Valheim

You are a dead Viking. A Valkyrie drops you into Valheim, the tenth Norse world, which Odin has used as a holding pen for the things he could not kill. Your job is to kill them for him. Do it and you earn your seat in Valhalla.

In practice that is a survival crafting game with unusually good bones. The world is procedurally generated from a seed, split into biomes that get harder as you go, and each biome holds exactly one boss. Beating the boss gives you a power and, more importantly, the material or the key to work the next biome's resources. The whole game is that staircase.

• Combat has weight: blocking, parrying, staggering and dodge rolls matter more than damage numbers.
• Building is a real structural system, not decoration. Beams sag, weight travels, and a bad roof falls down.
• Sailing is a genuine subsystem with wind direction, and it is how you reach everything.
• You die a lot early, and death costs you carried items and some skill progress, never your world.

1. 1

   Follow the bird

   Hugin, the raven, tutorialises the whole game in short prompts. Read them. He tells you exactly what the next unlock is.

2. 2

   Punch wood, make a hammer

   Wood and stone into a Hammer, a Workbench, and an axe. The workbench is the centre of everything you can build, and needs a roof and walls to upgrade.

3. 3

   Build a small shelter with a fire

   Fire needs a hole above it or the smoke kills you. Fire plus a roof plus a bed gives you the Rested buff, which is the single strongest early buff in the game.

4. 4

   Eat three different foods

   Food is your health and stamina bar. Three slots, three DIFFERENT foods, refreshed before they run out. Eating the same berry three times wastes two slots.

5. 5

   Kill deer, then boar

   Deer hide into a cape, leather into armour. Tame boars later for endless meat.

6. 6

   Find the Sacrificial Stones and summon Eikthyr

   Two deer trophies at the stone circle in the Meadows summons the first boss. He is beatable in leather with a flint spear and a lot of dodging.

Every biome is a difficulty tier, a metal, and a boss. You do not need to explore in order, but you do need to gear in order, and the world will teach you that quickly.

• Meadows. Safe. Wood, flint, deer. Boss: Eikthyr, whose power makes running and jumping cheap.
• Black Forest. Greydwarves and trolls. Copper and tin into bronze. Boss: The Elder, whose power speeds up chopping.
• Swamp. Genuinely nasty: poison, wet, draugr, leeches. Iron, from crypts you need a key to open. Boss: Bonemass, poison resistance.
• Mountain. Cold kills you without frost resistance. Silver, from ore buried under the snow. Boss: Moder, who gives you a summonable tailwind for sailing.
• Plains. Fuling villages and deathsquitos that one-shot the unprepared. Black metal and flax and barley. Boss: Yagluth.
• Mistlands. Blind, vertical, full of seekers. Eitr, which unlocks magic. Boss: The Queen.
• Ashlands and the far north. The newest tiers, hostile in new ways, and where the current endgame lives.

Valheim rewards knowing four things: food, block, stagger and skill.

• Food. Your maximum health and stamina come almost entirely from what you ate. Cook, farm, and upgrade your food before you upgrade your sword.
• Block and parry. Blocking at the moment of impact parries, staggers the enemy and opens a free damage window. A parry with a good shield is worth more than any weapon upgrade.
• Stagger. Enemies have a stagger bar. Break it and they are helpless. Most bosses die to patient stagger cycles rather than to bravery.
• Skills. Every weapon type levels by use, so the axe you have been swinging all game outperforms the fancy sword you just crafted, for a while.

Crafting stations upgrade in place. A workbench with the right attachments nearby reaches higher levels, and the same is true of the forge. Building a proper crafting hall is not vanity, it is the gate on your gear tier.

Every piece you place has structural integrity, shown as colour when you look at it with the hammer: blue is solid ground, and as support travels outward it goes green, yellow, orange, red, then it falls. Stone supports far more than wood, and iron beams support the most.

1. 1

   Start with a foundation

   Level ground with the hoe. Flat ground makes every following piece line up and stops rain reaching your floor.

2. 2

   Roof everything

   Rain rots exposed wood over time and cancels Rested. A roof plus walls is the difference between a house and a pile of planks.

3. 3

   Vent the fire

   Smoke needs somewhere to go: a hole in the roof or a chimney. Otherwise it fills the room and damages you while you sleep.

4. 4

   Add comfort

   Bed, chair, table, banner, rug. Each unique comfort item extends the Rested timer. Look at the bed with the hammer to see your comfort level.

Valheim is Norse mythology told through absence. The Valkyrie drops you and leaves. Odin appears only as standing stones and as the raven who follows you around. The bosses are called the Forsaken, and nothing tells you what they did.

• Runestones scattered through crypts and ruins carry the actual text: fragments of who lived here and how it ended.
• The Elder was a guardian of the forest. Bonemass is what happens to a swamp that has been dying for a long time. Moder is a dragon whose eggs you steal to summon her.
• The Plains hold Fuling villages built on top of ruins that predate them, and the Mistlands are the wreckage of a civilisation that clearly lost.
• You never meet a friendly human. The only living voices are traders, and one of them is a rambling merchant who will sell you a fishing rod.

Killing a Forsaken lets you hang its trophy on the Sacrificial Stones, and doing so grants you its power. You are not saving this world. You are clearing it, on behalf of someone who has never once spoken to you directly.

• Up to ten players share a world. A dedicated server keeps that world alive when the host is offline, which is the right call for a group on different schedules.
• Progress is per world for bosses and per character for skills and gear, so you can carry a character between friends' worlds.
• Split roles: someone farms and cooks, someone mines, someone builds. Food economy is a full time job and it makes everyone stronger.
• Death is communal comedy. Corpse runs into a swamp at night with no gear are the reason this game has a fandom.

• Always carry a hammer, a hoe, a portal kit (fine wood, greydwarf eyes, surtling cores) and food.
• Build a portal hub at home with one spare portal, tag it "spare", and you can reach any new outpost in seconds.
• Chop trees away from your base. Falling trees kill players and flatten buildings.
• Sail with the wind. Use the Moder power for headwinds, and never sail at night in unexplored water.
• Carry a bronze pickaxe to the swamp and an iron one everywhere after.
• Rest, eat, then fight. Nearly every Valheim death is one of those three skipped.
• Tame two boars and two wolves early. Free food, free defence, free breeding.

• The official Valheim site and patch notes for what the latest biome update actually added.
• The community wiki for boss summon items, food tables and biome resource lists.
• World seed browsers if you want a world with a friendly starting layout instead of a hostile one.