Valheim: Five Years Later

I like Valheim beyond all reason. Everyone in my play group has moved on; only I remain. And all I do is build and explore; well, not so much exploring. The devs have said that with the upcoming Mistlands patch, any explored biomes of that type will not be updated with the new content as they have been set in stone already.

I’ve taken that as a reason to just stay in the areas we have already opened up and just… see what I can build and how those things stand up to the terrors that await.

I’ve really been trying to develop the mountain that sits next to our plains settlement. It is the most difficult-to-traverse mountain I’ve been on in the game. It had three ruins on it. I started by building those out. Then I wanted to just make a castle. Actually, I started out trying to make my IRL house, but gave up pretty quick because it was boring. Stone is pretty plentiful on the mountain, so the castle was always going to be stone.

This small tower was built from an existing ruin. I added a tall stone chimney and finished out all the walls. Drakes just love attacking this for reasons unknown to me.

I’d sailed to this swamp for some iron. When I got back from my dungeon mining, skeletons and draugr were just finishing destroying my boat and my exploration portal. I needed to make someplace safe for the portal and boat, once I’d finished rebuilding them. That small cabin turned into this little safe spot in the middle of the hostile swamp. It’s on legs and was built over a leech lake. Once I finished with the cabin, I cleared the leeches one last time I filled in the foundation with stone. I still come back to blobs and other critters beating on it, but they’ve never gotten inside.

The boat wasn’t safe in the swamp, so I built a dock for it near our plains base. Then, I found Calrain’s boat down the coast a bit and brought it back here as well. Kasul has a boat somewhere around, too, but he’d already built a protected dock for it, and last time I checked, it was fine.

This dock is on the edge of the Mistlands, so it is gloomy and very hard to see from the water. I made a huge bonfire and a lot of iron torches to help guide ships in.

I never really had a plan for this. I was just fooling around and liked how the triangular entrances came together. I thought, maybe explorers walking through the plains would see this first and wonder who lived there. Later, I built a set of stairs that go from here straight up the mountain to the mountain settlement.

The guard tower was built up from another ruin. I keep getting inspiration from builds I see on Twitter, but in the end, none of mine look anywhere near as good as theirs. The tower was a good place from which to hunt drakes, but they have mostly stopped spawning nearby.

I was building a new tower in the plains settlement when the Skeleton Surprise! event hit. I didn’t think much of it, as I was inside, surrounded by stone. Turns out the skeletons could easily climb the spiral staircase I’d just finished building.

I had this idea for a huge maze that would, via portals, cross biomes and go all over the world and really get people lost. This is as far as I got. I took this picture just after I laid down the initial walls of the maze.

The finished maze drops people from a raised portal (on the right in the picture) and the exit portal is on the other end of the maze. The maze isn’t tough to figure out, but it was fun to build and I run through it every so often just because it’s fun to imagine I’m lost. I was kinda worried that dwarfs would destroy it, but it’s held up fine so far.

Here’s our plains settlement, prior to me building the new guard tower. This was the last place Team Spode built as a group. The wolf pen is lower right; above that is my house. Counter clockwise are some of our tame lox, then the main long house. To the left of that is the first tower; in front is the second tower (I was trying to do a circular tower with staggered stone blocks, but it was mostly a failure). In front of that are the mills. The third tower wasn’t constructed at this time.

This will be my last Valheim post for awhile, and maybe ever. I feel that this is a special game, and the time spent in this world with my boyfriend and Team Spode was some of the happiest I’ve spent in a multiplayer game.