Valheim - a viking multiplayer exploration and survival game by Coffee Stain

First, welcome to the forum! Second, that’s helpful to know about the netcode, thanks! Man, I remember when DSL was such an unfair advantage over us plebs on dialup. :)

Played a little of this today and it sure looks like a nice addition to the Conan-style survival games. Seems promising enough that I ordered up a dedicated server with password in case anyone wants to co-op with friends. Server name is Wanderers and password is Palomides. There’s only a shack with a workbench so far - don’t expect a palace yet ;)

I bought this last night apparently :)

Just took a quick 15 min spin and really liked what I saw. Super excited to jump back in even if I couldn’t figure out how to build a work bench. Will check out your server in a bit as you seem to have tackled that obstacle!

Haha! Had to look it up myself. When you’re holding the hammer click your right mouse button and it opens a crafting menu. Not sure why it’s not mentioned in game. The other crafting leading up to the table tell you what to do.

It’s only a couple of sawbucks so I grabbed it this morning. Little jank and seems like a pretty strong entry into the genre granted I’ve only played about an hour.

It’s legitimately a very dark game at night. Dark enough that you’ll need to bring a torch at night and maybe set up some static lighting in your base.

I picked this up yesterday. Enjoying it so far but I’m a sucker for these types of games.

Things get more difficult when you move from the Meadows to the Black Forest. I built a base near copper and a burial mound. A troll came by to investigate.

At first I just led him far away from my base and then doubled back but he came back the next day. It took many throws of my spear and many arrows after at one point I missed with the spear and couldn’t find it.

Got a screenshot just before his corpse exploded into goodies.

This was my initial base a longhouse in the meadows.

The black forest base up on a mountain slope.

Really like your long house design. I was struggling to see how to use those wood 'X’s. Makes perfect sense now.

I am just making bronze now after hitting two burial mounds. Great game so far.

I like it so far, but still in early stage of game trying to figure out how to get the ground level so my building isn’t all non-Euclidean geometry lol. The hoe claims to level the ground, and it appears to do so to some extent, but then I start building and stuff doesn’t line up. It worries the Norse craftsmen part of me deeply. ;)

Supplement your Hoe-ing with the Pickaxe to get relatively flat/level terrain over an area. Using the pickaxe on higher areas will dig deeper chunks out and then you can go over the area with the Hoe to raise/smooth as needed.

You can also build on posts that will somewhat adjust to the ground level once you have it pretty close to level. Just put one post, attach a floor piece to that post, and then build off of that floor piece, with posts for support every 2-3 floor pieces.

Thanks for the tips. Using floor joists seems to help a bit, oddly enough lol.
Still had some oddness here and there but was much happier with the results.

Played with some buddies tonight on my hosted connection. It ran smooth for 6 of us…Impressive.

As people tailed off and went to bed, I hung around with a buddy as we tried to find copper. We had to build a boat to get to most of the black forest on this seed. Hilarity ensued. It was one of those precious moments where you’re laughing till your crying.

Ya, they’ve got a few rough spots, but they’re really doing a lot of good things with this game so far.

Not a fan of the building so far but that’s not surprising. Trying to line up floors between the various size pieces is a pain. It needs to autofill the gaps if the piece is big enough. Instead you have to place it just so and then it just overlays the none gap areas and looks like multiple layers of floors. Of course the building parts of these games are my weak spot. They always inevitability look like a 6 year old playing with legos. I suppose I’m more a hunter/gatherer.

Digging the rest though in my couple hours of play. I die a bunch but I’m being fairly careless in my wanderings. Skeletons hurt and seem to have a huge aggro range…be careful. I was able to get closer to the Blue troll thingie without him chasing. Mobs seem to chase forever as Banzai can attest. I may have kited 3 of the 1 star Dwarfs? into his camp last night from pretty far away. Thanks for the help Dude! :)

When I built my second base I ended up with gaps in the roof since I didn’t account for the little bit of extra space a horizontal beam between floor sections added. Fortunately the rain in Valheim respects intent so it’s considered a good shelter anyway. I realize now I could probably cover the gaps by adding horizontal and angled beams. Next time I’m going to start with just a frame of beams and then fill in the walls/floors/ceiling from there.

At one point yesterday I found a troll cave, with a troll in it. I successfully snuck around it to loot a couple of chests. Unfortunately I didn’t realize my inventory was already full so I need to go back and do it again at some point to get the rest of the loot.

I’ve been slowly exploring the black forest hunting deer and piggies as I go. I was in a quiet, peaceful section of the meadows that borders the black forest all by myself when I stumbled on a large rocky outcropping. I walked over to it and saw that it was a large copper deposit. It was the first that I had found, but I hadn’t killed the deer boss yet so I couldn’t mine it. I opened the map to mark the spot (which you can do by clicking a symbol on the right and then double clicking on the map) and made a note for future reference when the ground shook.

It was one of those perfect gaming moments, with the map filling up my screen and something very much not right happening right next to me. I closed the map and didn’t see anything, until I turned around and there was a huge blue thing with his arm raised up about to smack me. I had a sphincter clinching moment, paniced, and sprinted off. He missed. I ran in a wide circle until I got back to my base, looking over my shoulder the whole time. As it turns out, my base is worrisomely close to that meadow. I added a fence and put a few extra campfires around, in case trolls don’t like fire. He hasn’t turned up again yet, but there’s no more peaceful meadow thinking in my brain now. How does something that big sneak up on you?

Looked a lot like this:
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Some amazing screenshots of bases from people way ahead of me.

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129.907 concurrent players? How did this happen? It’s a fine game and a labor of love I think (the weather, the lighting!). But also a pretty standard survival crafter so far. I thought the market was pretty saturated. Well…

well, i haven’t unlocked chimneys yet, so for now, gaps are a good way to vent smoke out of your house. And this is the first builder game i can think of with smoke effects

For me, the fact that it’s a PVE survival crafter is a massively big deal. One of my biggest complaints with the genre is how they expect other players to provide the content by knocking each other’s shit down. I have zero interest in that sort of thing so my interest in various survival games tends to peter out really quickly to the point where I just started skipping them. When I saw this one was PVE I grabbed it.

For a chimney I just used wood walls and half walls and a roof peak.