makes moving through dangerous parts of the map a lot more exciting and challenging.
