Smacking rocks and trees has been by far the easiest way to level up weapon skills in Valheim, and it’s been particularly handy for recouping the experience lost from dying. But following the big Hearth and Home update, Valheim players are finding that they now need to use their chosen weapon against an actual enemy to level up that particular combat skill. So, good news for trees and rocks, but bad news for Greylings and Greydwarfs.

The change isn’t mentioned specifically in Iron Gate’s Hearth and Home patch notes (opens in new tab), but you can see it in effect in this video shared by Redditor OldGuyWhoSitsInFront (thanks, The Gamer (opens in new tab))

til_you_cant_level_up_weapon_skills_on_rocks_and from r/valheim

Browsing the comments on the above video, there’s a lively discussion about whether Iron Gate was right to remove this little trick. Some users argue that the game’s intended progression system, i.e. killing whatever aggressive creatures cross your path, is proportional to the challenge, while others say the experience penalty for dying is too harsh and calls for just such a hack as a counterbalance. Others still have taken to using console commands to gain back lost experience and bypass the system altogether, but whether that’s necessary is another argument altogether.

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The piping hot new details arrive via Iron Gate’s first Hearth and Home spotlight video. The video reveals that the update will split food items into three categories: food that gives you more health than stamina will be indicated by a red fork icon, food that gives you more stamina than health will get a yellow one, and food that gives you a roughly equal amount of each will get white.

Excited for #Valheim Hearth & Home? Here’s a little sneak peek of what we’ve been working on in terms of the food system! Stay tuned for next week’s video 👀🥘 pic.twitter.com/DmpP1yQ9aLAugust 9, 2021

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On top of that, the big food bar that lives next to your health is going away, and will instead be replaced by a series of icons which show your currently active food and how much longer they’ll last via numeric countdown. With these changes, Iron Gate hopes to give players more interesting decisions about what kind of a diet to eat for any given day based on their plans: longer lasting stat-boosting food for a day of chores and building at the homestead, shorter but stronger items for combat-heavy adventuring, and so on.

Iron Gate is teasing that next week’s video will focus on how your choice of food could affect your preferred combat style, and it still says Hearth and Home is coming this quarter – which means it should be here by the end of September.

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The Valheim patch is available bringing the game to version 0.155.7 (opens in new tab) and mostly targeting AI issues. However, developer Iron Gate has also revealed that because it’s midsummer in Sweden, a buildable maypole has been temporarily added to the game so that players can celebrate. 

There are also a bunch of other fixes, with the main portion of the update changing the enemy AI behaviors. Monsters will now become more aggressive, particularly when they’re unable to attack the player. They’ll focus their attacks on structures and other things in the area, making themselves somewhat more intimidating and giving the player more to manage. Additionally, when fighting bosses, they won’t run away from players anymore.

There’s also a Blob event that has been enabled and Greydwarfs can now throw better. Event triggers have been tweaked as well, the Wolf event only triggers after Bonemass has been killed, and Moder army can trigger in mountains are some of the examples given.

For fixes, SFX volume settings have been fixed and a save bug issue where world corruption could occur when shutting down has been patched up. Containers also won’t need to be clicked multiple times to open.

Valheim is a Viking-themed survival where players can craft their own camps and survive against the elements and monsters. Earlier this year, the game hit 1 million players after only a week in early access, and shortly after that, it set a new concurrent record on Steam and then topped itself again by hitting over 400,000 concurrent players.

The studio did have a roadmap laid out for future content but has changed things up a bit. Instead of releasing 4 updates, it now plans to release a Hearth & Home update later this year. This was detailed in an update earlier this month (opens in new tab) where the studio says that the influx of players has highlighted “a thousand new problems” and as such it says the “priority has been to make the current experience as stable as possible and this has meant new content has taken a backseat.”

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The Valheim Hearth and Home update is now set to arrive in the third quarter of 2021 according to the latest Steam community update from Iron Gate Studio (opens in new tab)  – so sometime in July, August, or September. It was originally planned to be one of four major updates for the early access game this year, but Iron Gate admits that’s no longer feasible. The new plan is to start working on the big Valheim Mistlands update  (set to build out the eponymous biome, which currently exists in-game but is mostly desolate) immediately after work on Hearth & Home is done, skipping past smaller updates which were originally going to come between the two.

While Iron Gate was only able to make time for Hearth & Home starting in May (fixing issues revealed by the massive influx of players was the main priority before that), it was still able to share some first looks at new content coming in the update. That includes changes to how food works in game, with more emphasis on strategically balancing your boosts to health and stamina; the developers give the example of a tanky viking wanting to stack health, since it will also help you “deflect incoming hits and mitigate damage” – both of which are purely based on what gear you have in the current system.

New cooking stations including a spice rack, butcher table, and pots and pans which will increase your culinary options, with more than ten new recipes headed to the game. That includes “Eyescream,” which sounds both terrifying and delicious – turning those piles and piles of Greydwarf eyes into a delicious frosty treat would be the ultimate revenge. Lastly, the developers teased new plantable onions and building pieces, including darkwood roofs and the long-awaited arrival of window hatches.

Make sure you check out our Palia preview if you want another option for building out a homestead in an online open world.

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This new mod called SkyHeim, because it introduces the magic system not unlike the one in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Just below, you can check out gameplay of the mod in action in Valheim, courtesy of Eurogamer (opens in new tab).

“Skyheim is a magic mod aimed at providing balanced progression and a reason to go back and slay bosses,” the mod description reads over on NexusMods (opens in new tab). “Each boss drops a crafting ingredient that can be used to craft and upgrade runes that will allow you to cast a variety of spells both beneficial and destructive.”

From the sounds of things, it actually sounds like SkyHeim has a solid little gameplay loop established. You kill bosses to gain crafting items, which in turn can be used to craft runes that let wield different magical spells. Different bosses grant different crafting rewards for new spells, so there’s plenty of reason to revisit bosses like The Elder, Bonemass, and others.

We’ve seen no shortage of player-created content from Valheim players over the last few weeks. Just last week, we saw one player making incredibly professional-looking trailers showcasing their impressive in-game farm, and another player managed to create a mod that drastically reduces the tedious nature of smelting. Valheim players, having mastered the game, are now turning their attention to building their own additions to the viking adventure game, which is very exciting.

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The Valheim Surtling Core Overclocking Mod, as spotted by Rock Paper Shotgun (opens in new tab), lets you craft special additions for your kilns, smelters, or blast furnaces out of Surtling cores and various other components. You can grab it on NexusMods (opens in new tab) right now.

The three types of cores can increase each item’s speed, efficiency, or productivity, but the boosts come with a penalty to the other stats as well. With a maximum of four cores per item, you have to balance how much speed and extra product you want versus how much fuel and other resources you’re comfortable with wasting, or vice versa. And yes, you could just turn on Valheim cheats to get your resources instantly, but this way you earn that pile of metal.

If you’ve played Factorio, the overclocking process probably sounds familiar – and mod creator MarcoPogo cites Factorio as a direct inspiration for their own work in Valheim. One of the areas where Valheim is arguably the most lacking compared to many other survival-focused games is tools to make your processes more efficient. That may or may not be the kind of experience Iron Gate Studio pursues in future updates (we’re still waiting for specifics on what’s on the way in the Valheim Hearth and Home update), but there’s no harm in modders taking up the cause themselves.

Meanwhile, if you want new ways to see your own personal 10th realm, check out the Valheim VR mod. 

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Just below, you can see a clip from the Valheim subreddit, which exploded in popularity earlier today on March 25. In the comments underneath the clip, the original poster says that they discovered you can do anything you want underwater if your feet are touching the ground, including building.

Building underwater from r/valheim

“You can use 26° and 45° roof tiles or wooden beams to create a slope that will push you deeper underwater if you swim under it,” the player explains. “If you are pushed deep enough so your feet touch the ground and are able to stay there, you will no longer be swimming (you will notice that your stamina bar starts replenishing) and will be free to use a hammer and build!”

The player in question then goes on to explain that sometimes you’ll encounter problems while doing this, like the camera zooming out and hovering above the water. All things considered though, this is an excellent method of building underwater, and enables players to build detailed structures like bridges spanning across lakes and rivers.

This is just the latest in a very long line of impressive player discoveries from the Valheim community. The game undoubtedly invites player experimentation and discovery, but in the last few weeks we’ve seen the likes of players creating their own sundials to tell the best time to set out on an adventure, and someone even making their very own viking-themed pachinko board.

Iron Gate’s game has been nothing short of a smash-hit success since it launched last within the last month, surpassing six million units sold worldwide. Celebrating the latest sales milestone last week, the developer revealed a cryptic teaser image of the first big update for the game, called Hearth and Home. There’s not much to go on surrounding the update right now, but Valheim’s developers are gradually turning away from bug fixing to developing new content.

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Celebrating milestone sales figures at 6 million units sold, Iron Gate issued an update to Steam (opens in new tab) on Hearth and Home’s development. The studio didn’t give specifics on the update’s release, but did say it’s been able to gradually shift resources away from bug fixes and play tests to development on Hearth and Home.

“A lot of you have reached out and asked about the road map. How’s ‘Hearth and Home’ coming along? Much of our focus has been on play testing and bug fixing, but as things are calming down since launch, we can spend more time working on our first big update!” reads a section from the dev update.

So while we don’t know when it’s arriving, it sounds development on the update is speeding up. To hold us over until its release, the developers revealed a little Hearth and Home teaser image you can check out and expand below:

(opens in new tab)

As to what’s included in the Valheim Hearth and Home update, Iron Gate has confirmed that, as you might expect, the new content largely focuses on house building and customization. In a recent interview with our friends at PC Gamer (opens in new tab), Iron Gate co-founder Henrik Tornqvist said that Hearth and Home will include “more building pieces and stuff to do in and around the house.”

If you’re enjoying making food in Valheim more than building houses, it sounds like there’s also some stuff for you tucked away in the upcoming patch. “It will probably be pretty focused on the food preparation aspect of the game with more recipes and stuff like that,” Tornqvist continued.

If you’re just starting out or simply need a few good tips, don’t miss our Valheim tips on how to get started in this excellent survival sim.

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The music in Valheim is essential to the game’s dynamic atmosphere, seamlessly transitioning between peaceful, somber, eerie, motivating, and utterly thrilling for the boss sections. You can check out a fan’s mix of the soundtrack in the YouTube embed above, but Odin willing we’ll have the tracks on vinyl someday, ready to spin us away to Valheim whenever we need a break from the real world.

The game’s talented composer, Patrik Jarlestam, recently took part in a Reddit AMA (opens in new tab) where they talked all things Valheim music, and at one point gave an update on the soundtrack’s release. “I have delivered the final Streaming mixes and looping+non looping mixes to the company, and we are looking at releasing it when we get the final details done,” Jarlestam wrote. “As of today I haven’t gotten a date from them more than it will be soon!”

This isn’t the first we’ve heard of a standalone release for the Valheim soundtrack – the pinned comment on the video up top is Jarlestam talking about exactly that – but in a later reply from the AMA he reveals that work is being done on a vinyl edition, noting that it could take some time to be ready for purchase.

“I love soundtracks and music on Vinyl and I am in talks with a company to release on Vinyl,” said Jarlestam. “It will take a while I think but I’m working on it Would be so much fun.”

While this little tidbit was my personal highlight of the AMA (and maybe my whole year), the whole Q&A session is packed with fascinating details about Jarlestam, their inspiration for the score, and the artistic, technical processes behind making such captivating video game music. Check it out if you just want to live in that world for a while.

Here are some great games like Valheim to visit next.

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While its location out in the Plains is a far cry from Paris’ Île de la Cité, the build from Reddit user GlPv is impressive both for its attention to detail and in the way it uses Valheim’s building system. Unlike creating in a block-based game like Minecraft, Valheim’s architecture is all composed of pre-made building parts: there are only so many different roof pieces, or angled wall pieces, or types of lattice, and so on. But they made it all work.

I built Notre Dame cathedral. from r/valheim

GlPv said this build is made entirely from wood iron beams and core wood, and it looks like they even intentionally weathered some parts to provide more color contrast (wood structures get darker as they take damage in Valheim). The interior of the structure is currently empty, but it would make a damn impressive home base, assuming it doesn’t completely tank your frame rate.

Also, don’t feel too bad if this structure makes your own in-game builds look like a wooden box with a chimney on the top. GlPv used the game’s debug mode – which allows you to fly and access unlimited resources – to create it. You can find out how to activate debug mode yourself in our guide to Valheim cheats and spawn item list.

Plot out your next perfect base location with the Valheim World Generator.

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