I played it solo, its fine in my opinion. Most biomes have a boss fight so there is something to work towards. The real question in my opinion is whether you’ll have fun with the creative side of things on your own because that is a large chunk of the game.
Wait, there’s mulitplayer?
(In other words, yes, fine solo)
I’ve got two games going, one is two-player co-op where we are working together one to two times a week. The other is a solo game. I’m enjoying both immensely.
Bosses are harder alone, for sure, but with preparation and planning they feel manageable.
I’m taking a very slow approach on this. In both of my games, I’m just past the second boss.
Co-op multiplayer is also incredibly chill and easy to set up. My life doesn’t work with multiplayer, but this is so easy to manage playing with a friend that I’ve found it’s been possible to make it work.
Top notch. Yet to play it any other way. It may be better building stuff with friends, I don’t know. :)
Very fun solo, pacing and progression are great. It’s tough enough that you really do have to prepare for new areas/boss fights, but the challenge isn’t insurmountable solo. The game is like living in an oil painting, very enjoyable experience.
@BrianRubin I have only played Valheim solo and have put a ridiculous amount of hours into it thus far without getting bored yet. It has a set cycle of resource gathering, exploration and building while you also upgrade your equipment and learn the strategies for defeating the creatures in each biome, then you fight the boss of the biome, defeat it, and move on to the next biome, starting the explore/gather/build/upgrade/learn cycle over again. Bonus, you can build cool ships that are fun to sail and listen to stirring Viking sailing music while doing so! I highly recommend.
Been hanging out in the swamp the past few sessions. I died a couple more times, once because I got careless with food/poison-resist. Folks, the swamp is no joke on 38 health with no poison resist, one swipe from a blob and you’ll watch helplessly as those health points tick down to zero while all you can do is find a relatively easy place for corpse recovery. The other death was to the thing that most often kills me, exploration. I thought maybe there would be one more crypt hidden up in the mostly empty coastal part of my current large swamp area, but all I found there were many skeletons, draugr, leeches and oozes, which eventually led to me getting swarmed and dying.
On the bright side, with 3 of 7 crypts fully looted, I decided to build a portal on a little patch of dry land roughly in the center of the 4 remaining crypt locations. While I can’t bring my scrap iron back home through the portal, it does cut down drastically on travel time from home to the crypts, as they’re all located on the other side of the swamp from my home and ore processing setup. I’ve squirreled away 150 iron with 2.5 crypts left to loot, so I’m hoping to surpass 200 iron in reserve by the time I am ready to take on the next boss. So far I’ve found two location stones for Bonemass, and both point to the same location in uncharted territory across the ocean, so I’m going to use some of that iron for nails to build a longship for the journey.
I’ve completely looted all of the crypts in the large swamp near my ore processing base. Upgraded my iron armor to max, banded shield to max and iron sword to 3, plus made the huntsman’s bow and upgraded it to 3. Before I sail for lands unknown to tackle Bonemass (the only location I ever received for him from 3 separate stones was way off to the east across uncharted ocean) I decided to poke my head into the Mountain biome as there is a decent sized one right near my swamp/ore processing base. I was able to take on wolves and drakes without issue (had the frost resist mead active) and discovered my first drops from both as well as some obsidian and a dragon egg. Going to need the wishbone to find silver of course, but at least I know I can survive OK in the biome.
Drakes were pests though, I killed three in the first encounter (over the nest with the egg) and it was mostly just waiting for them to hover, pinging them with an iron arrow, then dodging their breath attack. It takes me three hits to kill one. But once I killed them, it seemed like another drake would show up every 30 seconds or so, just one, and I’d have to stop what I was doing and take care of it. Is this how it is in the Mountains ('cause that’s going to be annoying), or was it just because I was still close to the nest which I assume acts as a non-destructibe spawn point for drakes?
It’s destructible by taking the egg. The toughest creature in the Mountains are the Golems.
Hmmm…I took the egg, but drakes kept coming. I wonder if there was another nest close by then. Thanks!
Valheim is an absolute sales monster! Has it been ported to any other platforms yet?
It hasn’t been ported (yet). But it’s hard to imagine that it won’t be eventually given the massive success and portable tool-chain that it is built from.
I’m still playing this pretty much exclusively right now (on nights I can actually play a game that is). I graduated from Swamp/Iron to Mountain/Silver after killing Bonemass (which was the easiest fight of the three bosses I’ve faced, but I was waaaay over-prepared for it).
I’ve been incredibly lucky with the random seed the game started me with, as my progression from biome to biome has never required much travel and my large starting continent had huge swaths of Meadow, Black Forest and even a large enough Swamp to get me all the way through iron with plenty to spare. I did have to sail to another continent to find and kill Bonemass, but I brought the materials for a portal with me on my longship so I only had to make the trip once, then could portal back and forth after that. Now there is a decent sized Mountain biome right next to the Swamp and Meadow seashore where I had built my ore-processing homestead, so I took portal materials up the mountainside with me, cleared out a nice stone tower I found at the top, set up the portal, and now I simply mine the silver, slide back down the mountain loaded to capacity, process the ore, then portal back up top to start all over again.
Already made myself a wolf cape & wolf armor (no more freezing, woohoo!) and have enough now to craft the Drake helm and Draugr Fang bow as well. I also have two dragon eggs at this point, but have found zero location stones for the next boss. I think my plan is to mine this Mountain region for all the silver veins I can find (two so far) and if I don’t find a Modor stone I will wait until I’m done with silver stuff and then explore the two or three other, smaller mountain regions on my starting continent in hopes of finding one. Thus far the only Plains region I’ve seen has been way across the ocean adjacent to the Swamp where I had to travel to kill Bonemass, so something tells me I will finally be packing up and moving when it comes time for Plains exploration.
Wow. I knew it was popular, but holy cats.
Sounds like they’re delaying that Heart and Stone update until Q3 and trimming down the size of the update.
Magnificent game, but one that I think I will check in on again in 18 months
Anyone else still playing this? I had to take some time off since my last update (life got too busy for gaming for a bit there) but have resumed at least semi-regular play recently.
I am pretty near finished with the Mountain biome. I have fully upgraded wolf armor, silver shield and sword, drake helm and Draugr Bow with about 100 silver bars in reserve. I have 3 eggs and found the alter for summoning the biome boss, which is all I really have left to do. I kinda want to finish uncovering the rest of the Mountain region I’m in though so that I can connect the two halves of my map that it bisects, but that’s just my map OCD talking.
Once I finish off the boss I’m going to need to scout out a new continent with a sizeable Plains biome, then find a Meadows nearby to lay down a base. I’ll have to recall my longship from the Swamp where I killed Bonemass and load it up with materials and supplies to build a new FOB for processing materials from the Plains, then hopefully forge ahead from there.
I put it in the backlog until they have time to flesh it out.
I had fun with it, but it started to get too annoying and boring once I got to the mountains. Needs more meat on them bones and I’m happy to wait.
I have just started this game in the last week or two – beat the first boss, on my way to take out the second. It’s been fun so far, but from what everyone else has said, I’m guessing it opens up quite a bit beyond the “bronze age” level stuff I’m doing/crafting now. Can’t wait!
It’s awesome and I played a bunch, but it’s into the backlog now until the new content drops. Don’t want to burn out on it!
I get distracted by shiny new games right before taking on the (current) final boss. I have all the items needed and a base nearby. I figure I’ll get back to it on the next big update.
I got to the plains and sort of hit a wall with it. I don’t care for it when games devolve into blink and you’re dead gameplay. Up until plains I felt like the challenge of the game to move forward was done pretty well, but plains, even fully geared, is just more annoying than fun to me.
Amazing game, one of the best I’ve played in a while, and when you are still in the discovery phase especially so. Once you get used to the loops they put you in, for me it lost its charm a bit.