Still playing Valheim. I fully completed the Ashlands, and am on the final stages of the, er, final stage: Deep North. My original plan was to just simply wait until I finished the game before making this post, but I have been struggling to find the motivation to do either of those things.

The Ashlands, as the Mistlands before it, was not nearly as bad as everything I heard about it. Which is because they subsequently nerfed it. Back in 2018 I wrote a post called The Internet is Forever… Wrong, and that remains relevant today. Whenever I go out and search for Valheim information on whether X weapon or Y staff is worth creating, nearly every search result or Youtube video is from 2 years ago and referring to stats or functions that have changed half a dozen times in the interim. There are filtering options available, yeah, but precious few search results afterwards.

That said, the Ashlands is definitely still hostile territory. The seas are boiling, all wildlife is hostile, stuff will catch fire randomly. And then there is the lava. Good lord, the lava. I actually appreciated the challenge of the lava at first. You can clearly see buildings suspended in the lava, so I tried to build pillars made of the same material. Nope, they crumble instantly. Then I tried to terraform the ground up. Nope, now there is a raised pillar of lava. It would have been rather silly if you could defeat the Ashlands with a hoe, but you never know with survival games.

By the next session though, the Ashlands was basically over. Trying to get the Flametal Ore from the spires in the center of lava fields is an engineering challenge. And it used to be harder, with the spires sinking after a few minutes! Just stealing entire chests full of the ore from forts with big green beacons highlighting their position? Much easier. Then it was just a matter of defeating the next iteration of the devs’ latest attempt to get you to quit the game from their bullshit boss design: Fader.

Fader is an exercise in deep boredom and frustration. Every 30 seconds, the boss creates multiple 11m zones of fire under your feet. If you are in melee range, the fire prevents from hitting the boss anymore, so you have to move out. Every 25 seconds, meteors rain down from the sky. Every 45 seconds, the boss calls adds, some of which are ranged bow users. There are more abilities, but those three themselves often meant the following loop:

• Hit the boss once
• Run out of the fire
• Dodge the meteors
• Kill the adds
• Start to run back to the boss
• Repeat

I eventually figured out that if I just kept running around at range, I could bait the fire to drop at range, and then maybe possibly get 3-4 melee hits in before some other bullshit happened. Bullshit being getting staggered by meteors, adds I didn’t kill, random other Ashland mobs who wandered into the boss area, getting launched into the lava by an Askvin, etc.

And props to the devs for making corpse retrieval as painful as physically (and emotionally) possible, even on the “easiest” difficulty. I’m not just talking about getting your corpse from the lava right next to a boss fight. I’m talking about how all these attacks create a lot of rock debris, which your character automatically picks up. So, when you run back to your corpse and try to hit “collect all”… you can’t do it. Or when it does work, you are overburdened and are desperately chucking things out of your inventory while under literal fire so you can move at normal speeds.

In any case, once my inventory and outside adds were taken care of, Fader eventually dies like the boring boss it is. Onward to the North!

…in which I am fighting Greydwarves and skeletons again? The upgraded troll is indeed upgraded, but nothing there is remotely at the same level as what I just got through. Which is kinda weird, right?

Thinking about it though, I started to realize something that had been bothering me since Mistlands. Specifically, how disjointed the newer biomes have felt in comparison with the originals. The Mistlands felt like a feature-rich biome, with more things than average: new enemies, new ways to get older resources, an entirely new item type (Eiter-fueled), the Grappling Hook, neutral NPCs, and so on. Ashlands? Not so much. The Deep North is similar, with recycled enemies, and random schematic grinding for some reason. Want to get the Vanguard set? Buckle up and kill certain Jotun for your 3% chance of a random one dropping!

I dunno. Maybe it is just me being done with the game way before the game is done. I have one more McGuffin to grab before I can summon the final boss, and then however long that takes to defeat. I’ve crafted like two items from this final tier, being in no particular hurry to make more as the enemies are dying just fine. In the Plains and Mistlands, I was fighting for my life for every upgrade. Not so much in Ashlands and Deep North.

Onwards and upwards, I guess.