In another distraction from Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, I started back up the new Valheim 1.0.

Although I had previously played for apparently 46.7 hours, it had been such a long time since then that I had forgotten everything there was about Valheim. Well, almost everything. I remembered that you can’t build a camp fire inside of your hut, but that was about it. Seriously, it was Day 3 before I built up the courage to kill a boar, as I had imagined them being some tough enemy for which I would need to defeat with a bow. As it turns out, they die in almost one hit, and drop the material you needed to craft a bow. I must have been thinking about all those blog posts about Windrose…

After defeating the first boss and heading into the Black Forest, antler-pickaxe in hand, I started to feel the familiar shape of outrageous bullshit. I was able to find Tin ore along the coastlines fairly quickly. Copper took a lot longer, as I had forgotten what it looked like (mossy boulder identical to other mossy boulders). Neither of the resources would do me any good though, without the red cubes inside the Burial Mounds. Which are in the Black Forest. Just not in any of your Black Forests.

I already linked them, but in my prior Valheim experience, I had to “explore” and essentially discard five Swamps and seven Mountains before finding those biome-specific resources. So, I guess hitting up seven different Black Forests in 1.0 is still par for the course. Fantastic. I suppose I should count myself lucky that any Burial Mounds spawned on my starting island at all; I have heard tale of people having to sail to new lands on the slow, beginning raft just to smelt ore.

It’s just ridiculously frustrating in what feels like a genuinely unique way. If I’m playing Terraria or Minecraft or ARK or whatever else, I’m not expecting Copper Nodes in the very first rock I crack open, or even the first place I look. In that respect, searching forever and then finding literally five Burial Mounds within 100 feet of each other is not a completely uncommon genre staple. The key difference with Valheim then is… well, the outrageous slog of it all. Playing Terraria is fun and engaging. Running/walking through environments, avoiding all combat because it’s pointless, is not.

And actually, I’m finding combat almost entirely unavoidable. Things might be different now that I have decked myself out in troll-skin armor (raises Sneakiness), but smaller mobs in Valheim don’t ever appear to leash or otherwise de-aggro. Found that out the hard way, several times, while spending in-game days looking for Burial Mounds. Nope, you need to stop what you are doing and defeat every trash mob you encounter and throw away its pointless loot, lest you get caught on some logs or stumble into a spawning nest.

Again, I’m not necessarily asking for a chicken in every pot. It would probably be a very short game if you found the dungeon at the entrance of the every new biome you walked into. But I am not exactly sure that the way Valheim handles exploration overall is especially fun. Specifically, the overland part. Sailing is it’s own thing, and I can see the fun in provisioning for adventure, setting up return portals, the tension between moving your entire base versus setting up outposts, etc. Running around by foot is just running around. That and the godawful trash mobs, which will only grow more annoying, I know.

We’ll see how it goes. This initial (re-)experience was very bad, but now that I have a Smelter and am (slowly) cranking out Bronze ingots? I having some… if not fun, at least some satisfaction. Copper/Tin/Bronze opened up so many recipes that I am slowly planning out my upgrades, testing new weapons, and spending some time improving my Viking crib. Which you wouldn’t necessarily notice just looking at it, but that’s because I’m giving it the old college try before following a base build video.

I recall the Swamp being a relatively miserable experience, and that’s what I have to look forward to after defeating the boss of the Black Forest. Then comes Mountains, which I believe was fine. Then… the Plains? Mosquitoland? Never actually quested in there after finishing the Mountains, so that will be all new. Assuming I make it. Which I probably will. Maybe.