Valheim - a brutal exploration and survival game - now available on Early Access

[vota DC]

Been playing this for a couple of weeks, about to quit before beating the 4th boss, for 2 reasons:

- Skill drop penalty on death is insane. The risk of losing all your gear, hair-raising naked runs to recover the body, having to build ships and portals to facilitate body recovery, these are all fine, skill penalty on top of that is just stupid
- Climbing near-vertical mountains to grind silver is long and boring as fuck

Also, game balance seems to be geared towards multiplayer, I don't mind hard but this is a bit ridiculous

Wait can you climb like Conan Exiles now?

 

[dextermorgan]

Been playing this for a couple of weeks, about to quit before beating the 4th boss, for 2 reasons:

- Skill drop penalty on death is insane. The risk of losing all your gear, hair-raising naked runs to recover the body, having to build ships and portals to facilitate body recovery, these are all fine, skill penalty on top of that is just stupid
- Climbing near-vertical mountains to grind silver is long and boring as fuck

Also, game balance seems to be geared towards multiplayer, I don't mind hard but this is a bit ridiculous

Wait can you climb like Conan Exiles now?

No, you basically sprint/bunnyhop up steep inclines so long as you have the stamina reserve for it. There's no dedicated climbing mechanic. You can go up vertical walls this way but you can't scale overhangs.

 

[dextermorgan]

As for the silver, you should build a base on top of a mountain to melt it and create a new armor and weapons. When you're done, take some ingots with you and you should be good as silver is probably the least useful metal and transporting raw ore from there doesn't make much sense overall. Also, don't go there without the insane armor buff from the third boss as without it wolves during an attack will eat you alive. Note that I haven't played since the last big update with a new biome, so some things might have changed.

I make forward bases with smelters waterside so it's easier to load the boat (usually just one trip while overencumbered from the base to the boat). My mistake was not dropping a portal at the top of the mountain/next to the silver node. It's much more manageable that way and I don't have to keep snarfing stamina foods all the time - just portal to the node, load up on ore then make my way down the mountain. The only risk are non-obvious overhangs. Well, that and the fact I plopped my base on a stretch of plains sandwiched between a swamp and dark woods so I can enjoy spawns of all kind waiting for me when I get back.

Daytime wolves aren't really a problem, it's the Hunted event that will fuck you if you don't have Bonemass ready and/or a place to run where they can't path to.

 

[whydoibother]

Returned to this game after quitting a year ago, with the same buddy playing jolly coop.
Before our base camp was a village, with separate buildings for kitchen, blacksmith, woodworking, a small one room house for our bedrooms, a scandalous large drinking hall for trophies. Now my guy decided he wants us to make a giant commieblock megastructure. Not sure I like it.

As for the main issues with the game, for me its not skill loss on death, I don't even notice skill levels tbh. Some math happens, some numbers grow. The combat is "don't get hit" and "hit until enemy dies" anyways. Its the Dark Souls school of combat, where you are supposed to evade damage while jumping in to get your own hits.
What does bother me however is how you can't hit enemies that are on slightly lower ground than you. The animation looks like you should be able to hit them, but you can't. And at times, even on flat ground, you can't hit things with the spear that are short, like the enemy spawners in dungeons.
I wish the hotbox tolerance was raised, so that I am not stuck in a situation where I need to hit once, miss, move, hit a second time, miss, move, before I start actually hitting what I am fighting. Trying to figure out where we are on a level plain and we can collide. Of course, AI controlled enemies don't have that issue.

 

[Alter Sack]

I have been playing the game for around 4 hours.

Why the hell is it rated so high?

It's a boring grind fest in my opinion.

I have to run around for minutes to finally find some fucking deer.

Also the building controls are tedious and you often have to fiddle around to place building parts right.

 

[Hag]

It's a boring grind fest in my opinion.

It is.
It actually gets worse and worse the more you play. Oh, and it's EA so no endgame.
Only grind.

 

[whydoibother]

I have been playing the game for around 4 hours.

Why the hell is it rated so high?

It's a boring grind fest in my opinion.

I have to run around for minutes to finally find some fucking deer.

Also the building controls are tedious and you often have to fiddle around to place building parts right.

Its slow while you don't know how to play. There used to be a grind fest in the middle, during the Iron gathering period, but they seem to have buffed it a bit now. Similarly, building is only slow and awkward while you don't know how to do it, and its all quick to learn.
Once you get the basics, its not slow at all. It never takes more than 1 in game day to get X thing you need in large volume: stock up on meet, or on wood, or herbs.
I'll just advise you to get some industry separation, to have workshop in one building, blacksmith in another, kitchen in a third, etc, with many chests in each room. You can stack them on top of each other with some wooden shelves. Also make timber frames for your walls and roof, they can't hold on by themselves if they are large in area.

What was, and continues to be very awkward is hitting enemies in melee while on an elevation slope, and trying to lower/raise ground level by a set amount. And smoke sometimes doesn't behave as you'd expect, and you need to build your chimney 3 times.

It actually gets worse and worse the more you play.

Objectively false. I will listen to other people's opinions, but this is just factually incorrect.
Your ability to generate resources increases much faster than your consumption of them. You become very rich very fast.

 

[Hag]

Your ability to generate resources increases much faster than your consumption of them. You become very rich very fast.

So what ? You end up with mountains of trash you've painfully hoarded and all your new gear lovingly crafted will only serves you to grind one area further away.

I mean there is no issue with liking the grind, but don't pretend there is much more to do.

 

[whydoibother]

Your ability to generate resources increases much faster than your consumption of them. You become very rich very fast.

So what ? You end up with mountains of trash you've painfully hoarded and all your new gear lovingly crafted will only serves you to grind one area further away.

I mean there is no issue with liking the grind, but don't pretend there is much more to do.

So the guy says its a slow grind, and you say it gets worse. It doesn't get worse. Its frontloaded. You are incorrect in your statement.
I am not at all speaking about end game, just the slow pace and labour you need to do setting things up.

 

[Frank Capicoli]

Last I played, less than a year ago everything Hag said is pretty accurate. The only good thing about this game was sailing around in the boat.

 

[Mortmal]

I have been playing the game for around 4 hours.

Why the hell is it rated so high?

It's a boring grind fest in my opinion.

I have to run around for minutes to finally find some fucking deer.

Also the building controls are tedious and you often have to fiddle around to place building parts right.

it's rated highly cause some play coop, anything with your friends is better. Doing the grind and boss fights alone is a chore.

 

[Alter Sack]

I liked Subnautica, so I thought it may be a game to my liking.

That seems not to be the case.

What I also really miss is the exploration aspect.

There doesn't seem much to explore.

 

[Pots Talos]

This game really shines when playing on a private server with a bunch of friends. If you are playing solo I wouldn't waste your time on this game.

Sent from my Pixel 6 using Tapatalk

 

[Cyberarmy]

I liked Subnautica, so I thought it may be a game to my liking.

Subnautica is sadly one of kind nowadays, even it's developers failed to catch the same mood with it's expansion pack.

 

[whydoibother]

What I also really miss is the exploration aspect.

There doesn't seem much to explore.

Getting on a boat with your most expensive stuff, and venturing into the storm to look for, say, turnips or whatever is rare on this version of the game, is very cool. There is a genuine danger. The teleportation devices might be too generous, which means you only need to travel to an area once, and then potentially back again to deliver metals. Teleports should've probably only worked for a naked character, not teleporting items, though this would've increased the grind immensely.

 

[retardgrand]

I played this like a year ago and stopped after getting to the swamp dungeons with iron. It's honestly ridicilous, you first need to find a biome and the dungeon itself, the dungeon is completely boring and mining the iron takes forever. Then you need to use the cart cause the iron is insanely heavy - good luck if the cart gets destroyed or you get killed. Depending how far your base is, it can take a really long time to get back - even the ship sailing takes forever. Spending what could be hours to get enough iron to maybe craft 2 new items or upgrade 2 existing ones, what a fun experience. This game is like Terraria with 20% of the content, but everything takes 5 times longer to pad out the length.

 

[whydoibother]

The time to mine iron has been reduced, and the yield of iron has been increased, and it also appears in loot chests in the dungeons now. So this phase of the game isn't insanely long anymore. Also they have a new enemy type for the swamp, a huge creature equivalent to the troll in the forest biome, which also drops a resource you can make light armor from.

I disagree on the time or difficulty of finding a swamp and finding crypts. Yes, its faster in Terraria, since its 2D and you literally just walk to the left and find it, but its not long in Valheim either. And the fun part is sailing and discovering new land. Oh, a swamp. But its Plains nex to it, thats too high level. Let me sail around... a peninsula with forest, okay. Stone tower there. Go in, kill the mooks, cut some trees, build walls, trench, portal, roof. Every time you visit swamp creatures are fighting forest creatures near, maybe beating on your walls as you shoot from your tower. Run into the swamp, clear a crypt. Keep bringing the ore to the first room with a chest, stack it there. Do 2-3 trips to bring it to the boat, sail away to go refine it in your home base. This neither takes too long, nor is it busy work, its integrated with the other mechanics.

I hate to be like this, but it honestly feels like most people complaining never got good. The game has legitimate issues (calculating elevation when digging or fighting in melee, as mentioned, but also AI, inability to dig out caves, the honestly useless skills menu and stats that you can play for days without noticing, enemy difficulty in dealing with ranged combat, the early access unfinished thing, can't build too tall or too deep, etc), but the ones being brought up either were from the initial versions and were already addressed, or aren't actually problems at all if you play in a normal way.
I don't mean to be an activist for this game, its just alright, but replies here are fake news.

Anyways, on the off chance that a dev is lurking, and since Terraria was mentioned: Make it so we can build rooms for guest NPCs! The game already recognizes when a space is a room, some benches require it to operate. Make it so if we have a room with X furniture in it, some NPC comes to live there. A blacksmith, a herbalist, or even just a guard. Should be easy to implement, most of the functions for it already exist.

 

[dextermorgan]

I played this like a year ago and stopped after getting to the swamp dungeons with iron. It's honestly ridicilous, you first need to find a biome and the dungeon itself, the dungeon is completely boring and mining the iron takes forever. Then you need to use the cart cause the iron is insanely heavy - good luck if the cart gets destroyed or you get killed. Depending how far your base is, it can take a really long time to get back - even the ship sailing takes forever. Spending what could be hours to get enough iron to maybe craft 2 new items or upgrade 2 existing ones, what a fun experience. This game is like Terraria with 20% of the content, but everything takes 5 times longer to pad out the length.

While I broadly agree on the general tedium of certain things, there's ways you can get around issues like this. For example, with iron I had a little waterside cabin set up with smelters right next to the swamps biome. I'd plop a portal at the cabin, then another on top of the crypt. Mine what you can carry, run back to the cabin and start the smelter, teleport straight back to the crypt, rinse and repeat.

Ideally you could sail near the swamps but the #$%%^ leeches will sink your boat if left unattended.

 

[whydoibother]

It takes 1-2 minutes to sprint from the crypt to your outpost, you don't even need to fight anything along the way. I have no idea why people are complaining about this of all things.
With crypts, an easy complaint would be that the draugr get stuck on terrain, can't jump over chests or ore veins. That you can mine out a window and shoot at them if they are all melee. That some rooms make no sense, like a stair to nowhere, or a room with literally nothing in it, because its too randomly generated without enough rules for the presets to match. That they all look the same outside, instead of a dozen variants to pick randomly from. That there isn't enough visual indication on which one you've already opened, maybe the torches can change color? You can't always see the doors. That they don't always have guards in front, and rarely have enemies in the first room, so you can use them to enter to hide if a battle is going poorly, including the boss fight. That you can't light a fire in the entry room, to get warm and dry, so the player sometimes needs to wait ~2 minutes to get health up before proceeding. That there isn't enough visual variety, so you can get lost and waste a minute going down the wrong corridor. That the corridors themselves are too narrow, in a game that is often multiplayer, and this is rage inducing if your mate gets you killed by standing behind you and blocking your escape. And the general issue of not being able to throw torches on the ground, or just place them on the wall or empty scones, which would've been a cool way to tell where you've already been, by leaving or collecting a torch on the wall.

 

[NorwegianWolf]

I started the game yesterday, played maybe 3 hours.

Initial quick thoughts:
1. It's jankier than I expected.
2. It's a little grindier than I expected.

So far, I'd say it's a solid 7/10 for fans of survival/craft type of thing.

 

[Catacombs]

So far, I'd say it's a solid 7/10 for fans of survival/craft type of thing.

It's better with friends.

 

[Alter Sack]

So far, I'd say it's a solid 7/10 for fans of survival/craft type of thing.

It's better with friends.

So it's basically not a game for codexers.

 

[Catacombs]

So it's basically not a game for codexers.

If you have the means to run a private server, start an LFP thread. You might find Codexers interested in playing.

 

[Zanzoken]

I started playing a couple of weeks ago. Have beaten the first two bosses, got some Iron level gear, and have a pretty well kitted out base.

It is quickly becoming one of my GOAT games tbh. Just really scratches that itch of exploration, progression, building, etc. I'd be down to play together some if anyone wants to.

 

[Zanzoken]

I am always tempted to get back into Valheim because it has a lot of good gameplay systems and great immersion and vibes. But the biggest thing that stops me is the progression mechanics.

First, although your character has RPG-like skills and the wiki says they do have an effect -- for example, having higher weapon skills increases damage, block skill increases block damage resistance, etc -- character development is 100% learn-by-doing and just kind of operates in the background as you play. And since you lose skills upon dying -- which happens quite a lot, especially as you're learning the game -- ultimately the impact isn't noticeable. In fact I am certain you can take a brand new character, equip him with zone-appropriate gear and consumables, and he'll be 100% fine playing more advanced content.

What this means is that progression essentially just boils down to grinding for the requisite crafting stations + gear + food. And unfortunately these new items don't typically add much in the way of meaningful complexity or choices... they are just linear upgrades over the last set of items.

The Plains has traditionally been where I lose interest, because:

• This is the point where the linear item progression starts to really become annoying. The upgrade to Blackmetal / Padded was the first time where I felt like I was tired of upgrading gear, especially since you have to grind more iron to get it.
• Same thing with food progression. Food is simply "numbers go up" and the time you spend farming the crop-du-jour for your current zone feels wasted as you soon progress beyond it.
• Every biome up until this point has seemed Viking-appropriate, but this one does not and is thematically jarring. Especially with it coming right after the Mountains which is probably the most thematically satisfying.
• Fulings and deathsquitos are not very interesting enemies. The only good encounters in this zone are the Fuling villages, which admittedly are fun and chaotic.
• The biome lacks a defining mechanic that forces you to adapt to it. This is a big step down from both the Swamps and the Mountains, both of which offer unique challenges due to their climate and terrain. The Mistlands and Ashlands also follow this pattern with their own twists. Plains on the other hand is essentially just a reskinned Meadows with harder enemies and higher level loot.

I guess what I'm saying is... I wish in later biomes the game dropped the loot treadmill and just leaned more into challenging you with new mechanics and encounters. I mean do zones like the Mistlands or the Ashlands really need buffed enemies in order to pose a challenge? I admittedly haven't played them, but it seems like these zones are compelling enough due to their environmental factors that you shouldn't have to force players to grind for yet another set of equipment and food.

Anyway, not sure why I've written all this. I guess I'm just trying to talk myself out of picking up the game again, even though I really want to. The early to mid game of Valheim really nails that balance of epic adventuring counterbalanced by the need to build, farm, and prepare better than anything else I've played.