After a very long and otherwise boring final fight, I have been welcomed into the halls of Valhalla. I logged 47 hours in Valheim back in the pre-Mistlands Early Access dayd, so that puts me at… 118 hours played in 1.0 from a fresh start to the victory lap home at the end of (in-game) Day 250.

To provide some necessary context, I played Valheim with zero mods. However, I did change resource drops to 1.5x, the Death Penalty to Casual (keep equipped items), and Portals set to allow all items (which includes metal). Per the game notes, that last option “circumvents the progression and exploration of the world as it is intended.” Which is kind of hilarious in the context of the game already taking 118 hours to beat, let alone how much more time it would take having to sail across the world with a ship full of iron ore every time.

Actually, this is something I want to talk about in finer detail.

In case you haven’t played Valheim… well, why the hell are you reading this post? Anyway, here’s the deal: fairly early after you defeat the first boss, you unlock the ability to craft portals. Plop one down, give it a unique name, then go exploring wherever and plop down a second portal, give it the same unique name, and bam. Instant teleportation between those two points. The rub is that both metal ore and metal ingots cannot go through the portal; if either of those things are in your inventory, the portal simply does not work. If you commit to a single mega-base, that means every ore run requires you to travel by cart or boat all the way back the hard way. Alternatively, you could theoretically set up a series of forward operating bases (FOBs) in each biome, smelting and crafting any new ores onsite. Ore/Ingots are bad, but finished weapons or armor is fine.

Back in Early Access, I did play the “intended” way, largely because I don’t think there was another option. It works to a point. The logistical trouble comes later on, when you are no longer on the same continent as your primary base. As the tiers progress, you can’t just slap down a Forge or Workbench and build the latest gear. Instead, you are going to need to craft ancillary furniture like Forge Bellows or a Grinding Wheel to “level up” the Forge and unlock new recipes. And this furniture requires older resources like Copper or Chain (etc), which means you either need to bring some with you from your stash, or go raid earlier biomes on the new continent, which means potentially more FOBs, and so on.

What you will notice is that none of this is particular hard. Or tricky. Or mentally challenging whatsoever. There is the constant fear of death, as by default you drop literally everything on your person. Were you deep in hostile territory and not yet plopped down a destination portal? Well, good luck! You can attempt the classical corpse run to retrieve your gear, and Valheim actually throws you a bone with a massive damage reduction upon picking up your stuff… but it does so mostly because it still requires you to equip the gear, which is not instant.

I actually played with the default Death Penalty in this 1.0 run, up until I got to the Mountain biome. Up there, the cold deals damage every second unless you have Frost Resistance from a cape or Mead consumable. So, I died and dropped all my best gear, did a corpse run with a belly full of Mead and second best gear, died again, and… realized that I had nothing else. No more gear, no more Mead. I would either have to continue making corpse runs in the hopes of luring away the mobs loitering around my corpse – which is totally an extra “fuck you” the devs put in – or practically start back over with sticks and stones. Eventually, I did “corpse hop” enough to get my original gear down the mountain, but I thereafter reduced the penalty to the lowest setting. Which still does drop everything but your equipped armor and whatever you were actively using in your hand, but at least it is not as (emotionally) devastating.

Nevertheless, even a default death penalty is a solvable problem: by outrageous, repetitive, mind-numbing grinding. Unlock that newest tier of gear and craft a set? Great! Now craft another full set or three. Pepper the landscape in FOBs and portals until you need an Excel sheet to document your portal naming conventions. You can type stuff on the map itself, if you can stand the clutter.

The bottom line is that the “intended” way of playing Valheim is apparently only for those who enjoy spending 500 hours playing the equivalent of an extraction shooter.

Or, hear me out: playing with other people.

Bosses gain more HP when multiple players are around, but know what doesn’t scale up? The fact that more players equals more carry weight, more inventory slots, more simultaneous boats, more help defeating mobs guarding your corpse. Sure, technically more players means twice as many meals and ingots need to be farmed as normal. But you probably don’t need each player to have 2+ suits of backup gear because the odds of both (or all) players go down is lower. Also, division of labor means that someone else can be crafting or cooking at home while others are out gathering resources. Everything is easier.

That is a whole lot of words to seemingly justify my difficulty slider decisions, in what is technically a single-player game. What I wanted to point out is that I actually appreciated the design vision the Valheim devs had for the game. I just don’t think the execution landed well in a solo world.

And, well, exploration kinda sucks in Valheim too; there are not very many unique POIs in the biomes, or secret biomes, or special gear, or any particular reason to suspect a particular Black Forest is any different than the last six Black Forests you walked through. You do technically get XP for killing mobs with specific weapons, but the practical effects each of each level up are hard to divine, and hardly matter anyway until you reach certain (invisible) breakpoints.

Anyway, I do give Valheim credit for some its systems, like keeping food/cooking important from Day 1 all the way to the endgame. The soundtrack is excellent, even though there is only like 1 song per biome. Combat feels weighty and important. There are a large variety of weapons and playstyles possible. The building system is fantastic and coherent. The Grappling Hook and Feather Cape combo is immensely satisfying.

At the same time, the survival crafting genre has gotten a lot more crowded in the intervening years. The old guard continue to get updates, and the newcomers bring genre-based Quality of Life improvements that practically poison the well. It’s 2026 and you can’t automatically pull mats from your chests? Or auto-sort them? There is something to be said about immersion, but conveniently no one is talking about going back to checkpoint-based saves or how you can repair gear for free even in Valheim. It all just feels very silly to ask the player to waddle across the floor with 1000 pounds of metal in their inventory just to preserve… what, exactly? The Viking magic? Meanwhile, I’ll be over here zipping around like Spiderman because it’s faster than traveling by boat, before getting to my Greydwarf spawner/Blood Magic farm outpost because actually raising the skill any legitimate way is almost impossible.

So, yeah, Valheim. It’s worth trying out if you’re a genre fan, but don’t feel bad if you don’t like it.