Spiders. Why Did It Have To Be Spiders?

This is just a brief update on my experience with the Hildir's Request patch for Valheim, which got a brief mention in last Friday's grab-bag post. As I suggested then, I had some difficulty getting the patch to download. It kept stopping at 98%. Clearing the cache didn't help at all so in the end I decided to uninstall the whole game and reinstall it from scratch.

That went much better. Weirdly so, in fact. I realise Valheim has a very small footprint for the kind of game it is but I was still very surprised to see Steam re-install the whole thing in a matter of seconds. The Play button was up before I had time to tab out and do anything else. It made me wonder whether Steam had actually uninstalled the thing at all.

I wasn't about to complain either way. Valheim was back and it worked. Before I did anything else, I checked to see if the new difficulty settings could be applied to an existing world and I'm pleased to say they very much can.

I had a quick look at all the options. There are half a dozen pre-sets, five sliders and a four buttons. You can set things up using any combination to meet your particular tastes, from a pure sandbox with no threat and abundant resources to an unforgiving nightmare hellscape.  

I was expecting to have to make several adjustments but in the end it occurred to me that about the only thing I didn't like about Valheim the first time round was having to keep fighting mobs I didn't want to fight, when all I was trying to do was get from one place to another. I never had a problem with the difficulty of the fights (Maybe some of the bosses...) just the frequency.

All I wanted to do was make a quick trip to my tombstones (Plural) in the Mistlands so I could recover my lost gear. If and when I decide to go explore the Mistlands a second time, I want to able to start over and pretend I never ran off and got myself repeatedly killed like someone who only discovered video games last week. 

To that end, I decided the only change I really needed to make was to set all enemies to passive. That's a change I'd dearly love to be able to make in all games. I'm generally fine with having to fight monsters just so long as they're monsters I've chosen to fight. 

For all that EverQuest infamously offered a deadly and unforgiving experience to the unwary adventurer, with vicious, aggressive and extrmely powerful monsters scattered far and wide, the crucial difference was that those monsters were rarely piled right on top of each other along the only route through a zone. 

If you kept your eyes open and paid attention (And used a wide range of magical abilities available to you through spells, potions and magic items, as well as your own natural stealth, if you happened to have any.) it was quite possible to move around with considerable freedom in safety. I much preferred that to more recent standard practice, which is generally to stuff every corner of a map with fairly weak enemies that don't pose that much of a threat and expect players to hack their way past them, coming and going.

Somewhat surprisingly, I not only remembered roughly where I died but also which portal I needed to use to get there. In a couple of minutes I was jogging through the rain along some scraggy stretch of Black Forest coastline, wearing my third-best suit of armor and carrying an iron mace I was dearly hoping I wouldn't need to use.

Almost the moment I left the portal, I spotted Hugin, the enigmatic raven, sitting on a stump, cocking his head in my direction. I had a brief chat with him to find out what he wanted, which turned out to be to tell me about Hildir. 

He was about as helpful as he ever is, letting me know I might find the new merchant "somewhere in a forest such as this". He did at least apologise for not being able to narrow things down any further, which has to be a first.

After that, it was a short but very awkward trip back to my tombstones. The terrain was difficult to navigate, uneven and littered with rocks and fallen trees. It was very dark, although it was still supposedly only morning. As I neared the fringes of the Mistlands visibility was further hampered by huge spider-webs strung across every clearing. 

It was very obvious how I'd had so much trouble recovering my lost gear the last two times. The harder question to answer was what had possessed me to get myself into such a suicidal situation in the first place. And twice, no less.

When I finally managed to clamber over the many obstacles blocking the path to my graves, I discovered the final, fatal reason previous attempts had gone so terribly wrong. In the picture above, you can see the creature that killed me. It's called a Sentinel Soldier but it's really just a spider the size of a rhinoceros. Maybe two rhinoceroses.

In the next shot I've removed the special effects so you can see the damn thing. It's absolutely horrific. You can also see me just ahead of it, which gives you the exact scale. 

Last time I played, when this thing killed me then killed me again, I never got any kind of look at it. It charged me from the darkness, killed me in moments, then vanished again. Looking at it now, I'm glad I couldn't see it. If I had, I'd never have had the nerve to go back at all.

I was apprehensive as I approached, wondering whether the button I'd pressed had really made all mobs non aggressive as promised. Fortunately, it had. Very fortunately, in fact, since I now know that my death spot is in the center of a tight patrol kept by the Sentinel Soldier. There was absolutely no chance of my avoiding it. It never leaves the very small clearing in the trees where it killed me.

The weirdest and by far the creepiest part of the whole corpse recovery happened as I was crouching down, trying to sort through my belongings to take the good stuff. I obviously didn't have room to retrieve everything in one go. 

As I was making my choices, I found myself being physically pushed across the forest floor. The Sentinel Soldier had come up behind me and was determinedly trying to continue its patrol, even though I was in the way.

Since Valheim has full collision, that meant I was being shunted through the undergrowth by a slavering, giant spider. I could see and hear its disgusting mandibles clacking right next to my head. It was one of the most unpleasant things I've ever experienced in a video game. It only stopped when the spider pushed me right into a rock and couldn't go any further.

Even though I was sure the thing wouldn't attack unprovoked, I was still very nervous about accidentally poking it with my mace. I didn't dare touch any keys just in case I hit the wrong one so I had to wait until the horror moved off. It took a long while... or it seemed like it.

Once it was gone I grabbed everything and ran. I left one tombstone to loot later but all that's on it are some crafting mats and a bit of food I can easily do without. If the Sentinel wants it, it can have it.

Pausing only to take a couple of selfies with a passing troll, I legged it back to the portal and the safety of my strong, secure, stone citadel. I was very happy to put a good hour's travelling time between myself and that living nightmare. Whether I want to go back to explore the Mistlands, even with the security of knowing nothing will go for me unless I go for it first, I'm not at all sure. I'm thinking there are some things better left to fester in their own fetid lairs.

And I think it must be pretty obvious now why I'm choosing to get my survivalist groove on in the whimsical, brightly-colored, well-lit and generally happy setting of Dawnlands rather than the existential horror of Valheim. 

For now, anyway. I do hear Hildir has some pretty fancy frocks for sale...