It's $20. It's a whole ass 1 gigabyte. Pretty atmospheric and serene while also being scurry as hell at times. Couple that with a really solid (though still needs improvement) building system and randomly generated worlds while still only being in early access and you've got a grade A time waster.
Bonemass sucks because the netcode sucks. We had I dunno 6 or 8 people and everybody was so lagged to shit half the team died and the other half had to withdraw.
Came back with just 4 and managed to down him.
The poison is just a highly irritating mechanic, but the only way to fight him is to get close and melee the shit out of him, so you end up in this cadence where you're doing no damage with arrows and fighting off ads waiting for your health to regen in the middle of the fight which is...not that fun a mechanic IMO. Poison resist isn't nearly as effective as it could be. Or we need a healer or something.
on the flip side that experience convinced us to try modding the game to up the bandwidth limit and that seemed to help back at base. Their upload limits are stupid low and the netcode seems pretty janky.
I'm taking a break from the game because of that fucking guy. He didn't even kill me, I just realized he was healing faster than I could damage him. One of the most awful, cruel boss designs I have seen in an already disturbingly sadistic game.
Bonemass sucks because the netcode sucks. We had I dunno 6 or 8 people and everybody was so lagged to shit half the team died and the other half had to withdraw.
Came back with just 4 and managed to down him.
The poison is just a highly irritating mechanic, but the only way to fight him is to get close and melee the shit out of him, so you end up in this cadence where you're doing no damage with arrows and fighting off ads waiting for your health to regen in the middle of the fight which is...not that fun a mechanic IMO. Poison resist isn't nearly as effective as it could be. Or we need a healer or something.
on the flip side that experience convinced us to try modding the game to up the bandwidth limit and that seemed to help back at base. Their upload limits are stupid low and the netcode seems pretty janky.
I'm taking a break from the game because of that fucking guy. He didn't even kill me, I just realized he was healing faster than I could damage him. One of the most awful, cruel boss designs I have seen in an already disturbingly sadistic game.
did you have maces and poison resist? He's bullshit impossible without blunt damage, but after equipping ourselves with maces me and my one buddy didn't have much issue
Bonemass is annoying, but I think you're overselling it. He's very strong against arrows and kiting, which is why you use a different tactic.
I think the game definitely has some needlessly frustrating aspects, especially around penalties from death, but combat really isn't that difficult in this game as long as you focus on A: good food and B: the best shield you can reasonably manage.
Bonemass sucks because the netcode sucks. We had I dunno 6 or 8 people and everybody was so lagged to shit half the team died and the other half had to withdraw.
Came back with just 4 and managed to down him.
The poison is just a highly irritating mechanic, but the only way to fight him is to get close and melee the shit out of him, so you end up in this cadence where you're doing no damage with arrows and fighting off ads waiting for your health to regen in the middle of the fight which is...not that fun a mechanic IMO. Poison resist isn't nearly as effective as it could be. Or we need a healer or something.
on the flip side that experience convinced us to try modding the game to up the bandwidth limit and that seemed to help back at base. Their upload limits are stupid low and the netcode seems pretty janky.
I'm taking a break from the game because of that fucking guy. He didn't even kill me, I just realized he was healing faster than I could damage him. One of the most awful, cruel boss designs I have seen in an already disturbingly sadistic game.
did you have maces and poison resist? He's bullshit impossible without blunt damage, but after equipping ourselves with maces me and my one buddy didn't have much issue
I did, still kicked my ass.
I know he is beatable, I just hate every one of his mechanics.
Edit: I imagine being two would make a huge difference because of the distraction factor. Since his attacks poison even if you block I could never approach him without taking damage, particularly because there were constantly skeleton archers shooting me.
Vic on
0
ThegreatcowLord of All BaconsWashington State - It's Wet up here innit? Registered Userregular
So what's the deal with this game? How does it differ from the other survival crafters like Ark and Rust and whatnot to make it such an overnight phenomenon? Or is the answer just "not much, these types of games just always do a good job of finding an audience"?
For me as a very VERY casual player of survival games that normally don't stick around for them, it does a lot of things really well that removes a lot of the bullshit that other survival games push onto you in the essence of "immersion" or artificially jacking up the difficulty.
These are the things off the top of my head:
-For an early access game, it's remarkably stable. Aside from 1-2 major world/character eating bugs this is an incredibly robust offering and as others have said, it's only about a 1 gig of hard drive space. Graphicswise think a gussy'd up Minecraft texture with really nice lighting/wind/weather mechanics and more robust physics engine.
-Food, you don't "technically" need to constantly eat or drink to survive. You'll never actually starve by not eating, but if you want to craft efficiently or have a chance fighting creatures, you're going to want to eat food. The food system is very simple too. Basically you can eat up to 3 "types"/pieces of food at a time before you're "full". The various combinations of food (meat/mushrooms/fruit/prepared food/honey/mead etc) will have different effects and increase your max health and stamina bar to differing degrees. It encourages experimentation but doesn't punish you for not participating unless you really want to heavily explore/craft/fight.
-Sleep. You don't "have" to sleep but doing so gives you rested bonuses and offers little flavor text for doing so. Also if you have a bunch of stuff queued up in your kiln or forge, it speeds crafting of it along for you. But you're not punished for not sleeping. You can simply keep retreating to a roofed structure and get a rested bonus as long as you're near a warm fire for instance.
-Repairs By far the best part of the game. You don't have to keep lugging around supplies or keep supplies in reserve to keep your gear functional. You got a workbench/forge? Cool just walk up to it and click the repair icon for each piece of worn/broken gear and you're good to go. No supplies needed.
-Tech Progression/Recipe unlocks - Very easy to move into. If you pick up an ingredient for a new recipe that you don't have, you unlock said recipe. So things like new ores, woods or food ingredients, for the most part simply picking up one of those ingredients will unlock the tech tree or recipe you need to do something with that component.
-Server hopping - This is a really nice feature that encourages playing with your friends. Your character file is stored locally. So if you get bored playing solo on your server, simply load up your character with whatever gear or supplies you want and log into a friend's server/seed. Whatever is on your character will carry over seamlessly to their server including your accumulated skills. So if they're just starting out, you can use your upgraded character to help get them started faster or if your friends are super progressed along, they can help get you some shinier gear if your particular seed makes mining components for said gear a royal pain in the ass. As long as it's on your character, it'll follow you wherever you go.
There's more but these were things that stuck out to me right from the get go. 50 hours later and I'm happily hooked and the biggest issue I have is now trying to split time between working on my settlement on my server/seed or helping out on Friend's settlements in their servers/seeds.
That fight really benefits from some, ahem, battleground preparation.
Raise the ground level a bit to fix any of the areas you’d be swimming. Chop down a bunch of the trees, leaving a couple big ones to kite/hide around. Clear any other mobs in a wide radius around.
So what's the deal with this game? How does it differ from the other survival crafters like Ark and Rust and whatnot to make it such an overnight phenomenon? Or is the answer just "not much, these types of games just always do a good job of finding an audience"?
I mean, it's a survival crafter like those games, and if you didn't like any of them then I wouldn't necessarily bet that you'd like Valheim, but it does do a few key things a bit differently:
1) it's not PvP-focused. PvP is an option on some servers but it's not the default option and it's underdeveloped and vestigial compared to those other games. Valheim is balanced around groups of friendly players cooperating to explore a hostile world. Instead of man being the real monster, the monsters are the real monster. And the monsters are often a lot of fun! There's some cool, huge creatures roaming the world that are interesting and fun to fight.
2) The game is fairer. Weapons, armor, and items decay, but fixing them is free and only requires a crafting bench; you aren't on the treadmill of constantly needing more resources just to stay where you are. The survival gameplay is balanced around long-lasting buffs rather than a set of constantly ticking doom timers, so eating good food, being rested, warm etc makes you stronger for ten or twenty minutes, but being hungry and naked and cold just means your guy is just a bit whiffy and ineffectual rather than thirty seconds from dead. You don't have those shitty situations where you get really into building your house and arranging the walls and suddenly drop dead because you forgot to exit the crafting menu and make your guy eat something, or where your guy dies of exposure because you got up for a minute to take a whiz.
3) Things are simplified and streamlined. Characters have simple numerical stats and recipes aren't excruciatingly elaborate. The game is less menu and timer-driven and instead uses more simple, clean interactions out in the world. Like, to keep a fire going, you go up to the fire and press the interact key to dump wood into it, rather than opening up the fire's inventory and dragging wood over from your backpack. When the smelter is done turning ore into bars of finished metal, it spits the bars out onto the ground for you to pick up by walking over, instead of the finished product piling up in some obnoxious inventory screen with 3 slots. You tend to spend a greater proportion of your time actually out in the world doing things than in menus watching timers click down or doing inventory Tetris.
4) The world is genuinely huge and vehicles (boats and longships) are a big part of it. The experience of getting together with six or eight friends and piling into a longship to sail off into the horizon for ten, twenty, or even thirty minutes to find new continents and new resources is genuinely exhilarating and an experience I haven't really gotten to have in other games in general or even other survival games. It's genuinely adventurous.
Our first real boat voyage a storm kicked up five minutes in, and also night, and also a sea serpent started chasing us. We were all screaming like maniacs, but dragged the serpent to shore and killed it. Didn’t even lose the boat.
So what's the deal with this game? How does it differ from the other survival crafters like Ark and Rust and whatnot to make it such an overnight phenomenon? Or is the answer just "not much, these types of games just always do a good job of finding an audience"?
First of all, Jacobkosh's assessment is a good one and I will echo everything he said.
All that acknowledged, as background, I really don't give a shit about survival crafting games and they do absolutely zero for me.
The gameplay loop is reasonably tight, the environment is for the most part relaxing, and the building and crafting are satisfying enough that I've put in ~20 hours so far mostly to hang out with some friends I haven't had a chance to otherwise.
It's not a gamechanger IMO. If you don't like survival crafting games, this one won't be the one that brings you into the genre. It is satisfying enough that I'll hang out for a few hours and gather materials or go on the odd raid with my friends however.
I wouldn't bother single-player personally, but I don't like survival crafting games.
That fight really benefits from some, ahem, battleground preparation.
Raise the ground level a bit to fix any of the areas you’d be swimming. Chop down a bunch of the trees, leaving a couple big ones to kite/hide around. Clear any other mobs in a wide radius around.
Removing leech pools, etc is very helpful.
This is one of the things I really like about this game. You can terraform your way around problems.
Bonemass is annoying, but I think you're overselling it. He's very strong against arrows and kiting, which is why you use a different tactic.
I think the game definitely has some needlessly frustrating aspects, especially around penalties from death, but combat really isn't that difficult in this game as long as you focus on A: good food and B: the best shield you can reasonably manage.
You CAN kite bonemass if you have Frost arrows, which aren't that difficult to make if you spend some time up in the Mountains. Obsidian and Drakes are found in abundance up there, although you'll definitely need Frost Resist mead or a Wolf cape (prior to killing Bonemass, probably the only ways to get Frost resist that I can think of). I think it takes around 120-160 Frost Arrows total, which are 6-8 batches of Frost Arrows. Not too shabby.
Also, you don't necessarily need a shield, since it's more effective to dodge-roll away from his attacks than block them due to the poison. As long as you have a Stagbreaker or something similar to AoE the adds, it wasn't too bad to solo. Prepping a battle arena in his area is a big protip, too, moreso than the previous bosses (who also can be exploited if you prep the surrounding area a bit). The swamp is a total pain to navigate, so a simple wood flooring everywhere makes it so you don't get wet (and you can set down some fires in case you do get wet) from wading around.
You definitely can't have wolf gear for Bonemass unless you blind mine I guess
milski on
I ate an engineer
+3
Rear Admiral ChocoI wanna be an owl, Jerry!Owl York CityRegistered Userregular
edited February 2021
Frost resist mead is definitely the best way to prep for the mountains if you want materials for frost arrows, and even though its use is obsolete once you get a wolf cape it's still handy to have around in your base to chug if you get killed and need to corpse run into the cold
Getting the mats for warm capes / armour just isn't really feasible without the Bonemass' drop
Ah, I had forgotten that it takes Silver to make even the cape. Frost Mead it is!
0
PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
edited February 2021
bonemass isn't explicitly hard, his issue is that his fight highlights basically all the worst parts of the game as it stands
bear in mind, I really enjoy this game and the extremely small dev team means I'm gonna be a lot less critical of it and also lower my expectations a bit
the fact that none of the other bosses, even the further ones, require anywhere close to the prep work necessary to make the fight not absolute dogshit is not great
I still haven't even gotten to the same landmass of the elder, but I am probably going to summon the bonemass in the middle of a death arena and see if I can get the environment to do half the work.
Yeah I need to find more seeds still, which I think means moving to the next landmass over. Which means my mining boat becomes a portal boat so I can build a little house near the boss and teleport to my main base when I need to.
Out of curiosity, has anyone else gotten duplicate boss altars? I have a second altar for the first boss on the same landmass, though it's not marked on the map.
Bonemass sucks because the netcode sucks. We had I dunno 6 or 8 people and everybody was so lagged to shit half the team died and the other half had to withdraw.
Came back with just 4 and managed to down him.
The poison is just a highly irritating mechanic, but the only way to fight him is to get close and melee the shit out of him, so you end up in this cadence where you're doing no damage with arrows and fighting off ads waiting for your health to regen in the middle of the fight which is...not that fun a mechanic IMO. Poison resist isn't nearly as effective as it could be. Or we need a healer or something.
on the flip side that experience convinced us to try modding the game to up the bandwidth limit and that seemed to help back at base. Their upload limits are stupid low and the netcode seems pretty janky.
Interesting, how did you do that?
We have an issue if an enemy or player is on fire the server basically craps itself. Everyone just starts to lag horrendously.
The server we are running off of has a 3700x and 32gb of ram so I’m surprised we were having issues.
So what's the deal with this game? How does it differ from the other survival crafters like Ark and Rust and whatnot to make it such an overnight phenomenon? Or is the answer just "not much, these types of games just always do a good job of finding an audience"?
I mean, it's a survival crafter like those games, and if you didn't like any of them then I wouldn't necessarily bet that you'd like Valheim, but it does do a few key things a bit differently:
1) it's not PvP-focused. PvP is an option on some servers but it's not the default option and it's underdeveloped and vestigial compared to those other games. Valheim is balanced around groups of friendly players cooperating to explore a hostile world. Instead of man being the real monster, the monsters are the real monster. And the monsters are often a lot of fun! There's some cool, huge creatures roaming the world that are interesting and fun to fight.
2) The game is fairer. Weapons, armor, and items decay, but fixing them is free and only requires a crafting bench; you aren't on the treadmill of constantly needing more resources just to stay where you are. The survival gameplay is balanced around long-lasting buffs rather than a set of constantly ticking doom timers, so eating good food, being rested, warm etc makes you stronger for ten or twenty minutes, but being hungry and naked and cold just means your guy is just a bit whiffy and ineffectual rather than thirty seconds from dead. You don't have those shitty situations where you get really into building your house and arranging the walls and suddenly drop dead because you forgot to exit the crafting menu and make your guy eat something, or where your guy dies of exposure because you got up for a minute to take a whiz.
3) Things are simplified and streamlined. Characters have simple numerical stats and recipes aren't excruciatingly elaborate. The game is less menu and timer-driven and instead uses more simple, clean interactions out in the world. Like, to keep a fire going, you go up to the fire and press the interact key to dump wood into it, rather than opening up the fire's inventory and dragging wood over from your backpack. When the smelter is done turning ore into bars of finished metal, it spits the bars out onto the ground for you to pick up by walking over, instead of the finished product piling up in some obnoxious inventory screen with 3 slots. You tend to spend a greater proportion of your time actually out in the world doing things than in menus watching timers click down or doing inventory Tetris.
4) The world is genuinely huge and vehicles (boats and longships) are a big part of it. The experience of getting together with six or eight friends and piling into a longship to sail off into the horizon for ten, twenty, or even thirty minutes to find new continents and new resources is genuinely exhilarating and an experience I haven't really gotten to have in other games in general or even other survival games. It's genuinely adventurous.
That the game manages to mix excitement (bossfights, exploring and sailing to new lands etc) with a lack of stress (especially the lack of PvP. Whenever there is a survival PvP game all creativity is condensed into one goal, creating and circumventing deathtraps. Building in Valheim is a lot more liberating) is a major sellingpoint for me.
I also like the story&mythos. Kill X number of epic monsters for Odin is a very simple story, but it puts all the building and fighting into a context that drives the progression through the game.
P.S: And if you can sail a karve/longship through a storm without singing the immigrant song I admire your willpower.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
+4
OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Bonemass sucks because the netcode sucks. We had I dunno 6 or 8 people and everybody was so lagged to shit half the team died and the other half had to withdraw.
Came back with just 4 and managed to down him.
The poison is just a highly irritating mechanic, but the only way to fight him is to get close and melee the shit out of him, so you end up in this cadence where you're doing no damage with arrows and fighting off ads waiting for your health to regen in the middle of the fight which is...not that fun a mechanic IMO. Poison resist isn't nearly as effective as it could be. Or we need a healer or something.
on the flip side that experience convinced us to try modding the game to up the bandwidth limit and that seemed to help back at base. Their upload limits are stupid low and the netcode seems pretty janky.
Interesting, how did you do that?
We have an issue if an enemy or player is on fire the server basically craps itself. Everyone just starts to lag horrendously.
The server we are running off of has a 3700x and 32gb of ram so I’m surprised we were having issues.
There is a hardcoded per-player (and server) 64KB/sec upload speed. By my (second hand) understanding, to spread out processing load, it tries to spread simulation ownership across nearby players. For players with shitty internet or in the case of a lot going on, that can saturate the hardcoded limit.
By decompiling assembly_valheim.dll, it is possible to change that constant to something much larger, recompile, and then apply that dll to the server and all players.
In some cases, that has helped--as long as everybody has the modified DLL. As soon as somone from the opposite side of the world joins without that DLL, you're all bottlenecked by that person's shitty internet and you're screwed again.
There appears to also be a hardcoded 128KB/sec download limit, and we haven't figured out where to change that yet.
I really like survival crafting building games (I've been playing 7 Days to Die and Empyrion: Galactic Survival for years) and I love vikings and Norse mythology, so this game has been a home run for me. I have some quibbles, but it's a viking survival game so I don't really care about quibbles!
Trollkill Tower was a wiiiild success. A troll came up to start something and all the walls and pits confused it enough that it could barely even path toward me unless I was outside the walls.
Second troll took a lot more work, as it was the scary bugger with a tree. Now it is a shirt. I am slowly colonizing that forest. Got some repairs to do and a few improvements I can make, but Trollkill Tower is well on its way to founding Trollkill Village someday.
Boats are fun. Longships are a considerably larger amount of fun.
I'm looking forward to being able to explore by actually bringing a decent pile of provisions (including a return gate) along instead of just desperately hoping I don't get ganked on the opposite end of a swamp.
Also I swear every time I put to sea a storm rolls in. I have no objections to this whatsoever because it's awesome every time.
Boats are fun. Longships are a considerably larger amount of fun.
I'm looking forward to being able to explore by actually bringing a decent pile of provisions (including a return gate) along instead of just desperately hoping I don't get ganked on the opposite end of a swamp.
Also I swear every time I put to sea a storm rolls in. I have no objections to this whatsoever because it's awesome every time.
One of our boats is named Vinderlaus because you are 100% guaranteed to be sailing directly into the breeze every time you get in.
Boats are fun. Longships are a considerably larger amount of fun.
I'm looking forward to being able to explore by actually bringing a decent pile of provisions (including a return gate) along instead of just desperately hoping I don't get ganked on the opposite end of a swamp.
Also I swear every time I put to sea a storm rolls in. I have no objections to this whatsoever because it's awesome every time.
One of our boats is named Vinderlaus because you are 100% guaranteed to be sailing directly into the breeze every time you get in.
Story of my life. Went on a nice expedition to get iron with some friends, and on the way back for at least two thirds of the way it was headwinds.
Boats are fun. Longships are a considerably larger amount of fun.
I'm looking forward to being able to explore by actually bringing a decent pile of provisions (including a return gate) along instead of just desperately hoping I don't get ganked on the opposite end of a swamp.
Also I swear every time I put to sea a storm rolls in. I have no objections to this whatsoever because it's awesome every time.
One of our boats is named Vinderlaus because you are 100% guaranteed to be sailing directly into the breeze every time you get in.
I forgot that you can't carry ore through portals and it took us well over an hour to bring back a load of 118 tin last night from literally the next island over. The wind shifted no less than four times in order to ensure we were trying to sail directly into it for the entire voyage. The only time it cooperated was when we finally hit the river which almost felt like the game was intentionally giving us the finger (it changed as soon as we got back out to sea).
It got to the point where I almost self sacrificed to go get a harpoon so at least we could get something from the serpents that we had to keep dodging :P
Since I already have a Bailey, I decided it was time to build a Motte. Especially since I already had a hill behind my Bailey that I could build it on top of.
I made the front side of the hill into sort of steps.
And I am currently digging out the sides to make it be a more standalone hill.
Good god, I do not like how when you use the pickaxe in front of you, it sort of adds dirt below you so I have to make several passes to get it to the depth that I want. This'll take a while.
Yo Bonemass is bad times lol
So I was forced to go up the mountains because I just can't deal with its bullshit poison aoe thing and blob summons
Boss fight spoilers
Saw a guide, dug a big hole in the side of the mountains, harpooned and dragged its big ass into the hole and pelted it with ice arrows from above. Took around 130 for me so maybe you folks will want to bring a little bit more just in case. Revenge is a dish best served cold as they say.
Bonemass sucks because the netcode sucks. We had I dunno 6 or 8 people and everybody was so lagged to shit half the team died and the other half had to withdraw.
Came back with just 4 and managed to down him.
The poison is just a highly irritating mechanic, but the only way to fight him is to get close and melee the shit out of him, so you end up in this cadence where you're doing no damage with arrows and fighting off ads waiting for your health to regen in the middle of the fight which is...not that fun a mechanic IMO. Poison resist isn't nearly as effective as it could be. Or we need a healer or something.
on the flip side that experience convinced us to try modding the game to up the bandwidth limit and that seemed to help back at base. Their upload limits are stupid low and the netcode seems pretty janky.
Interesting, how did you do that?
We have an issue if an enemy or player is on fire the server basically craps itself. Everyone just starts to lag horrendously.
The server we are running off of has a 3700x and 32gb of ram so I’m surprised we were having issues.
There is a hardcoded per-player (and server) 64KB/sec upload speed. By my (second hand) understanding, to spread out processing load, it tries to spread simulation ownership across nearby players. For players with shitty internet or in the case of a lot going on, that can saturate the hardcoded limit.
By decompiling assembly_valheim.dll, it is possible to change that constant to something much larger, recompile, and then apply that dll to the server and all players.
In some cases, that has helped--as long as everybody has the modified DLL. As soon as somone from the opposite side of the world joins without that DLL, you're all bottlenecked by that person's shitty internet and you're screwed again.
There appears to also be a hardcoded 128KB/sec download limit, and we haven't figured out where to change that yet.
In addition to this, enemy AI and game physics are hosted on the machine of the person that is the first to load a zone(no idea how big these are), and/or the last person in a zone if everyone else leaves. This is true even with a dedicated server. There is also some kind of queue structure for updates sent to the server, so if one person is laggy, it's going to drag down everyone else.
The workaround to half of this problem is to have the person with a bad connection hang back a little, so they are never the first to load a zone.
Posts
I'm taking a break from the game because of that fucking guy. He didn't even kill me, I just realized he was healing faster than I could damage him. One of the most awful, cruel boss designs I have seen in an already disturbingly sadistic game.
did you have maces and poison resist? He's bullshit impossible without blunt damage, but after equipping ourselves with maces me and my one buddy didn't have much issue
PSN: Robo_Wizard1
I think the game definitely has some needlessly frustrating aspects, especially around penalties from death, but combat really isn't that difficult in this game as long as you focus on A: good food and B: the best shield you can reasonably manage.
I did, still kicked my ass.
I know he is beatable, I just hate every one of his mechanics.
Edit: I imagine being two would make a huge difference because of the distraction factor. Since his attacks poison even if you block I could never approach him without taking damage, particularly because there were constantly skeleton archers shooting me.
For me as a very VERY casual player of survival games that normally don't stick around for them, it does a lot of things really well that removes a lot of the bullshit that other survival games push onto you in the essence of "immersion" or artificially jacking up the difficulty.
These are the things off the top of my head:
-For an early access game, it's remarkably stable. Aside from 1-2 major world/character eating bugs this is an incredibly robust offering and as others have said, it's only about a 1 gig of hard drive space. Graphicswise think a gussy'd up Minecraft texture with really nice lighting/wind/weather mechanics and more robust physics engine.
-Food, you don't "technically" need to constantly eat or drink to survive. You'll never actually starve by not eating, but if you want to craft efficiently or have a chance fighting creatures, you're going to want to eat food. The food system is very simple too. Basically you can eat up to 3 "types"/pieces of food at a time before you're "full". The various combinations of food (meat/mushrooms/fruit/prepared food/honey/mead etc) will have different effects and increase your max health and stamina bar to differing degrees. It encourages experimentation but doesn't punish you for not participating unless you really want to heavily explore/craft/fight.
-Sleep. You don't "have" to sleep but doing so gives you rested bonuses and offers little flavor text for doing so. Also if you have a bunch of stuff queued up in your kiln or forge, it speeds crafting of it along for you. But you're not punished for not sleeping. You can simply keep retreating to a roofed structure and get a rested bonus as long as you're near a warm fire for instance.
-Repairs By far the best part of the game. You don't have to keep lugging around supplies or keep supplies in reserve to keep your gear functional. You got a workbench/forge? Cool just walk up to it and click the repair icon for each piece of worn/broken gear and you're good to go. No supplies needed.
-Tech Progression/Recipe unlocks - Very easy to move into. If you pick up an ingredient for a new recipe that you don't have, you unlock said recipe. So things like new ores, woods or food ingredients, for the most part simply picking up one of those ingredients will unlock the tech tree or recipe you need to do something with that component.
-Server hopping - This is a really nice feature that encourages playing with your friends. Your character file is stored locally. So if you get bored playing solo on your server, simply load up your character with whatever gear or supplies you want and log into a friend's server/seed. Whatever is on your character will carry over seamlessly to their server including your accumulated skills. So if they're just starting out, you can use your upgraded character to help get them started faster or if your friends are super progressed along, they can help get you some shinier gear if your particular seed makes mining components for said gear a royal pain in the ass. As long as it's on your character, it'll follow you wherever you go.
There's more but these were things that stuck out to me right from the get go. 50 hours later and I'm happily hooked and the biggest issue I have is now trying to split time between working on my settlement on my server/seed or helping out on Friend's settlements in their servers/seeds.
Wud yoo laek to lern aboot meatz? Look here!
Raise the ground level a bit to fix any of the areas you’d be swimming. Chop down a bunch of the trees, leaving a couple big ones to kite/hide around. Clear any other mobs in a wide radius around.
Removing leech pools, etc is very helpful.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
I mean, it's a survival crafter like those games, and if you didn't like any of them then I wouldn't necessarily bet that you'd like Valheim, but it does do a few key things a bit differently:
1) it's not PvP-focused. PvP is an option on some servers but it's not the default option and it's underdeveloped and vestigial compared to those other games. Valheim is balanced around groups of friendly players cooperating to explore a hostile world. Instead of man being the real monster, the monsters are the real monster. And the monsters are often a lot of fun! There's some cool, huge creatures roaming the world that are interesting and fun to fight.
2) The game is fairer. Weapons, armor, and items decay, but fixing them is free and only requires a crafting bench; you aren't on the treadmill of constantly needing more resources just to stay where you are. The survival gameplay is balanced around long-lasting buffs rather than a set of constantly ticking doom timers, so eating good food, being rested, warm etc makes you stronger for ten or twenty minutes, but being hungry and naked and cold just means your guy is just a bit whiffy and ineffectual rather than thirty seconds from dead. You don't have those shitty situations where you get really into building your house and arranging the walls and suddenly drop dead because you forgot to exit the crafting menu and make your guy eat something, or where your guy dies of exposure because you got up for a minute to take a whiz.
3) Things are simplified and streamlined. Characters have simple numerical stats and recipes aren't excruciatingly elaborate. The game is less menu and timer-driven and instead uses more simple, clean interactions out in the world. Like, to keep a fire going, you go up to the fire and press the interact key to dump wood into it, rather than opening up the fire's inventory and dragging wood over from your backpack. When the smelter is done turning ore into bars of finished metal, it spits the bars out onto the ground for you to pick up by walking over, instead of the finished product piling up in some obnoxious inventory screen with 3 slots. You tend to spend a greater proportion of your time actually out in the world doing things than in menus watching timers click down or doing inventory Tetris.
4) The world is genuinely huge and vehicles (boats and longships) are a big part of it. The experience of getting together with six or eight friends and piling into a longship to sail off into the horizon for ten, twenty, or even thirty minutes to find new continents and new resources is genuinely exhilarating and an experience I haven't really gotten to have in other games in general or even other survival games. It's genuinely adventurous.
It’s now one of my favorite gaming memories.
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
First of all, Jacobkosh's assessment is a good one and I will echo everything he said.
All that acknowledged, as background, I really don't give a shit about survival crafting games and they do absolutely zero for me.
The gameplay loop is reasonably tight, the environment is for the most part relaxing, and the building and crafting are satisfying enough that I've put in ~20 hours so far mostly to hang out with some friends I haven't had a chance to otherwise.
It's not a gamechanger IMO. If you don't like survival crafting games, this one won't be the one that brings you into the genre. It is satisfying enough that I'll hang out for a few hours and gather materials or go on the odd raid with my friends however.
I wouldn't bother single-player personally, but I don't like survival crafting games.
This is one of the things I really like about this game. You can terraform your way around problems.
Also, you don't necessarily need a shield, since it's more effective to dodge-roll away from his attacks than block them due to the poison. As long as you have a Stagbreaker or something similar to AoE the adds, it wasn't too bad to solo. Prepping a battle arena in his area is a big protip, too, moreso than the previous bosses (who also can be exploited if you prep the surrounding area a bit). The swamp is a total pain to navigate, so a simple wood flooring everywhere makes it so you don't get wet (and you can set down some fires in case you do get wet) from wading around.
Getting the mats for warm capes / armour just isn't really feasible without the Bonemass' drop
bear in mind, I really enjoy this game and the extremely small dev team means I'm gonna be a lot less critical of it and also lower my expectations a bit
the fact that none of the other bosses, even the further ones, require anywhere close to the prep work necessary to make the fight not absolute dogshit is not great
Twitch: akThera
Steam: Thera
Good to know, thanks!
Interesting, how did you do that?
We have an issue if an enemy or player is on fire the server basically craps itself. Everyone just starts to lag horrendously.
The server we are running off of has a 3700x and 32gb of ram so I’m surprised we were having issues.
That the game manages to mix excitement (bossfights, exploring and sailing to new lands etc) with a lack of stress (especially the lack of PvP. Whenever there is a survival PvP game all creativity is condensed into one goal, creating and circumventing deathtraps. Building in Valheim is a lot more liberating) is a major sellingpoint for me.
I also like the story&mythos. Kill X number of epic monsters for Odin is a very simple story, but it puts all the building and fighting into a context that drives the progression through the game.
P.S: And if you can sail a karve/longship through a storm without singing the immigrant song I admire your willpower.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
There is a hardcoded per-player (and server) 64KB/sec upload speed. By my (second hand) understanding, to spread out processing load, it tries to spread simulation ownership across nearby players. For players with shitty internet or in the case of a lot going on, that can saturate the hardcoded limit.
By decompiling assembly_valheim.dll, it is possible to change that constant to something much larger, recompile, and then apply that dll to the server and all players.
In some cases, that has helped--as long as everybody has the modified DLL. As soon as somone from the opposite side of the world joins without that DLL, you're all bottlenecked by that person's shitty internet and you're screwed again.
There appears to also be a hardcoded 128KB/sec download limit, and we haven't figured out where to change that yet.
So now I have blue pants.
- Fish
- Bird
- Drake
I'm looking forward to being able to explore by actually bringing a decent pile of provisions (including a return gate) along instead of just desperately hoping I don't get ganked on the opposite end of a swamp.
Also I swear every time I put to sea a storm rolls in. I have no objections to this whatsoever because it's awesome every time.
One of our boats is named Vinderlaus because you are 100% guaranteed to be sailing directly into the breeze every time you get in.
Story of my life. Went on a nice expedition to get iron with some friends, and on the way back for at least two thirds of the way it was headwinds.
I forgot that you can't carry ore through portals and it took us well over an hour to bring back a load of 118 tin last night from literally the next island over. The wind shifted no less than four times in order to ensure we were trying to sail directly into it for the entire voyage. The only time it cooperated was when we finally hit the river which almost felt like the game was intentionally giving us the finger (it changed as soon as we got back out to sea).
It got to the point where I almost self sacrificed to go get a harpoon so at least we could get something from the serpents that we had to keep dodging :P
I made the front side of the hill into sort of steps.
And I am currently digging out the sides to make it be a more standalone hill.
Good god, I do not like how when you use the pickaxe in front of you, it sort of adds dirt below you so I have to make several passes to get it to the depth that I want. This'll take a while.
So I was forced to go up the mountains because I just can't deal with its bullshit poison aoe thing and blob summons
Boss fight spoilers
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
Yo fuck that all the way
I have found many troll caves. I'm sad I can't collapse them and they get marked as a thing to avoid :P
In addition to this, enemy AI and game physics are hosted on the machine of the person that is the first to load a zone(no idea how big these are), and/or the last person in a zone if everyone else leaves. This is true even with a dedicated server. There is also some kind of queue structure for updates sent to the server, so if one person is laggy, it's going to drag down everyone else.
The workaround to half of this problem is to have the person with a bad connection hang back a little, so they are never the first to load a zone.