Valheim

After more than 200 hours of play time my friends Jamie, Shadey and I have completed Valheim and have created an amazing base. That adds up to more than 600 hours play time between us. Developed by Iron Gate Studio, Valheim was released in 2021 as a third person open-world survival game with a viking theme and in many ways reminds me of Minecraft. We generated our world with a random map seed and began exploring the biomes, starting with the meadows. As we gathered resources recipes would unlock to let us craft weapons, armour, food, crafting stations and building blocks to help prepare us for the next (more difficult) biome. By progressing through the biomes we would encounter new challenges, dungeons and bosses which would unlock special powers for us. This is what Shadey and I focused on where as Jamie focused on the creative side of the game.

Shadey and I would spend most of our time progressing through biomes collecting the new materials available to us so that we can create better and stronger weapons, armour and food for the impending battle with the biome boss. We would also bring back a large quantity of building materials for Jamie, who we named as Builder Bean, so that she can continue her efforts creating our base. That’s not to say Bean never joined us. Whether it be cutting down trees or helping carry metal scraps, Bean did help with gathering materials, especially at the beginning of our adventure and always helped when we confronted one of the 7 bosses. As builder, Bean built herself a throne room under the house as pictured below.

I felt it was important to cultivate vegetables and other ingredients used to craft most food and mead recipes. This is an important element for the overall progress of the game. New foods and meads would give us more health, stamina, resistances and later eitr which would help us combat ever more challenging monsters and environments. While some might find the task of cultivating ingredients a bit boring, I actually enjoyed it and was named Cultivator Copper. Because of this Bean built a throne for me overseeing our farm.

Shadey had already played Valheim up until the plains biome and had defeated Yagluth who resides there. This made Shadey a natural leader for the group, at least at first, and had the most motivation to progress and enjoy newer content that he hadn’t experienced yet in mistlands and then ashlands which was released in May. It’s not like Shadey did nothing else, he was part of the team and certainly did his fair share of gathering and crafting. But his desire to explore, progress and defeat stronger enemies earned him the name Slayer Shadey. Bean built Shadey’s throne inside a temple decorated with trophies of slain foes.

It’s difficult to describe how exciting it is to find new items and the recipes they unlock. At first to see the new weapons and armour available but then over time what Bean was able to build. After each session Shadey and I would take the time to see what had been built in our base while we had been exploring. While it was cool exploring Valheim, for me the highlight has always been the creation of our base which involved expansions and several rebuilds. To give an idea of how cool our base is, I created the YouTube video below. The quality isn’t as good as I would have liked and I found it was too much of a struggle to record in first person view.

The creators of Valheim have promised one more biome which will be the Deep North. The release date for this has been penciled in for December 2024/January 2025, but there’s no telling how accurate that might be. As it stands I believe that we have completed Valheim and will add it to my list of completed games. At some stage however it is highly likely that my friends and I will return to Valheim for the final biome. If we do I will more than likely provide an update on our adventure, but for now we will move on and play some other games.