I’m going to come out and say it: Valheim’s “exploration” is shit.

It may come as somewhat of a shock, but I am not an Explorer. Per se. I enjoy survival crafting games, and one of the biggest decisions you make in them is where you want to build your base. As such, I will happily traverse the world in search for the perfect location, and am always reevaluating the merits of better ones. Coming across rare resources, especially ones that regenerate, tickles my fancy. Nary a waterfall escapes examination for secret caves. I do pause for sunsets.

At the same time, rearranging a room with four objects doesn’t generate an infinite amount of novelty.

Valheim will procedurally generate a world for you with appropriate biomes scattered about, and then randomly populate those biomes with progression-required resources/POIs (points of interest). It is not enough to find just any Swamp, you must find a Swamp with a Sunken Crypt, before getting access to enough Scrap Iron to build better gear. This particular aspect is annoying, but not backbreaking.

What quickly becomes backbreaking is the additional layer of RNG: locating the randomly-assigned boss-locator tablet, which only appears in certain randomly-distributed POIs a percentage of the time. It is not enough to find an abandoned stone tower in the Mountains, you must find enough to get enough dice rolls to have one spawn the tablet.

The variability is a problem, but not the biggest one. The problem is how you can be “done” with all the progression in a biome and yet still have to spend several real-life hours “exploring” for these POIs. Meanwhile, there is nothing new for you to encounter. Is the terrain different? Sure. But that’s it. Maybe you find a better location for reconstructing a Plains base or whatever, but are you really going to move everything right as you’re looking for the Plains boss so you can head to the next biome? Certain POIs will have treasure chests, but the contents of them are all standard resources. None of the hostile mobs you encounter will be any different than the ones you defeated hours ago with worse gear.

The initial foray in the unknown? Premium tier. Walking into a new biome for the first time is a terrifying experience. What should you be looking for? How deadly could a “Deathsquitto” really be (spoilers: very)? Progression feels good as you slowly upgrade your armor and weapons, making the dangers a little bit less so.

But then… there’s a gap. Sometimes a gulf, between you and even locating the boss you have prepared yourself to tackle. And Valheim nevertheless requires you to drudge around for… some reason. Ambiance? Hubris? Maybe they expect you to die and lose all your gear and then need to re-smelt all the ore and collect all the resources all over again somewhere else? It’s dumb.

I did not think it was possible to create an exploration system worse than Starfield, but the Valheim devs did it. Because at least in Starfield, it wasn’t required.

I’m currently in the Mistlands, and do you know how things have went thus far? The very first place I docked my boat had the POI that you need to raid for progression material. And inside that same POI was the tablet that showed me the boss location. Do you know what it didn’t have? Enough progression material to actually build the crafting tables to make the new weapons/armor/etc. Sounds like the reverse problem to what I had earlier, right? But this time I will be rewarded for my hunt for another POI with access to all kinds of new weapons and armor. Even if I have to go to a completely different Mistlands area, the carrot is still on the stick. In just about every other biome up to this point, the carrot was long gone, and it was just all stick. And that’s shit design, IMO.

I do (thus far) appreciate what the devs have been able to accomplish with Valheim given its spartan design. This does not feel like a game that only takes up 4.23 GB of space. Nevertheless, I do feel like they have hewn things a bit too much to the bone. If it goes against their design principles to have a sort of “pity timer” that will guarantee the boss tablet by the third POI or some way to spend a bunch of resources to divine the location yourself, it would be helpful to at least pepper some random useful shit across these biomes we slog through.