Valheim (PC game)

There is a population of gamers out there (IMO likely kids) that only focus on battle and striving to be the first to kill the ultimate boss, and of course bragging about it. I ignore those types. Just enjoy the game the way you want to.

I just heard of this game today, and it looks like it’s up my alley (maybe similar to Radiation Island) so I’ll watch for it to come out on IOS. My iPad is my “game machine”. :slight_smile:

So don’t. That’s on you.

Look, I shouldn’t have to explain this, but people are going to disagree on things, and the correct response to a reasonable answer isn’t, “I’m gonna e-fight you!”. If we all had the same opinions on everything, there wouldn’t be any need to chat, now would there? I’ve been perfectly reasonable so far.

Preparation in this game takes the form of hunting, farming and mining. Buff yourself up with nourishing foods, make yourself better arms and armour, bring a few mead potions. You still can’t chuckle-stomp your way through the biggest fights, and if you swing blindly you’ll get the worst of it.

With adequate food buffs, and an eye to defense, you could eat several hits and still recover, none the worse for wear.

I hope I’m not telling you stuff you’ve already figured out, but the monsters are way more aggressive at night and spawn much more frequently and with variants that are much stronger. When practical, sleep at night and work only during the day if you want to keep enemy interference to a minimum.

Also be mindful you haven’t gone into the “Dark Forest” if you’re not prepared for it. It’s primarily coniferous forest. You’ll definitely want to go there after you’ve bested the first boss, but getting hold of some “core wood” early (taken from pine trees) may be worth your time. Your starting axes will be up to the task, unlike birch trees.

The Graydwarf enemies (excepting perhaps the brutes) are also afraid of fire, so if you don’t want to fight, put a lit torch in your hand. They’ll still follow you around but they won’t attack. You could chase them around and try to hit them though. You can even use the torch as a bludgeon in a pinch.

You can eat up to three different foods for a buff. In the meadows, your best bet is raspberries, cooked meat and cooked neck tails.

If you find a ruined house, odds are it may also have a wild hive. If you can’t smash the hive directly, demolish the building–unsupported elements will start collapsing in the fullness of time. Scoop up the queen bee and you’ll learn to make a hive. They will passively make honey for you, which you can eat directly or (later on) brew into various meads.

My wife and I have been playing the same game for some fifty-odd hours at this point. We’ve only killed the first two bosses, though we’re nearly ready to take on the third. However, there were islands to discover, roads to build, ever-more-elaborate houses and farms to construct, and an entire longboat filled with iron ore to smelt. So we get distracted.

You can also shoot the hive with a fire arrow.

And my interest in this game just dissipated. I don’t play games that penalize you for dying beyond having to replay a battle (I’ll accept a symbolic monetary penalty, like in Borderlands, but no more than that).

I’m not actually trying to sell you a copy, I promise.

But what I can tell you is that if you were adequately prepared, the bosses I have fought so far can’t kill you that easily in open combat. Adequate preparation is key. I promise you that if you were adequately prepared, no boss can kill you in three seconds.

In all cases, “adequate preparation,” is “make the best armour and weaponry you can for your area,” “Eat three of your best foods for maximum HP,” and, “Attack at the break of dawn.”

And should all of that fail you anyway, the game has a “corpse run” buff. You can dash up to your tombstone, “use” it, and all your inventory is transferred over. The buff kicks in and gives you an enormous stamina and HP regeneration buff, so you can get clear pretty easily and can eat a few hits while doing so.

You may need to lure the boss away from your loot a little in the worst-case scenario.

Past the first boss, you gain the ability to make portals; you could put one a moderate distance from the boss area, and quickly get back to your gear, so you won’t even have to spend that much time crossing the countryside.

I just “finished” the game (i.e., beat the last boss. Maybe there will be a proper ending someday.)

I’m in the camp that there is nothing resembling Dark Souls in here. The boss fights are extremely forgiving, and as Acierocolotl noted, comes down to adequate preparation. I would add “craft weapons that work against the boss’s weaknesses”.

I did play with a friend. Not sure if the difficulty scales with the number of players, but in any case I probably could have done all of them on my own, with maybe a little more prep.

There were some frustrating moments, usually when you get swarmed at an inopportune time and can’t run away. Nothing too bad though. The corpse run buff helps. You also don’t lose skill points during a corpse run, so if you get ganked you can just try again without additional loss.

We made lots of bases, and had a whole giant portal network going. We did cheese one thing, which is that normally you can’t bring metal ore through a portal, but if a player has a local game going, they can bring stuff to/from the server, and arrive wherever they logged off last. So you can use that to move metal between bases without running it by hand.

All in all a lot of fun, though not much to do after the last boss is dead. Hopefully we’ll get some interesting updates as time goes on. It’s clear they have a lot more to flesh out.

It has more than 6 Million units sold at this point. I think it’s over-hyped and I’m not really sure why. As a game, it’s meh. It is not the hardest survival (don’t get me wrong, I die a lot) and it’s super grindy.

BUT. It is a decent builder. It is still early days, and I think the building will only get better. I do have a paid dedicated server. I almost never play on it. I mostly just play god mode in my SP game. I will probably only keep my server going because I have a few players who are having a great time with it.

You seem to be implying that being the hardest survival is a virtue. I’d suggest that being not too hard, plus the generally simple mechanics, is exactly why it’s popular. Anyone can participate, no matter their skill level.

It depends on why you are playing, I guess. If you like the challenge of a survival game, this isn’t going to challenge you that much. A better game, survival wise, is The Long Dark. Even in easy mode, it is tough. But that is what it is. Valheim, has survival elements, but I wouldn’t say it is a survival game.

It does have some interesting gameplay mechanics. It seems that as individual players progress, the difficulty level increases for everyone on the map. It’s one of the reasons I stopped playing on my server. My players were at bronze level and going into the swamps. I had swamp bad guys spawning at my house on the first starter island. Since I am mostly interested in building, I noped out and now play almost exclusively in god mode in my SP.

That seems like a bug. We never had strong baddies spawn at our original base even after beating the final boss. Just boars, necks, and graydwarfs.

I played a fair amount of The Long Dark, but the problem with that game (and many other survival games) is that you never seem to make any progress. You’re fighting for your life every second, and you can’t accumulate resources past a certain point. It’s just unrelenting. In comparison, each new biome in Valheim brings different challenges, and it’s survival at first since you don’t have the gear to make it comfortable. But eventually you do and you can relax a bit in your base. The contrast makes it more compelling to me than being constantly at death’s door.

So, I’m not sure one this at all, But I wonder if it has to do with the types of biomes connected to your starting land. I had no Swamps or Plains on my start land, and never saw any swamp or plains creatures at home base.

Could be, but I’d suggest distance is an issue too. Baddies will cross borders to some extent, but only so far. We had a base in the swamp, but close to the plains border, and it was constantly being invaded by plains mobs. We moved it farther in and didn’t have a problem.

In my game, we’d get the occasional special event incursion based on the highest boss slain, so it was just graydwarves early on, and then later surtlings, ogres, or draugr. But those were special occasions so you could largely just hide behind the walls and pelt the enemies with missile fire.

Late-ish game (we’d beaten all but the very last boss), we’d get graydwarf shamans and brutes at night, and they’d go toe-to-toe with skeletons, but nothing fiercer than that. Since we had silver armour, this was nothing but an inconvenience.

Ohh, the special event raids, I totally forgot those exist.
I saw one on my fifth night in the black forest, then one more 25 days later, then I haven’t seen one in 200+ days and truly forgot they existed, sorry.

That was the dude. My players did open a wormhole to the swamp. And these guys spawned not far from the drop point. I got killed and haven’t really been back.

To me that makes it a game just about survival. Surviving is the goal. These other games the survival aspect just boils down to inventory control.

I downloaded it this weekend, and am having fun.

Following some online advice, I got ready for my first boss fight, with leather gear and a flint spear and a shield. But I was really bad at the combat in the game, and it kicked my ass.

And I hadn’t followed the advice to keep some backup gear in a chest. So I had no food or armor or weapons except what was on my body. And my body was right where the boss monster was.

The boss monster killed me another three times as I tried to recover my gear. Finally I crafted just enough gear to survive grabbing my corpse, and then as I ran away from the boss I furiously threw all my recovered gear on the ground, and then ran away from it, so after the boss monster inevitably killed me a fifth time it would corpse-camp a naked body.

At last i was able to recover my gear, and put it on, and eat. And this time when I fought the boss, I decided to see what the shield was good for.

Uh, yeah. It turns out that maybe I should’ve been using the shield all along, instead of just lunging after the boss like an asshole and leaving myself wide open. Using my shield made the boss monster pretty easy to take.

I spent about an hour last night wandering to the far corners of the earth looking for enough boars to kill to gain enough leather to build a tanning rack. That wasn’t exactly fun: super grindy, as said before. But the game is gorgeous to look at, and I’ll forgive a lot for beauty like that.

The recent update changed the console commands. The biggest change being that you have to enable console commands in Steam. The “imacheater” command is now “devcommands” the rest is still the same.

I like Valheim well enough, but something about it just doesn’t hold me the way, say, Ark: Survival Evolved (900 hours at this point) or 7 Days to Die (7-800 hours) do. Early access though, and I like some of the design ideas, so I’m excited to see what becomes of it!

The last two games my wife and I have gotten into were Satisfactory and Deep Rock Galactic. We didn’t realize until we’d put a few hours into the second game that they were both from the same studio, which is also the studio behind Valheim. So, it’s definitely on our list of games to check out, just based purely on pedigree.