I am going to complain about Valheim later, but before I do so, I wanted to get some words out in praise of some of its subtler elements of genius design. Specifically, there are two main elements: food and base-building. I’m going to talk about both as someone still in the Plains biome.

Counter-intuitively, in many survival-crafting games food is usually an afterthought. There might be a time period right at the beginning where you are scrounging for edibles anywhere you can, but thereafter hunger is just another meter you manage. Or more accurately, a meter you forget about completely until it is actively flashing at you. Certain “late-game” foods might provide specific buffs to damage or whatever, but it is clearly a bonus reward to encourage you to treat the design with more seriousness than it ever truly merits.

This is not at all the case with Valheim: your next meal is always top of mind at every stage of the game. And it achieves this, ironically, with no technical penalty for not eating. You will never starve to death in Valheim. Instead, you will… just have the default amount of HP and Stamina. Which is fine for a minute in the early game, but becomes a brutal setback nearly anywhere else.

In Valheim, you have three “slots” for food. Each piece of food grants you some amount of extra HP, Stamina, and healing per interval. However, you can’t just eat the same thing three times, as the food slots are mutually exclusive. This automatically elevates the food/cooking system way past almost all traditional survival crafting games, into the realm of Green Hell and similar ones that track individual macros like Protein and Carbs. Unlike the super technical ones though, Valheim doesn’t care if you eat the same three (unique) dishes each day, nor does it bear the same burden of UI overhead. Food just gives the same three stats in varying amounts, for varying amounts of time. Want to subsist on just Turnips and Onions and Onion Soup? Go for it… but good luck not getting one-shot in the next biome.

As a sidebar, I also appreciate what Valheim does (thus far) when it comes to obsoletion of materials as you progress. After defeating a boss, you typically unlock something that allows you to process the next biome’s materials, which you need in order to take on the next boss. That’s pretty standard. What has been nice though, is that food/equipment still makes use of older ingredients in fairly rational ways. Some might find this grindy to have to head back into the Swamp for Iron or Blood Bags or whatever, but I appreciate the (usually) measured approach of some items requiring older mats.

Finally, I want to talk about the meat (ahem) of the genius design: the campfire.

Real talk, Valheim slaughtered the sacred cow that almost every survival game raised without even knowing it, e.g. fires producing smoke. In almost every other game, you start by building a 2×2 box for a base, and throw everything inside… including the campfire. After all, rain will put a camp fire out, and you cannot fast-forward the night without being within a certain radius of a lit fire. In Valheim, however, unventilated fires also produce smoke, which creates a damaging debuff which can kill you.

And that’s it. One simple change elevates the game beyond many of its peers in the genre. Not because it’s realistic (it is), but because of what it changes about how the player approaches base design. My own progression went something like this:

• Builds a 2×2 square box… ouch, getting smoked out
• Builds a 3×3 box with the center tile open… and it rained
• Get annoyed, place the campfire outside with a janky lean-to protecting it
• Get annoyed standing in the rain to cook my own food. Hmm.
• Put campfire back in the middle of 3×3 box, create a 1×1 elevated roof. It works!
• Get annoyed accidentally walking into campfire so many times
• Tear down wall in back corner, place campfire there, with a “range hood”. It works!
• ???
• Realize why (fantasy) Viking architecture all looks like the way it does

It may not seem revolutionary that a game with Viking-themed set pieces ends up encouraging players to build Viking-looking bases. But consider how the genre’s bar for successfully encouraging anything beyond a wooden survival cube is practically nonexistent. The closest I have felt to such an inspired synergy between mechanics and aesthetics was Nightingale, which wore its Valheim inspirations on its lanternpunk sleeve.

In any case, my compliments to the devs on these two, specific points.