Valheim’s first content expansion brings a little adventure together with a lot of new things to make and build. Is it going to be enough to bring the magic back?
It’s not hard to tame a lox — the large, yak-like creatures that congregate in the Valheim plains biomes. All you really need is a few stacks of barley or cloudberries, and a place to hide nearby while they eat and gradually come to love you. This also works for wolves (who enjoy meat) and boars (who love mushrooms and berries).
Once you’ve tamed them, though, what are they good for?
Before Hearth and Home, they would help fight off some invasions, if they didn’t involve plains creatures. But now, they are much more versatile, becoming active defenders of your home.
In the picture above, I’ve got my personal lox, Coffee, all saddled up and ready to accidentally destroy buildings in its zeal to keep us save from deathsquitoes and the odd fuling that gets past the outer defenses. It is destructive, though — I’ve had to make significant repairs to two of our buildings; my house, and the visitor’s center at the bottom of the ski slope.
Turns out they have an even better use. Hearth & Home introduces a new plains location — tar pits. These sticky pools, which provide the raw materials for many of the new building items, are guarded by ooze-like tar critters called “Growths”. Growths will hunt you down and there is no way to hide — they are fast, jump high, and rapid fire tarballs at you that bind you and slow you down. And you can guarantee, without fail, that once a Growth has got you trapped, fulings and deathsquitoes galore will show up to join in the fun.
I died six times, I think, trying to recover from a particularly bad Growth fight. The pool in the picture above wasn’t bad; it had just three Growths. But the next one I found was much larger and had many, many more.
After using the findings from the first tar pit to start building a small base locally, I set out to tame the two nearby herds of lox. Since lox are far more active fighters now, it was simple to just sweep in after they’d fought off the trolls and grey dwarfs from the bordering Black Forest and grab wood, stone, eyes, resin and so on to supplement what I brought in from the main settlement.
I’d set up a portal at the place when I found the tar pit, but hadn’t prepared by setting one up at the settlement, so that meant a long boat trip back to match the one that got me here in the first place. Luckily, serpents would attack often enough to keep me in food.
Once the base was built and the lox tamed, I saddled one up and left it right near a tar pit, hoping it would kill any Growths that spawned for me.
My poor unnamed lox perished in a putrid puddle of petroleum. It killed a few of them; and I’d have helped, but I was gathering the leavings and carting them back to the base. It died alone. When I returned, I found only its saddle and its head as a trophy — both stuck in the tar so that I can’t get them out.
The Food Situation
I’m still learning about the different foods and stuff — a friend is doing a lot more with that than I am. I’m content with the foods I have been using since I was able to gather the supplies for Blood Pudding and Serpent Stew easily enough. I’m really feeling the loss of stamina in what I eat, though — I tire out quickly in battle. A “Skeleton Surprise” actually overwhelmed and killed me because I got to the point where I could no longer fight them off.
There’s a lot of new crafting stations to make better foods, most of which Calrain has built at the meeting house in Mistvale, and I’m grateful for that, since I don’t have to make them. I did make a spreadsheet with all the stuff I would need to gather to make the stations at my mountain castle, but Mistvale is just a portal away, so I’m happy to let someone else do that work.
Mistvale Plans
I’d been keeping a wolf kennel in Mistvale for awhile. We used to have some in the meeting house, but the howls were just too much. I’d built the kennel pretty close to my house, but it’s just started interfering with my plans to expand my house with the new H&H items. So, I let the dogs out. (It was me, Baja Men). I did build a cage for one of them. The others are free to roam the place. Deathsquitoes and fulings have got some of them, but it’s been many in-game days now, and there’s still lots left alive. My lox Coffee has been good about keeping the place pretty safe.
Maybe this weekend, I’ll tear down the kennel and start sketching out the expansion I want to make. There’s lots of ideas online, and I have over two stacks of tar, plus a pool I haven’t even really started draining for more when I need it.
Will Hearth & Home Bring Folks Back?
I don’t really think Hearth & Home is enough to get people back. It doesn’t really offer anything all that new; there’s still the issue that all the bosses are dead, and even if Mistlands was out with new bosses, we know we’d just kill that boss and then be back just building stuff again.
There’s still no storyline; we won’t be ascending to Valhalla no matter how much we prove ourselves. The ruins of old Spodeheim still remain as a testament to those few months in the height of the pandemic where we came together to grow, fight and explore, but most everyone has moved on. Some to other survival games, even 馃檪
I’ve struggled with whether or not to shut down the server I pay for. Calrain is on occasionally, and I’m on now and then, but I can download the world and play it locally for free. I’m not shutting it down yet, but the next time Team Spode starts an online game that could use a server, I’ll change it over to the new game and leave Valheim behind.
We have our memories of the game. Those are good memories. At some point, probably after Mistlands, it will be time to let it go unless they fundamentally transform the game. I get that they want people to just continue on to new worlds and start over, again and again. That didn’t work for No Man’s Sky and it won’t work here, either. Players need something to work toward.
Do you think you’ll come back and re-visit it when it leaves Early Access? Because I probably wouldn’t, which is why I try to avoid the temptation of EA games. Once I’ve played a game in EA it loses that new shiny appeal when it launches and I get a ‘been there, done that’ feeling.
There are exceptions of course and I DID buy Valheim but didn’t get very far and already I have little desire to return to it.
I think it’ll be a good game for flurries of interest. Valheim was a lot of fun when I was playing with friends, less so alone. I have the Discord of a communal Valheim server that is supposed to be pretty busy. There’s a reason Minecraft has stayed popular so long, and it’s the easy way to find communities to join.
If Valheim can’t build that same shared community, it won’t last. There just isn’t enough content to keep someone playing alone playing, imho.
I don’t have the issue of playing with friends since I played Valheim totally solo and loved it. My issue is I categorically do not want the world to get more challenging. Absolutely not. If anything I want it to get less dangerous although staying just as it was works, too.
For that reason, I have no incentive at all to explore new areas now and even less (yes, going into the negative) incentive to start over on a new world. As you say, if there was some clear progression then it might tempt me but even then, unless that was leading to something, I can’t see the point.
It’s a weird Catch 22 of Early Access, I think. If you go EA and your game isn’t very good it will get a bad name and you’ll struggle to get people to look at it again if/when you improve it but if you go EA and your game is very good, as Valheim was, you’ll satisfy people with what you gave them, they’ll feel they had their money’s-worth and you’ll still struggle to get them interested in coming back.
I think you might actually be better off to start bad and then get good rather than start great and then drift along not getting any better.
Yeah, I think that’s one of the unfortunate truths of Early Access. Most of the time, people are wanting to play a game, not help with development. And once they are done that game, they are done that game.
Real question is — is this new expansion (or any of them) enough to get people who hadn’t yet played Valheim to give it a shot? They did run a substantial sale at the same time they released H&H to help push people off the edge of deciding whether or not to buy.