Warning! Spoilers of game included ahead. If you wish to experience Valheim without knowing much about it read no further. If you have played Valheim before and/or want to know my journey in the game continue reading.
So I did not know much about this game when I started. I looked on some streams to see what kind of game it was. Then I noticed my friend was inside the game on Discord and I wrote to him about it and the game was really starting to grow on him. Few days later I bought the game and me and my friend took the journey to Valheim together.
We got left of by some Valkyries or whatever the angel-like or so thing that dropped us off in the world is called. Then I think you could pickup stuff and that way got stone and some wood and you could do your first axe and/or stick. Cant remember exactly was sometime ago. A bird helped out by telling us about things in this strange world we had entered. Then we picked some berries and ate them for the stamina and health buffs you get from them. We continued hacking on wood and then it was time to find shelter because it got cold during the evening. We made a campfire and got roof on it and repaired our equipment. When the night was over we continued hacking on the nearby trees and scouted out a location for our base.
After building the base I think we went to the location of trophy and there we found our first stone Vegviser(I think it was called that) marked the location of the first boss. Yes you read right, we got bosses in this survival game! We continued farming the nearby woods and fixed food, gear and staying away from skeletons in the black forest that we also encountered this early on. Damn they hit hard! We then thought it would be best to go to the first boss because we had been farming quite sometime. My friend had already found the spawn location which was on another spot then the marked we had on map. We went to the spawn location and I got to check what was needed to spawn the boss. The stone was marked with a deer so I thought, maybe a deer trophy and I tested it and it worked. Cant remember really if I spawned him without help from friend or not but we both was ready to fight the boss. And Boy it was a big deer that spawned. So I stayed a bit far off trying to learn its attack pattern. My friend just stood there or near him. Here comes the sad part. Appears you can just block the attacks. So that was what my friend was doing, when learning that I entered the fray as well and blocked attacks. Hit. Blocked. Hit. Checked what way he was turning and then hit again. Basically that was it until the boss died. Which was quite lame first boss, but hey its a boss at least. We got the trophy from boss and took it to the trophy stones so we got a power Eikthyr that was really nice to have during long runs and/or climbs on mountains later on.
We then started our journey into the black forest and met some skeletons and trolls. The trolls was big and nasty. The first troll we met held a tree in his right hand and made large swings with it that I couldn't avoid. I think it was a one shot. On me that is. We then went into our first Burial Chamber. Here there was a lot of cramped space and you had to check twice before entering any of the rooms inside because they could be swarmed with skeletons. By swarm I mean like 2-3 but it felt like a swarm. We found some nice loot that we could then build some things in our base. We got back and built portal I think and some other stuff, then we continued on in the black forest and mined a lot of ore that we upgraded our weapons and axes with. Cant remember exactly when we found the Vegviser or whatever it was called that marked the location on the map. Appears the boss was on another island! By now we could build our first boat so my friend made that and then I got to steer the boat on our first boat journey.
Turns out steering the boat was a nice system. You can turn left and right with A and D and a indicator on how much you turn is shown in the game UI so you don't have to hold down the button to steer a lot which is nice. You can set speed in four steps I think. Back, paddle(one), two or three. That number is how much the sail is curled up or let loose. With three being full sail. Hard to explain but something along those lines. Okay so we went east and were out on water and then we came to a river that we wanted to try sail through because the second boss was on other side of a landmass so we tried. We hit some stones but all in all it went good and we got through. Then it got interesting. We continued and saw some new areas and we heard a strange sound. All of a sudden my friend just said on Discord “I died” and I was like “but how?” Then I saw a large mosquito flying hitting the boat, apparently it had one-shot my friend just because he was standing up in the boat. I tried my best to survive and get as far away I could from the bug. I was stressed out but I made it. Then I turned around and got most of my friends loot. I had to turn back and forth again three times until I got the important stuff because my inventory got cluttered with less valuable things. Then we decided I had to go opposite direction of boss to try rendezvous with my friend and so this journey continued. I got past some new scary looking areas and some black forest then appeared. I got hit by something big and scary though and after awhile the boat just got destroyed. I was in black forest and quite long away from our main base but I moved towards that location at least. During this time my friend was going in another boat to the west instead of east that we took before. I came to a Meadows(first biome) area and there I build a portal. My friend got the boat near me and we relaxed some. Then we continued the journey to the second boss. We got there finally after quite along boat trip.
Time for the second boss. So, Yeah. I got the job to figure out what spawned the boss so I tried all kind of stuff. Trophies, food and other stuff. Then I was about to give up when I asked my friend for advice. He had done it on other character. But I asked if the things on top of the pillars was a clue and he said that it was. I got back to base and then I noticed the things on the pillar resembled an item we had in our base. So I went back to the summoning place and tried it and it worked with the Ancient seeds. A huge tree spawned and we were in trouble. I held my distance trying to read what the boss did. Noticed he spawned many arms, tree arms that I didn't know what they did. But I got it when I closed on them that they hit hard. So tried to avoid those whilst getting closer to the boss. I did bad in the start and had to use healing potion. Then after sometime I got closer to him easier and got some hits in. We continued fighting and then he got down, without any of us two dying so that was nice. Got trophy and went back to trophy stones, his power was quite lame though. Faster/better woodcutting, hello? that is so situational. The one from first boss is so much better and versatile at least between those two.
We could then go into the next area which was a swamp, and boy it was so lame. We managed but it was so hard for me at least, my friend was bit better at knowing what the enemies did. I hate the poison blobs and it was annoying with the Draugr archers, especially the star marked ones hit so freaking hard. So we got a swamp key from second boss and we used that to enter some Swamp ruins and mined from ooze that contained leather scraps and ore. We then made few runs back and forth with that, but it wasn´t a major spot we was at. We then found our way to another swamp and built a base there, where we upgraded most of our gear from I think if I remember right. We also found the way to the third boss which was in another swamp, so we had to get there. We travelled and built a outpost with portal and then headed for the boss. There I had to try figure out again what it was and the hint from the runestone at the summon said something about “Burn its remains” or so and I tried with skeletal fragments and skeleton trophy which didn't work, also tried other things I had on me. I then went back to base and checked for something “bony” and found Withered bone, which I returned with and that worked. This fatty was so hard though. Around the location of the boss was a lot of water. So when the boss spawned minions and also spit out gas we were in trouble. The gas itself wasn't an issue cause we had resistance potions for that but in combination with the water that limited our movement and the adds and the boss itself it got quite hard to recover. The boss itself was probably not hard but all this in combination made it super hard. Also. A Wraith joined the party and I died. Then ran back, and my friend died too and ran back and I think we then took the boss after we died each one time. That sucked, because it should probably have been easier with more land around the boss. We got the trophy from the boss, which we turned in at trophy stones for physical damage resistance buff, and also some weird magical bone.
The weird magical bone could be equipped and the bird told us we could find silver with it so on to the mountains it was. It was so cold up there you had to use frost resistance potion or you would freeze and take damage. So we got some potions and ran up. Met some wolves that we killed and De big Dragons also which we shot down with arrows. The dragons hit hard with their attacks but when I learned that you could roll away on them it was quite easy to dodge when you saw them and you were ready. Which wasn´t all the time of course. We went over the first mountain. No way to boss. No silver. We then went to the second mountain. Same thing. No silver. No way to boss. We then took our boat on a journey and found another larger mountain, where we finally found silver. We then shipped that back to nearest base and smelt some and made weapons and upgrades. We then went ahead and found another new mountain where we found not one but two silver veins and one of those was big as hell. There we mined it all and was like “Do we really need this much?” my friend said second vein was the biggest vein he had seen also which was quite nice. We saved all the silver there and then went another way with the boat. There in the horizon we saw it. A huge mountain appeared an we were like “This have to be the boss mountain” when we climbed it. We got all the way to the top and scouted. This is a shot I took.
No silver vein. We saw no structures. So we moved to another top and then there it was. My friend saw it. A structure! I said “Where?” “Over there” he said. “Where I shoot my arrow” And I saw nothing, turns out it didn't render until I was bit closer. Inside that structure was the pin pointer to the next boss. We took the boat and went on our way. To the mountain. And boy was it a big mountain. Pretty much the same as the one before and it took sometime to get to the top. During this time and when we mined silver we had found some dragon eggs and both me and my friend thought that this had to be what you summoned the next boss with and when we got to the altar it seemed that both of us was correct. But. You needed three eggs! damn son. That was annoying but we had one egg with us and two of the other we could take on this mountain we was at so that was okay. We then spawned the big Mother dragon and fought. We had to shoot it when it was flying and it shot ice down on us that we had to roll out from. I rolled twice when my friend rolled one big roll but I thought it was safer to roll twice. We also ate frost resistance potions here. With our capes we had built from silver we didn't take cold damage from the weather though which I forgot to say until now. Back to the boss, we shot arrows on it when it was in the air and when it got down it bugged out sometimes. Its attack pathing was weird when I and my friend was on opposite sides of the dragon attacking it, it “spazzed” out. Jerked its head back and forth basically. But with that said it got dark and we had adds and I died from a star wolf and a werewolf that wanted to join in on the fun. We had the boss at 20% when this happened and that led to my friend dying too. All seemed lost. We thought the boss would de-spawn. But it didn't. so we got back and got our corpses and took frost resistance potions and fought on and the dragon finally died. We got trophy and turned that in at the stones, the power we got was that we could have tail wind on sails when sailing, which is quite nice on long sea journeys. We then built some upgrades and continued on to next biome.
We had already found the next biome before so we just went to a base with plains nearby and explored from there. The Deathsquitos(Mosquitos) was deadly but they didn't one shot us this time. Which was nice. We also met some furry large creatures that we killed, we could block these so that helped. They also dropped large meat that we could grill and get quite nice food buffs from. We also met a lot of goblins that hit quite hard too but without stars they was quite easy. You pretty much blocked at the right time so they got staggered, then you hit them few times and then blocked again. I was so bad at this but I am starting to learn. You also sometimes cannot block attacks from one or two star marked mobs, which is annoying. This depends on how strong your shield is I think. The ones with stars hit a lot. Suddenly I heard my friend. We were in luck. My friend saw the stone that pointed to the boss and apparently it turns out the boss was on the same island we were at! in the same area we now were in. Look at that! So we continued in that zone. We went ahead to the boss area and we think that we will spawn it with some totems. On the ritual altar there seems to be five slots available so we think you will need five totems to spawn him so we will try to gather that. We then went to a nearby village and tried to hunt some. Damn was it hard. A star marked berserker were going at my friend so we were out of luck, but my friend didn't die. I then died out of nowhere to a two star marked goblin that one shot me. So I ran back with full food buffs and rested and got my gear. You get a corpse run de-buff when you get your corpse that makes you almost invincible so I just spammed attacks on the berserker which then went down. Bam! Hurray for corpse run buff. We then went back to our Outpost 4, yeah did I mention we have 7 Outposts?. And we thought that we should build another base inside the plains so that we could sow some seeds on the new stuff we found, I think it was called Barley. At least the things we could make with the new ingredients were so huge so it would be worth it to have a supply of those materials inside plains. Other thing was fish that also gave pretty good buff so I did some fishing when my friend was expanding the base some. I think I finally got 20 something fish, but man it was boring in this game. Sometimes the fish wouldn't hook so it took ages and/or I had to move position and the fishing minigame wasn't that fun I think. You didn't have to do much but it was so slow and if you sent out the line to far the fish might escape, yeah I just didn't like it. But back to the plains, we were in our Outpost 4 base and prepared things to expand and make a Outpost near the fifth boss. But it got quite late so we were going to bed for the night.
We begun thinking we want a base in plains too so we would be close to the boss and also so that we could grow some barley. So we started building. When we had a shell my friend said “Wouldn't it be better to have it closer to the sea” and I could just agree. So we moved it closer to the sea and begun building. Which took quite sometime. We had stone walls and tree for roof. We also deconstructed Outpost 4 and went with all the mats to Plains base. Boy was it rough. You cannot teleport with some materials in this game, so we had to go by cart. And the cart gets stuck in terrain sometimes so you have to clear the area and sometimes go another way to be able to go forward. So yeah it was rough and after dying sometimes we got to the Plains base, phew! We then farmed some more totems and head for the boss cause we wanted to try it. I told my friend we should have fire resistance potions with us so we had that. Then when we were about to spawn the boss I didn't have full food buffs yet, but he said that I could eat during the fight so we spawned the boss. And Boy was it a boss. A large skeleton appeared that only had his torso and up I think. We began trying to fight. I was far off and he shot out a fire beam which from him and I rolled off, then he made a move with his hand and all of a sudden I took damage from no where. He had shot down meteors from the sky! My friend died from that or other damage. I went in for a hit, but he made area fire damage too sometimes, but apparently that did not tick for much damage so you could just stand in it my friend said. We continued trying to fight and he got his corpse and I died and we rotated like that, then we noticed the boss healed too and we just said. No. We wouldn't be able to take him like this. So we tried to get our corpses and then ran off to base. Seems the boss tried to follow us so we ported to our main base. I hope the boss doesn't ruin our plains base, but we have to see during our next gaming session.
So we started playing again and talked about what to do, the boss hadn't ruined our base, but he started following us when we went to it so it was hard to be there. We decided to build a little farm elsewhere so we set out with the boat. We built a farm some distance away from our main base. We did not see any Sea Serpents on our way over there. So we decided to go further west toward the end of the world, and soon we saw a Serpent and we killed it. It just dropped some meat, turns out you could make some pretty good food out of it, but nothing more. Then we went to try check out Mistlands which we had seen before and I was wondering what it could be. I thought it was a sea area only, and suddenly we had a area that was called Ashland. We went ashore and then built a outpost and started exploring, it was just small Surtlings there. Then we found a deposit that we mined of Flaming metal, that we wanted to see if it gave something new that we could build. So we began a journey to try to find a swamp with Iron in it, turn out the island we were at didn't have any swamp on it. We went with boat to any swamp we could find and set ashore there. My friend found some green things on tree that was glowing and tried to shoot on them, but it didn't do any damage. I tried to make a stair to it and hit with sword but no luck, a bit later he did the same thing but with axe and it worked. Turns out you could build a bow from it so we farmed some more and did that. We didn't see any Sunken Crypt here with Iron in it though, so we went to another swamp. That took sometime to find but finally we were there and my friend found a Crypt pretty fast that we made a small outpost outside and farmed some Scrap Iron. We did a smelter for the iron and I stood stomping there waiting for the 10 Iron to be smelted and then made a Blast Furnace. When I took up the smelted Fire Metal I was sad, it didn't give any new recipes..so sad. So next time we will probably try to cheese the fifth boss with bow and arrow, lets see how that goes.
We did a short session, where we took the iron back to base. We both had the Mother buff that change wind on the sails so that went quite smooth. We then upgraded some gear and grew some Barley for our food supply. My friend farmed some Lox for their meat also. Soon it was time to go to bed, so we decided to stop there without doing much more.
Today we farmed more food to prepare for the boss fight, and my friend fished some and I got some more Lox meat. Together with Barley we now had three large buffs, Lox meat pie, Blood pudding and Fish wraps I think. After thinking about it we then went to the boss, because with 300 frost arrows each we should probably be able to take down the boss by range. So we started the fight and drank a fire resistance potion each. We then fired arrows when we could and as soon as the boss raised its hand we knew the meteors would come down so then you could run in another direction with sprint and it was fine. Even though I was slow sometimes so one or two meteors hit me, at least it wasn´t lethal. My friend got most of the beams that he did, probably because he mostly was closer to the boss. We continued firing arrows from a distance and my friend went in for some melee hits here and there, thus also triggering the AOE effect that the boss did when you was close. I also went in for some hits with sword and it seems he was vulnerable to that kind of damage, or at least we though so. I mostly did damage with bow though. All of a sudden my friend said “Is that poison arrows?” because he saw a green trail from my arrow. I was like, “oh it probably is”. Seems the game took that automatically instead of my frost arrows when a stack was depleted. It was kind of funny. So we continued to hit the boss and even though it regenerates, we had the continued damage so in the end he got down. We did not die a single time during this try, which was very satisfying.
We now have roughly 80 hours in Valheim together, damn that went by fast. All in all it is a good game even though it is only in early access, so I hope that the team developing the game will be able to create a greater experience now when they have the resources to increase the team if they want to because of the many units sold. I had a blast. Some smaller things may be annoying, like enemies being inside rocks, which makes it harder to hit them. Or inventory equipment showing as grey bar instead of white fully repaired in certain slots. But that only happened once though. And as the game is in early access I can ignore the little faults and see the greater picture and still have a good time.
With that I want to end the post with a screenshot from the fifth bosses trophy. Enjoy!
