Those “in the know” remember how much I’m struggling in Bloodborne and Elden Ring, even as I finish up the last of the main campaigns in Wildermyth. Those, though, are all primarily solo games. When I want to hang with friends, though, there’s only two choices: DCUO, and Valheim. And Team Spode mate Calrain made a whole new world and invited me in to go through the game a second time as we wait for Mistlands to re-appear.
It really was a dark and stormy night, when the Valkyries carried my soul to Valheim and I awoke in the afterlife once again. I built myself a quick yurt near the altar where new souls awaken while Calrain made his way back to show me the spot he’d picked for the settlement. A place in the meadow, but near to a black forest, mountains, and the ocean. Everything we would need to make our mark on the world.
He’d built a yurt, too, and it makes sense — it’s a quick little building you can make with very few resources that will keep you warm and dry. He’d been in the world for awhile already, and had already killed the deer god and was able to give me some starting weapons and armor.
I’d have liked to have cut and pasted my home from Spodeheim to here, but that’s not something you can do. And anyway, each new place tends to guide the home I make, I’ve found. It wasn’t too long before I had a place I could call my own.
I took this screenshot during the raising of our northwest guard tower — my house is in the back left corner. The starting yurt is directly below, and is used for portals. The building in front of my house, with the iron bars, is the boar pen. I’d tamed some boars and a bat invasion killed them all. So this time — a roof and iron bars. They’ve been alive ever since, and we have a good source of boar meat. To the right is Calrain’s super large house.
One of the first things we did after I joined the world was kill The Elder, the second Valheim boss. I was poorly equipped and had zero skills in most everything, so I mostly just distracted the boss while Calrain did all the heavy killing.
For the third boss, Bonemass, I was prepared. We’d spent a long time mining iron in the swamps and had the best gear and weapons we could make. Both Calrain and I had brew barrels pumping out poison resistance meads. Bonemass wasn’t as easy as he would be if we had Frostner or the Porcupine, but we didn’t and we made do. With its death, we could finally explore the mountains and the new Frost Caves.
Frost Caves offer a wealth of riches — for one, the first truly new weapon in the game, Wolverine-like claws called Fleshrippers. Combined with the Fenris armor you can make from the resources found in the caves, you can become a stealthy, fire resistant, backstabbing machine. Pretty much anything just poofs if it’s hit from behind with a stealth attack, wielding these. I still use them when just exploring, though the Fenris armor just sits on an armor stand now.
I don’t have decent screenshots of the Molnir fight. The mother of all dragons didn’t much like us playing with her eggs and this was one really bad fight. Days of game time. We thought we were prepared, but we were not prepared. Of course we were also attacked by wolves and drakes and, I think, one Fenrir. A couple stone golems, too. There were many deaths. I’m not sure how we eventually killed her, but in the end, she was defeated. We didn’t have this sort of trouble back on Spodeheim, and I’m not sure what changed.
With Molnir dead, it was finally time to move to the plains biome. Calrain suggested we make a new base in the black forest near a plains that he had scouted, so we did. Well, he did. I was going to get to his base and then start building near it, as before, but I couldn’t find it and built instead a small cabin that turned out not to be that far from where he’d built his. His was closer to the plains, and he’d already started a small garden with which to grow barley that he would then take back to the main settlement to mill and bake.
I mostly just use this cabin as a mining outpost, as it’s near good sources of copper and tin.
We had some troubles first breaking into the plains, but as we got our plains armor and weapons made, things got easier, and we were able to do some fun stuff like farming tar to make fancy furniture and shingles and taming lox.
Taming lox isn’t THAT hard. You get a lot of cloudberries, you find a herd of lox, toss the cloudberries in the middle of them, and then make yourself scarce for two-three days of game time. You have to be in the area, though, which means constant attacks by deathsquitoes and goblins while waiting. I came out of that camp with more needles and black metal than I could ever use.
Once tamed, though, the lox are now a target for deathsquitoes and goblins, as they’ve switched sides. I wanted to bring at least one back to the main settlement — on a different island. I scraped together enough materials to build a longship (I thought), but I’d been looking at the wrong ship and when I had ridden my chosen lox to the shore, I found I could only make the considerably smaller karve. At least it wasn’t a raft. I managed, somehow, to ride the lox onto the karve and set sail. I, of course, had forgotten to prepare the Moder power of constant tailwinds, and it was a slow row to the open ocean where, thankfully, we were not attacked by sea serpents.
Unfortunately, I eventually sailed too close to a swamp. The lox decided it was going hunting, jumped off, and went crazy on some blobs and leeches it’d found. With it dying from poison and no possible way to get it back into the boat, I saw on the map that there were only swimmable crossings separating us from the home island, so opted to just ride the lox home.
Draugr attacked us. Not one but THREE trolls. More greydwarfs than I could count. Skeletons. At one point the lox’s health was so low, I thought it was dead. But we found a few moments of peace where I could feed it more cloudberries. I got it home, then went back the next day and sailed the karve back. Still no sea serpents — and this time I would have wanted one.
If I want lox cubs, I’m going to have to do this again… not looking forward to it.
So, that’s where things stand. We have all we need to take on Yagluth, but we know that will set loose the fuling hordes for no reason. We’re going to wait on the Mistlands to worry about that. For now, it’s just building and waiting.
And… that’s it for now.
