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...

Lost In The Mists

So...

I started a post where I was going to ramble on about how ridiculously much there is to do right now, what with every blasted mmorpg in creation either dropping an expansion or a holiday event or in some cases both at once and all at the same time we all have a million extra things to do in real life, what with it being the busiest time of year commercially, culturally socially and every other which way...

And I was going to hang that post on the news I saw today that Iron Crown finally pushed out the Mistlands update for Valheim, which, when I read the patch notes, seemed to be even more interesting than expected, what with a new magic system I'd somehow not heard about before on top of everything else.

I'd knocked out a couple of paragraphs but then I had stop and take Beryl for a walk and when I came back I had the bright idea of logging in to Valheim to take a few screenshots. There's been a lot of talk about having to start a fresh world because the new biome will only trigger in places you haven't yet visited but I have a ton of unexplored land in my original world, including a bunch of places where I found patches of Mistland and chose not to explore them.

I figured I'd find the nearest portal to one of those and take a look to see what was there. Of course, I haven't played Valheim in any meaningful way in over a year but it's like riding a viking bike, right? What could go wrong?

Obviously, everything. And it did. Only someone who'd completely forgotten what it's like to play Valheim would have imagined otherwise.

It all started well enough. I opened the map and found a nice patch of Mistlands to the far south. I was already in very good health and fully equipped so all I needed to do was find a portal. Back when I was playing regularly, I'd chosen to give all my portals gnomic names that now mean absolutely nothing to me but by miraculous chance the very first portal I tried went exactly to the spot.

I should have realised that wasn't a good thing. It meant I was even more woefully unprepared than I might have been, had I had to make my way there slowly. To give some scale to my rustiness, it was only after I'd left the portal building that I realised I wasn't only not holding a weapon, I couldn't remember how to equip one.

After a few minutes re-familiarising myself with the controls, I set off down the coast, hatchet in hand. It was daytime and visiibility was good, meaning I saw the troll long before he saw me. I edged round him, even though from memory trolls didn't seem to be much of a threat any more, when last I played. Better safe than sorry. (That's irony, in case you missed it.)

It only took me a couple of minutes to hit the first spider webs. I climbed up a rock to get a look beyond the veil and the first thing I saw was a cross between a zeppelin and a giant tick floating towards me. I got a shot of it and ran.

It didn't follow me so I went back for a better angle. This time it spotted me and spat something and next thing I knew I was on fire and so was the forest. Amazingly, I didn't die. I scrambled back down the water and turned round to see the thing was following me, almost always a fatal mistake but not this time. The monstrosity had drifted back into the mists.

I think it was that encounter that made me overconfident, leading to my inevitable, hubristic demise. I pushed on down the shoreline, taking a few snapshots as I went, then I struck inland to see what I could see. 

What I mostly saw was blood. Mine. Something came at me out of the gloom and hacked away half my health in a shrieking flurry. I made no attempt to respond. I just ran. This time the creature came after me.

I woke up back in my distant bed. It was dark. Being an idiot, I stumbled out into the darkness, found a spare set of armor and some food and headed straight back. I won't go into the ugly details but it went about as badly as you'd expect. Actually, worse.

Not only did I fail to recover my corpse and all that was on it, I managed to die a second time, directly on top of my gravestone. As any Valheim player knows,the very last place you want a corpse is on top of another corpse, especially when it's the one on the bottom that's wearing the better gear. Now I have to empty the first one before I can get to the one I really want, except while wearing even less protection.

Skipping over the next part, where I managed somehow to trap myself in my own basement and then get lost while travelling through my own labyrinthine portal network, eventually I dressed myself in trollhide and went back for another try. At which point, finally, I came to my senses.

Thanks to this series of unfortunate, if entirely self-inflicted, events, I have come to realise a couple of things about Valheim. One is that any sense of urgency you feel while trying to recover a corpse is entirely imaginary.

I think it goes back to other games, like EverQuest, where corpses used to rot if left unrecovered. That doesn't happen in Valheim. You can happily leave your corpse until tomorrow or next week or next year and it will still be there, along with everything it contains, whenever you have the time and feel the inclination to do something about it. There's absolutely no need to do amything about it until you're ready.

The other thing is purely personal. While today proves to me that Valheim still has the power to grip me like it always has, I don't think I want to be gripped like that any more. Rather than feeling excited, immersed and thrilled, mostly I felt irritated, annoyed and, surprisngly, a little bored.

Once I got a hold of myself, I found I didn't much care whether I got my stuff back or not. There's was absolutely no hint of that sick feeling that comes from knowing you've taken a massive step back. For a start, it's mostly just crafted stuff. I could make it all again if I wanted. Even the things that aren't so easy to replace, I probably won't miss. At this point I can't even remember what they were. 

If I was keen on playing Valheim again I could easily just set up again from where I am or I could do as Iron Crown would like and start over from the beginning. Only I'm not keen. I'm curious to see the new biome and try out the new magic system and all the rest of the innovations that come with the Mistlands update, but really not curious enough to put in the hours that would take. I feel as though I've been there and done that, even though as far as Mistlands goes, I categorically have not.

For now, at least, I'm going to let my corpses lie where they fell. They can keep each other company until I'm ready to go get them, if ever I am. Right now, I have other games to play that also have new content but which make it much easier to enjoy. Christmas is a stressful enough time of year without corpse runs.

Maybe in the New Year, when things are quieter, I'll try again. Or maybe not. It really doesn't matter much, either way. My corpses aren't going anywhere.

Nothing Lost And Nothing Gained

One of the more surprising things about Valheim is the absence of bugs, glitches and things not working as they should. For a game in Early Access, let alone one with just five developers, it's astonishingly stable, solid and bug-free.

According to Steam I've now put a hundred and fifty hours into the game, a figure that would suggest obsession verging on madness were it not that it includes a considerable amount of time when the game was merely idling at login as I wrote blog posts and even played other games. In however long it may be that I've actually been logged in and playing, though, it wasn't until yesterday I encountered the first thing I'd tentatively describe as a bug.

And it was a killer. 

If there's one thing you really don't want to run into in a game based on vertical gear progression it's a bug that results in an unrecoverable corpse. When you've spent the best part of three days of your real life finding, mining and refining ore, turning it into armor and weapons and upgrading those as far as you're capable, you very much expect that the game will play fair and not wipe out all your hard work in a moment.

Here's what happened. I was in a sunken crypt. My bags were full of scrap iron and I needed to ferry it back to the nearest holding camp so I could come back for more. I came out through the gate and there was an oozer right in doorway. 

It was night. Visibility was near-zero. I went to skip around the ooze and leg it but somehow I got spun around. I was disoriented. I carried on running but I wasn't going anywhere. I couldn't figure out where I was or where the oozer was but it wasn't having any such problems. 

I'd been low health when I exited the crypt and I didn't have a poison resist running. By the time I'd hit the key to glug one down it was already too late. I was dead.

I was mildly miffed. It was a careless death and my own fault. Never mind. My bed was close by. It was a simple recovery.

Only it wasn't. When I got back I couldn't see my gravemarker. I could see it on the map but not in the world. Since I wasn't sure where I'd been when I died my only recourse was to roam around in the dark hoping to stumble over my grave by chance. I died again doing that. Only to be expected. 

Coming back again, it occurred to me that maybe I'd died inside the entrance to the crypt. I'd been stuck on something. It could have been the stonework.

It was. In a way. When I got to the entrance and looked through the gate, there was my grave, glowing bright red. Not in front of the gate. Beyond it. Well beyond.

"She's only shining bright 'Cause she's so out of reach".

Somehow I'd contrived to die outside the crypt itself but inside the invisible barrier that separates the open world from the instanced dungeon. My stuff was neither here nor there. It was somewhere else.

I tried edging close enough to click on the corpse but the game was having none of it. Before I could get in range I zoned into the crypt. 

I tried from the roof. No dice. All around the walls. No response. Inside the crypt. Nothing.

At this point I was sure it was unrecoverable. It existed in an ethereal state, neither lost nor found. I could see it but I couldn't touch it.

In an mmorpg at this point you might put in a petition or contact customer service. I didn't think that was likely to be something Iron Gate would offer. And anyway, it's Early Access. Play at your own risk.

My feelings on the situation were surprisingly muted. I had, after all, made all the things I'd lost. I could easily make them all again. It would be annoying, having to repeat a couple of days gameplay, note for note, but I've endured far worse in other games.

I'd rather avoid it, all the same. And Valheim has five million players now. Maybe one of them had run into something similar and found a way out. 

Turns out they had indeed. A search brought up this thread on Valheim's Public Bug Tracker. It demonstrates just how many ways there are to lose your corpse for good. A lot of them arise from situations like mine, from deaths in liminal hinterlands the game can't seem to parse.

The bad news is, if it happens to you there doesn't seem to be any way to get your stuff back. The good news is you can get new stuff just as good. All you have to do is cheat.

In retrospect I probably could have worked this out for myself. I'd read Potshot's post on how to set Valheim up in pseudo-creative mode. I'd read a couple of posts by Tobold that alluded to various cheats that should have given me a clue. I'd even pressed F5 by mistake many times (I keep my hammer in slot 5) so I knew just what the console looked like.

But I never cheat in video games. Well, unless you call using walkthroughs cheating. It's not that I have any moral issues with cheating in single player games. I just don't like to do it myself. 

As one of the people explaining the method used to replace items from an unrecoverable coprse pointed out, though, this wouldn't be cheating. It's effectively no different from having your items restored by a GM. The game bugged out and stole your stuff. You're entitled to get it back.

So I did. It was easy. All you need to do is find a safe spot, hit F5 to open the console, then type imacheater. Dev humor. Dontcha just love it?

That sets cheat mode to True. It'll stay that way until you type the same thing again. It's a toggle.

With cheat mode on you can do as many impossible things before breakfast as you want. If you type "Help" the game will even tell you what they are.

All I wanted was my stuff back. Or stuff that looked like my stuff. The originals were gone forever but what's a digital original? Just some numbers in a database. 

For each item you want, all you have to do is type "spawn". Then the name of the item. Then how many you need. Like this:

The syntax has to be exact, of course, and it's case-sensitive. Once you get it right the items just fall out of the sky and land at your feet.

My only problem was remembering what I'd lost. I was determined to get back only what I'd had. Valheim has very well-paced progression. The last thing I wanted to do was bug my own fun.

Luckily, I'd been concentrating all afternoon on making and upgrading iron armor, tools and weapons. I knew just what I'd lost there. For some reason you can't spawn items at anything but the base level so I summoned those, along with a pile of iron for upgrades.

It took me five or ten minutes to get back everything I could remember. The final thing I recalled was the key I'd gotten from The Elder. Thank Odin I don't have to go back and do that fight again!

I knew there were some mats I'd forgotten but nothing worth bothering about. I put the extra iron and the few duplicates I'd created while I was learning the commands into a chest. My Cheater's Chest. Nothing comes out of there unless it's to address a situation like this one.

And that was that. Potential disaster averted. I'm very happy the option exists although I strongly suspect it may have to be tweaked somewhat as the game evolves, particularly in the light of multi-player worlds.

I did also have a slight concern at the back of my mind that I might have opened Pandora's Box. Would anything feel as real, now I'd peeked behind the curtain? 

Short answer? Yes. I played on for another hour or so and within a few minutes I was mining and gathering with the same enthusiasm as ever. If it's a choice between bending reality a little or losing two days work to a glitch, I'll bend it with the best of them.

And then I'll bend it straight again.

Swamp Fever

 

On Wednesday evening I killed The Elder, Valheim's second boss, keeper of the keys to the gates of iron. Literally. He drops a key. It opens a gate. Behind the gate there's iron. Piles of it.

Killing him came as something of a surprise. I thought that was going to be the hard part. With the big fight out of the way I imagined my forge turning out iron weapons and armor the very next day. It certainly never occurred to me it would take me three days to find the blasted gate!

The gatein question is attached to the front of a sunken crypt. Not a specific sunken crypt. Any old sunken crypt. It's just a regular crypt that's sunken. In a swamp.

Swamp is the third of the five biomes in Valheim's Early Access. Two more to come. Actually there are six already, if you count Ocean. Only no-one seems to. 

In order of difficulty they go Meadows, Black Forest, Swamp, Mountain, Plains. I thought the last two were the other way round but in his comment on Wilhelm's  "looking for swamp" post  SynCaine says not and he's way ahead of me so I'll take his word for it.

Because every Valheim world is procedurally generated from seed there's nowhere you can go to look up where to find a swamp nor yet a sunken crypt. You just have to go find it for yourself. 

Except I already had found some swamp. Two dirty great patches, close together, right next to where I'd built my log cabin. I figured there'd be plenty of sunken crypts there. 

 

There weren't. There weren't any. Not one. I even googled what the damn things looked like so I could be certain I wasn't running past them without noticing.

Not likely. They're very distinctive. They look like Victorian mausoleums with green torches either side of the entrance. You can see them for miles in the gloom of the swamp.

Or you could if there were any. Which there weren't. 

Needless to say I looked again. Then again. I killed a lot of draugr. I killed a lot of blobs. I got quite comfortable in the muck and mire. Too comfortable. I got cocky, went roaming through the swamp in the night-time and it came on to rain and visibility went all to hell and I ran into a bunch of draugr and thought I'd plow through them and one was an elite and I died in the water, under a fallen tree.

Took about two hours and half a dozen deaths to get that corpse back. It had all my best stuff on so I had to do it. If it hadn't been for the stuff I'd bought from the merchant (I finally found him!) which cost all the gold I'd found in two weeks of graverobbing, I might have left it there. I was starting to wonder if it wouldn't actually be quicker to make an entire new set of gear than go get the old stuff back.

That about convinced me I wasn't going to find any crypts in the swamps I knew. I'd have to find some new swamps. That was my Friday, looking for swamps. I mapped all the areas of the large starting island except for the deep south, where it turns to plains. 

There was the start of a swamp down there but it was too dangerous to cross the plains to get to it. A major feature, intended or otherwise, of Valheim is the way the mobs from one biome roam into all the others. I might have a post about that some day but for now I'll just say it's like the old EverQuest days when you had to keep your eye out for griffins and spectres going on a rampage. Plains mobs encroaching on swamp environments is the stuff of nightmare.

 

After a few hours I was sure there were no more swamps I could reach by foot. It was going to take a sea voyage and some blind luck. 

For once I exhibited some sense. Instead of rushing headlong into it I did lots of prep. I worked out a likely destination and a route. Rather than waste an hour sailing my karve (It's a mini-longship. I guess that makes it a shortship) halfway round the island, I portalled over to the house near where I needed to start and made a new one there.

I took off all my good gear and stashed it in chests. I packed some food, some wood and rocks to make a shelter when I landed and all the mats I needed to make a portal so I didn't have to do the whole thing twice. Then I set sail, fully expecting a disaster.

It all went perfectly. The wind was in the right direction all the way. I made landing in a good spot. I got a shelter up and built the portal. There were a few greydwarves coming in but I dealt with them. Once I had my beachhead set up I headed off to explore. 

It turned out to be just a smallish island. Not tiny. About big enough to take one game day to go round on foot. And it didn't have a swamp to be seen. 

Bugger. Back to the chart table. This time I decided to go the way I'd tried right back at the start, when I'd sailed my raft into a storm and been eaten by a sea serpent. I'd seen land ahead just before I drowned. I'd try that.

 

And it worked! It was a much longer journey. I saw a sea serpent but it didn't see me. I landed on a small island at the head of a chain of them leading in to a wooded shore. There were a lot of greys but this time I'd equipped myself a little better, having learned from last time, when I had to spend the first few minutes making a stone axe because I'd travelled too light.

With a second base camp in place I once again installed a portal. Just because the last one was a waste of time, no reason to skimp. And just as well I did because this time I found what I was looking for. And a lot I wasn't.

But that didn't come until this morning. Last night was all huzzahs. I found some swamp! Even better, I got back in one piece, didn't wreck the boat (it was close!), got the portals paired and didn't die once. I went to bed feeling very pleased with myself. 

Today soon put a stop to that. I won't go through the painful details. Suffice it to say at one point not only was I trying to find a corpse with all the good stuff on yet again, this time with no grave marker to tell me where to look because of how many more times I'd died trying to find it, I was also trying to find another corpse I'd left somewhere not really all that close. It was wearing my second-best gear.

My judgment was becoming impaired from the endless carnage. At one point I built a supposedly unassailable shelter on a rock in the sea only to fall off the rock and drown as I missed the door trying to get in. There was a blob chasing me. I panicked. Lucky gravestones float. Not that I was carrying anything worth salvaging by that point.

 

And yet, in the end, I prevailed. I managed to find and grab my best gear and when I was leaping and bounding over rocks with blobs in squelching pursuit I spotted my second-best corpse on a tiny island. Once I was dressed I mades some chests, stashed most of my stuff, kept the armor and weapons, went back, cleared the general area and got my reserve kit.

It was glorious. Well, apart from the skill loss. I really wish they'd change that to a skill penalty against future gain. I must have dinged 35 in axe ten times now.

And the best part? On one of my desperate, hopping, swimming, stumbling runs through the brackish water and over rotten tree-stumps I spotted a sunken crypt. It was as hard to miss as everyone says they are. 

Amazingly, after that everything went smoothly. Well, I only died once more. I was careful. I made yet another house, right in the swamp, near the crypt, this time by fortifying the trunk of a giant tree. I even managed to get a bed, a workbench and a fire in there. And two chests. 

You can put a workbench on top of a fire and still use both. Did you know that? I knew you could put a workbench on top of a bed and still sleep in the bed but a bed's not on fire, is it? I'm guessing they'll change all that, eventually. Beta is better.

 

I got to the crypt without incident. An ooze was camping the entrance but I just sprinted past it. Inside there were two blobs in the first room. I killed the first and survived the poison with about ten hit point left. Then I killed the second and died on the final tick. So close. If I'd had the patience to wait for the fermenter to finish making my first batch of poison resistance potion I'd have survived. Nah, who am I kidding? I'd have used it long before on one of the corpse runs.

But that was the last death. It was a thirty second run back to get dressed and then three more round-trips to get the pick-axe repaired. I wore it out mining scrap iron in the crypt. Those two blobs turned out to be the only creatures down there but there was a ton of iron and I got it all. Now I never have to come back, not to that particular crypt anyway. Nothing respawns inside crypts as far as I know.

I stashed my iron in a chest in my fortified treetrunk, jogged back to the portal at the beginning of the island and ported home. Now I just have to figure out how to get my ore back to the smelter. It means a boat trip at the bare minimum and possibly a long overland run after that, unless I upgrade my original smelter and forge, which are much closer.

Or I could just break the whole lot down and move the entire operation to the new island. All decisions for tomorrow. Now I'm off to sleep.

After all that lot I'm flippin' exhausted!

Dead Again

 "I guess we can look forward either to dozens of posts, where I eat my words and bang on about the game to the point of delirium or to never hearing me mention it, ever again."

Me, summing up my first impressions of Valheim five days ago.

Yeah, I think we can all guess which way that went. Steam has me at 41.4 hours played, which is an average of around eight hours a day. 

It's not quite that bad. I left the client idling on the login screen while I wrote one post and there have been a few times I stayed logged in while I did something else, like have lunch, but even so I would guess I've been actively playing for around six hours a day since I bought the damn thing.

And to be brutally honest, I have to force myself to log out and come here to post. It's not just that Valheim is the new seven day wonder, which of course it is. It's also the way it plays. The ever-rolling timelessness of it. The almost total absence of natural endpoints. The sheer just-one-more-thingness of it all.

It's a sensation I remember very clearly from my first few months in Everquest, when everything was possible and nothing was understood. The mystery and the danger. 

Don't look this way. Don't look this way!

 

Oh yes, especially the danger. You know there's a vast world out there to explore but you also know if you make one mistake you'll be all day fixing it, if it even can be fixed at all.

Corpse runs, eh? Did you miss 'em? Turns out I did. There's something I didn't expect.

Then again, I always saw more in the C.R. than just pure misery. I used to annoy the heck out of Mrs. Bhagpuss back in the day, when I occasionally claimed to enjoy corpse runs. No-one enjoys corpse runs, do they? It's just wilfulness to pretend otherwise. 

Well... I did not enjoy losing my corpse. I loathed it. Like many people, I'm sure, there were times I came close to quitting because of a lost corpse.

But corpse runs when you got your stuff back? The ones that took planning and preparation and thought and cunning and nerve, plus some dumb luck? Those were special. I can remember a few, even now, dacades later. 

Corpse runs turn rpgs into puzzle games. Escape rooms in reverse, if you will. Valheim brings some of that back, in an ameliorated, more palatable form. 

Except, when you come to look at it closely, it's not so toned-down after all. When you die you leave a gravestone and all your stuff. Everything you were carrying. The lot. And you don't get a nice little exemption for being low level.

 

Low skill, I should really say, Valheim having skills that level up but no actual levels. And if you keep dying you're going to be low skill for a long time because death makes you forget a little of what you've learned.

Not every time. There seems to be a random element in whether you lose progress at all and if you do there's an immunity to losing any more for a while. That's handy because getting your stuff back can be tough. Particularly when there's a troll corpse-camping your grave.

Finding your way back to where you died is easier than it was in old Norrath. Back then you had to hope you remembered some landmark near the fatal spot, something you'd recognize again. Or you had to be necromancer or a bard, someone with an affinity or a trick for finding corpses. Or you could buy a chipped bone rod and hope it didn't run out of charges.

In Valheim death leaves a dirty great skull and crossbones on the map showing you where you died. It's very helpful. Until you die again on the way to it, that is. The map only shows your latest grave. Or your nearest. Or something. I haven't quite figured it out. It's just one grave at a time, I know that much.

I had plenty of opportunity to observe how it works this afternon, when I spent a couple of hours getting my stuff back. I won't go through the whole increasingly embarrassing tale. Just the highlights.

I was pushing south to see what was there. I'd already had one run-in with a troll. I'd half frozen to death in the foothills of a mountain range, where I'd seen a blue drake or maybe even a dragon flying far overhead. I'd been holed up in a ruined tower with fires all around me, spending a freezing cold night under siege by Grey Dwarves. And yet I carried on. 

I knew it was a mistake even as I was doing it. I was much too far from my bed, the place I'd wake up if I died. It would be a long run back and I'd be doing it naked. 

Not because I don't have spare gear stashed at home. I have chests full in half a dozen places now. No, the problem, as I've learned by hard experience, is that if you need to loot all your stuff in one click, you have to have enough free inventory space for all your stuff. I know, right? Who'd have guessed?

If the plan is to run in at top speed, click your grave marker to auto-loot everything, then keep on running, which is about the only viable plan when a troll is camping your corpse, it all falls apart if you have to stop and select things one by one. Actually, it's you that falls apart, when the troll brains you with a tree-trunk.

The pernicious difference between corpse runs in EverQuest and Valheim is this: in EQ the penalty for repeated deaths was so harsh I was terrified of losing my corpse, so I took enormous pains to plan for every possible mishap. In Valheim the death penalty feels like it's not that important, so the temptation is to rush straight back and just grab everything. How bad can it be?

Could do with discovering fur anytime now.

Pretty bad. If I'd been paying more attention I'd have checked my stats and taken note of just how far skills drop on death. It's significant. It was only when I finally realized I was seeing the same numbers coming round again and again every time my axe skill levelled up that I twigged.

Fortunately there is that skill loss immunity buff. Without that I'd be about back where I started five days ago, I reckon. I have died a lot, almost entirely because I thought it didn't really matter. That's how I finally ended up dying this afternoon, on the edge of the Swamp, far, far from home, all my bags completely full, in over my head as usual.

There was a ruin. It looked interesting. I crossed the stream to get a better look and a gang of Grey Dwarves came barrelling out. I don't back down to those guys. I pulled out a torch (they're terrified of fire) and started swinging my axe. 

I wasn't very fit when it all began. I was low on food and wet from crossing the river. I knocked down a couple but there were at least three more and one of them was big, a Grey Brute, a nasty piece of work. Hits hard and can take it, too. I should have run but I thought I was going to get the other two down first. And I did. But the Brute got me.

It's taken me five minutes just to get past my house.

When I woke up, miles up the coast, I made several attempts to run back just as I was. A troll killed me the first time. I forget what killed me on the next run. I thought I'd better at least get a weapon so I jogged back up the coast to another house I had, where I thought there might be some useful stuff. There wasn't. And I died again on the way. 

Then I thought I might make a raft and sail down. Oh, that was a plan. Took me twenty minutes in my skivvies killing boars with a club for leather scraps. Then I had to make a jetty because I can't just do things the easy way. And when I finally got on board it turns out sailing is a lot more complicated than I realized. The wind was against me. I could have walked faster.

That plan abandoned along with the raft, which I left bobbing in the swell, I made another run and this time I got all the way to my original corpse... which I couldn't loot because it was completely full and I was still carrying the club I used to beat the boars to death.

I died again but at least this time I had a marker at the right spot. Next time I travelled over high ground. I'd imagined the coastline would be the safe route but not so. The edge of the treeline, where the snow begins, that was the right way to go. Until night fell and the Greys came out. Lucky I found that tower.

Finally I came to a flat rock looking down on the ruin where my two grave markers stood, side by side. By now I'd started to appreciate the risks. And to see what I was doing wrong. Rushing, mostly. And not taking the death penalty as seriously as it merited.  

It was coming back to me at last, some of that hard-earned EverQuest knowledge. Preparation is key. Never run straight back to the place you died, imagining this time it won't go the same way. If you couldn't handle it with your armor on, how likely is it you'll do better naked?

I think I'll put the hot tub about... here.

So I built a house. Couldn't do that in EQ. But you could rebind, if you were a caster. And you did, if you had any sense, so if you died again at least you'd have a shorter run the next time. 

Beds in Valheim are exactly the same as bind spots in classic EverQuest. Setting your bed as your spawn is the precise equivalent of casting Bind Affinity. And I could have done it almost as quickly. I could have chopped down a couple of trees, dropped a workbench, tossed up two walls and a roof, lit a fire, placed a bed and presto! Work of a few seconds. Well, five minutes.

I was going to do that. Then I chopped down a tree and a whole bunch of new recipes popped. Pines give logs that make log cabins. Who knew? Not me. Not until then. 

So of course I had to make a log cabin. I did actually force myself to do the corpse run first. Threw up a shack to get the bed made. A chest to put all the stuff I was carrying in so I could do that one-click drive-by looting thing. Which went perfectly. Just got to think before you rush in.

As soon as I had my stuff back I killed that blasted Brute - he was the only one left - and spent the next three hours building my  cabin in the woods. Next to a Swamp. A whole new biome to die in.

But that's an adventure for tomorrow. We'll see, then, if I've learned anything from today.

Another Raft: Atlas First Impressions, Take Two.

It all started so well. As soon as I hit Publish on yesterday's post I logged back into Atlas. This time I'd get out of Freeport and sail the wild ocean wide. I'd see such wonders, make my fortune, forge my legend. At the dam' least I'd make a frickin' raft and get it over the zone line.

And I did, too. First I went to the guy at the end of the dock who sells the rafts. It's a peculiar fudge of a deal. Instead of money he wants what are clearly the necessary materials to craft the thing. When you give him those a window pops up, asking you to name your raft. A raft of that name then appears at the end of the row already bobbing up and down in front of you. Why you can't just craft it yourself , who knows?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. When we left her, Buzzcut Bette, the scourge of the Southwest Shoreline, had lost everything, not least her own corpse. Before she was ready to set sail for the horizon she'd need to start all over again.

It's always easier second time around. In what felt like a matter of minutes I had her fully dressed, with a waterskin and a campfire in her bags. Atlas is an odd mixture of the realistic and the ridiculous. Resources come from predictable sources - meat and hides from animals, wood from trees, flint from rocks (Yes, I finally worked that one out) but somehow you can carry a fully-functional campfire in your backpack and, as I later discovered, set light to it on the wooden boards of a flat raft without the obvious consequences.

Soon, I had all the hides, wood and sundries on my list. I didn't have the recommended stores of meat and I was short the wherewithal to make a bed but other than that I felt pretty well set. I was also becoming increasingly paranoid about a second death leading to another do-over. Night was beginning to fall. Best get on with it.

Campfire nights. Or freeze to death. Your choice.

Atlas seems to be one of those games that, having fronted-ended an encyclopedia of instructions into an opening-scene info-dump, feels perfectly justified in never explaining anything ever again. Fortunately I've sailed imaginary boats before. I figured if I hopped across the bobbing raftway to the one at the end, sporting the name I'd given it, some kind of control panel would pop up.

And it nearly did. I had to work the camera angle a little and hit the ubiqutous "E" key but standing facing the one feature a raft has other than planking, namely the mast, I managed to open a radial menu.

Atlas likes radial menus. I don't. Fortunately, for once these are huge and not at all fiddly. What they are not, however, is intuitive. I looked at the thing for a while. I even pressed a couple of segments, cautiously, to see what they did. Whatever it was wasn't obvious.

I was getting paranoid again. It was dark and I was worried I might wreck my raft, or scuttle it, or otherwise do something I'd regret. I decided to ask a friend and since I don't have any friends playing Atlas I asked Google instead.

If anyone reading this is thinking of trying Atlas I can do no better than suggest they watch Zueljin Gaming's fifteen-minute Beginner's Guide on YouTube. It is, as one of the comments has it, "a beginners guide that's actually helpful". I flipped through to the part where he explains how to sail a raft and it was so clearly and cheerfully explained I went back to the begining and watched the whole thing. And learned stuff I hadn't worked out for myself.

I'd be just as happy with WASD.

Confident in my newfound knowledge I let down my sail, turned my raft to catch the prevailing wind and off I went. At some considerable speed. So fast, in fact, that I began to worry about runing into rocks and smashing the whole thing to matchwood.

That didn't happen. I managed to skirt the only rocky promontory between me and the horizon by a sliver and then it was ho! for the open sea!

There turned out to be a lot of open sea. After a while I started rifling through my packs to pass the time. I'd read someone, somewhere, talking about having a campfire on his raft so I thought I'd give it a go. I set my campfire up, lit it and waited for the sail to burst into flames.

Nothing happened. I was pretty sure it wouldn't or I would never have taken the risk but if I'd been wrong I'd at least have gotten a funny story out of it.

With a roaring fire and the journey still ongoing I taught myself how to roast a chicken. There's a whole controversial and complicated nutritional system in Atlas that I'd been ignoring until I watched the video but now I understood roughly how it worked I figured I probably ought to do something about keeping myself healthy.

Fire on board ship. The thing a sailor fears most. Or not.

I'd just had time to cook and eat my chicken when the zone line finally arrived. Free of Freeport and never going back! (That's ironic foreshadowing, in case you missed it).

The sun was coming up and the scenery was verging on the spectacular. I've always been a sucker for lens flare. Far in the distance I could just about make out some faint shimmer that might be land so I pulled the sail round and headed in thst direction.

I'll say one thing for Wildcard: they absolutely weren't kidding when they said this thing was going to be big. The timescales for crossing the distances in question are going to be immense. Presumably bigger boats go faster, but even so exploring the whole of this watery world is going to be a major timesink.

Opening the map is a daunting prospect. It works just fine and it looks splendid. The problem is scale. It makes you realize just how insignificant you are and how little the ocean cares about your existence.

I'm not much of a sailor either in real life or games. I just wanted to get to dry land and start exploring on foot. I knew there was a high likelihood I'd be eaten by a grue at first landfall but I was bouyed by the knowledge that I'd no longer have to start again from nothing. My raft would be my revival point and my corpse would be no harder to recover than in the good old days of EverQuest.

Great. At least I'll know the name of the place where I died.

That's what I thought. I wasn't reckoning with two things: ignorance and early access.

Let's take ignorance first. Yes, you can respawn on your raft. If, that is, you've thought to make a bed and place it there. It's your bed that acts as a respawn point, not the raft. I'd somehow missed that crucial factor in the thread I'd read on the subject of getting your body back.

I had not made my bed and yet, precisely because I had not made it, I did indeed have to lie in it. Isn't language fun? 

Having carefully manouevered my raft to the extreme shallows of the first island I came to, I waded ashore. Another raft was moored further out to sea. There were some rudimentary foundations laid for some kind of structure. The place was obviously claimed so I wandered inland to look for a better spot to set up home, whereupon I was promptly killed by a wolf.

It was a fair fight. He was level 5 and so was I. I got him to half health but I am absolutely not getting to grips with Atlas's hyper-kinetic combat so anything more aggressive than a chicken has a better than fifty-fifty chance of doing for me.

Which would have been fine had I respawned, as I expected, on my raft. Nope. Big nope. What's more, I didn't even have the option of respawning in the same zone. Having died bedless it was back to Freeport or start another character. And naturally my corpse stayed just where the wolf left it and my raft just where I'd moored it.

Maybe I could just steal one...

To say I was miffed would be putting it mildly. I stomped off to do some research into respawning and corpse revovery, which was when I learned that even had I made a bed and put it on my raft I might well have ended up back in Freeport anyway. There's a bug, the paramaters of which don't seem well-understood, that makes respawning on beds something of a lottery. This is Early Access, after all.

And so, as I write my Pathfinder, the peculiar title given to characters in Atlas, is back in Freeport in her skivvies, the whole "make a raft and sail away" thing ahead of her yet again. Rather than get on with it, I used the unexpected return to Freeport as an opportunity to experiment with the respawn system.

I died many times. I took all the available revival options, opening a cluster of tiny vistas on my vast fogged map. I read the aforementioned thread and contemplated my unfortunate situation.

I'm aware this is going to be a relatively hard game to learn, let alone master, especially since I'm alone and the general advice seems to be that you can't get much of anything done with fewer than four. I'm not convinced I'll ever get to grips with the combat. It's hugely more offputting than the ostensibly similar version in the alpha we don't talk about, where I have little or no real trouble managing the controls.

Once more unto the beach, dear friends.

It's not the dying I mind. I can hack dying, even dying a lot, just so long as my character keeps moving forward. There seems to be no penalty for dying other than inconvenience, anyway, although given the current degree of inconvenience, I'd take level-loss any day.

I 'm not much bothered by corpse runs, either. Been there, done that, got the body. Mostly.

What I'm not up for, though, is endless restarts. I need to know that I can at least pick myself up and dust myself off somewhere roughly adjacent to where I fell down, then head off to get my stuff back. I'm okay with having to prep. I belong to the bind generation, after all. I'm just not okay with Groundhog Day gaming.


I'm going to give it one more go. Get another raft. Make a bed this time. Sail to somewhere no-one else has claimed. See what happens. It does look pretty darned amazing out there...

If I die and end up back in Freeport, though, that's it. I'll be shelving Atlas until I see a patch note that says respawning is fixed. We should at least wake up safely, back in our beds, thinking it was all a dream, before the real nightmare - corpse recovery - begins.