Climb Up On A Rock

For a few days now I've been meaning to post about how it's going in Valheim but something or other kept coming up. Then Wilhelm put up his take on on life on the plains and it seemed like I might just as well link to it with a "What he said".

Seriously, the post I was going to write would have been all but identical. I guess there are only so many things left to do at this stage of the game.

 

What I have been doing is a lot of exploring, opening up long stretches of coastline to mark the outlines of islands, then criss-crossing them to fill in the blanks.  Wherever I find goblin camps, towers or villages I clean them out. Not because I need anything from them. I have self-sustaining fields of flax and barley and far more black iron than there's currently any use for. No, I clear goblin camps because it's fun.

I have a fairly well-established method. When I find a camp or a village I scout it to get an idea roughly how big it is, how many fulings live there, what classes they are and, if possible, how tough they are. Regular fulings pop like balloons with a single well-placed arrow but put the same arrow in a one or two star goblin and all it does is make them mad.

Once I've got a good idea what I'm up against I find a nice, high place to start picking them off. Ideally I like a steep rock on a flat plain. Goblins can't climb anything steeper than a gentle slope. Hell, they can't even go up and down their own wooden stairs. Odin knows how they get to the top of their towers because they sure as heck can't get down again. Maybe they're cats!

If there's a good rock and it's in range I pot them from there. If it's out of bowshot I move in, snipe one and run back. Sometimes none of the goblins even notice one of their pals exploding right next to them but usually two or three will come running, cackling and waving their spears. Then I pick them off as they mill around the rock like angry chickens.

As I've been roaming further and further I've taken to carrying a portal kit with me. The only times I've died have been when I ranged much too far and got stranded miles from home, at night, deep on the plains. 

I don't bother building a shelter for the portals any more. I put them right on top of the rocks. Nothing can get to them up there and I can see them for miles. In some ways, now I'm at home there, the plains feel safer than the black forest. Trolls, skeletons, greydwarves and even boars will smash anything you leave unprotected.  Lox and deathsquitos never attack structures and even fulings don't seem that interested. Anyway, there are far fewer of them roaming loose. They mostly stick to their camps. 

Sniping goblins is a lot of fun but more surprising to me is how much satisfying it is to meet them in combat face to face. I'm coming round to the opinion that Valheim has my favorite action combat of any game I've played and that's because it manages to be both skilful, tactical and incredibly simple all at the same time.

For me, it's all about movement and weapon selection. The fights, pulling with the bow, swapping to a sword, maybe pulling out the big hammer, feel hugely kinetic. 

Almost from the start I've ignored blocks and dodges. I tried a shield for a short while but it seemed slow and awkward compared to just hitting things really fast. For a long time I used an axe and that worked vey well. Then when I learned to work with silver I made a sword and that worked better still.

The black iron axe is statistically superior to the silver sword so I made that and swapped back for a while but although it does hit harder the sword is so much faster. Crucially, it strikes on both the forehand and the backhand. That's what makes it not just possible but productive to fight three or even four fulings at once.

Monster AI in Valheim is really excellent, I think. All creatures have particular ways of behaving and quite a lot of the behaviors are convincing. Fulings feint and dart and circle out of reach. They're always moving, looking for opportunity. What they can't cope with is being rushed and hacked at and perpetually knocked back but you have to be sure never to let them get you surrounded. It's like EverQuest on meth.

The sword, with its speed and the way it strikes both on the atack and the withdrawal keeps fulings stunned and struggling to respond. The knock-back isn't as great as with other weapons but it happens so often. So long as I make sure my health never drops much below 150 I can reasonably expect to slice up a gang of regular goblins with a one or even a two star thrown in before I get into in any great trouble.  

Shamans are a problem because they have a nasty long-range fireball attack and a very effective ward. If one of those comes out of the camp then I do back off and come back later when they've all calmed down. Then I single the shaman out and put an arrow in him and with luck he doesn't have his ward on so he explodes. 

All of that and a good bit more makes exterminating fulings good entertainment for a couple of hours. Even so, I'd probably have had enough of the plains by now if that was all there was to do. There are lox to hunt for meat, of course, and deathsquitos for their needles, which make the best arrows, but that wouldn't be enough to keep me either.

No, the reason I'm still out there clearing the fog from the map is that even after all this time I still run into things I've never seen before. While I was pushing along a coastline to the east I happened on a henge. It stood out from the golden fields like a sign, which turned out to be just what it was. It had the vegasir for Yagluth's altar. 

With that on my map I had to go take a look, even though I have no intention of summoning him until there's something in it for me. His dias was next to a fuling camp and a fuling tower, at the head of the first river I'd seen on the plains. (I've seen several more streams since then).

Last night, as I was heading south on the biggest of all the islands, I stumbled on what looked eerily like a brutalist blockhouse from some 1960s out of town industrial park. I'd never seen anything in Valheim like it before. As I approached I could hear cackling. Surely goblins couldn't have built this thing?

Whether they built it or not they were using it. It had stone stairs and a chest on the flat roof. Whether it was some religious structure of their own or something they'd re-purposed I couldn't say but it made me very curious. 

And then the mist came down. I hate the mist on the plains so very much. It's far too real. It swirls and billows and hangs there and you can see shapes and hear sounds through it but never well enough. If the mist blows in while I'm clearing a camp I know it's going to be a long, long day.

That's what I've been up to in Valheim this week. Looking forward, I've marked a couple of possible spots for my island getaway. I've cleared a whole medium-sized island of all fixed spawns and I'm thinking of moving there because it's a lot nicer than where I'm living now. I've done so much work on the castle, though, I couldn't bear to tear it down. I'd have to start again from scratch and I don't think I can face all that mining again.

My next project is going to be a trip to the Ashlands. I've ranged so far south now it can only be a short boat-trip away. I just need to set up a base in the far south and call on Moder for a favorable wind. And make some fire resistance potions, of course.

I guess I'm not done with this thing quite yet.

High Plains Drifter

A couple of weeks back, when I reached the conclusion of the tale of my battle with the great drake Moder, I wrapped the whole thing up with an expression of existential uncertainty: "The plains call. I don't know, yet, whether I will answer." 

I wasn't at all convinced I wanted to go to the next biome. I'd seen enough of it already to know how incredibly dangerous it was. Even at the margins, where the plains ran into meadows or black forest, to meet chittering, spear-chucking goblins or giant mosquitos meant instant death. Who'd want to go out into the middle, where they live?

And for what? The chance to corrupt the green and placid meadowlands, open the door goblins could join the skeletons already harrying the local wildlife there? That last boss drops nothing that's needed at this stage of the game but by some reports his death frees the goblin hordes. The last thing I need are fulings raiding my mostly peaceful homes.

As for the crafting, all the remaining recipes became available the moment Moder died. The tears she cries build the artisan table and that lets you build the rest of the crafting stations. So why wake Yagluth? Let him lie. 

Only that's not how it goes. I should have known better. 

Not about the boss. He can wait. I was right about that. No, what I should have known by now is that Valheim has perfect pacing. If it's time to face the terrifying plains then it is time. If you've done what you should to get there, you will be ready when you arrive. Not just ready, either. Keen.

He followed me home. Can I eat him?

I'd have known that if I'd had all the facts. Or, really, if I'd just thought about it a bit harder. When I killed Moder, though, I was still avoiding looking things up in advance. Well, things other than the strats for killing the bosses. I want the authentic experience but I'm not a zealot about it.

Not having done my research meant I was puzzled for a while as to where all the new recipes were. I made the artisan table and the blast furnace and I smelted some black metal but the only new things I could see were a couple of shields. And I don't use a shield.

I wasn't completely ignorant. I'd already managed to leech on a couple of giant buffalo kills. I never did see what they were fighting but I put enough arrows into them to make sure they lost and then I stripped them of their meat and skin, because in Valheim only vikings kill for need, it seems. Everything else just leaves the bodies to rot.

I picked up the leavings and that opened a couple of new recipes. I'd killed a few fulings so I knew they dropped the next metal, black iron, and somewhere along the way I'd picked up the idea that I'd find something else I needed in their camps. Cloth, maybe? Grain? 

It seemed I wasn't going to be able to avoid the plains after all so I set about cautiously pushing forward. Very cautiously. Really, very cautiously indeed... and guess what?

It was great! It was fun. Actual, interesting, compelling, enjoyable entertainment. Yes, it was nerve-wracking at first but I should have remembered how things had gone before, in the black forest and the swamp and the mountains. 

Twister! Oh, wait, that's a rock.

Every new biome in Valheim has seemed terrifying at first. Overwhelming, even. The terrain is difficult, the creatures are deadly, death never feels more than a stumble away. Exploration is daunting, corpse runs exhausting, the only way to get through it is to take it slow, always prepare and never lose concentration, even for a moment. It's intense.

And then after a while, as you open more possibilities, gain access to better armor, learn which potions to carry and what weapons to use, things start to feel less impossible. In a while it feels manageable. And then, one day, without even noticing it's happened, you realize you're feeling almost relaxed. You're having fun!

Okay, I don't suppose many people ever get to like the swamp but it's a long time now since I was afraid of it. It's still annoying but in the way a bad commute might be. You just get on with it and think about something else.

As for the black forest, it's positively welcoming these days. It's been a few weeks since I even bothered to stop what I'm doing there when night falls. And the mountains, while there's not much there I need to go back for, they make for a pleasant day trip and a change of scenery when I need a few hundred rocks for building or some obsidian for my arrows.

The trouble with farming is the hours. Always up before the sun.

It's been a long time since I played a game where the sense of progression was so well-judged. If you rush ahead and try to take on a new biome with gear that only just barely got you through the last one, you're going to get your head handed to you, along with other parts of your anatomy. 

If you take the trouble to max out the level before, though, upgrade everything as far as it goes, you'll find it matches, pretty much exactly, the starting point of the tier you're going to open next. Each biome is chamfered seamlessly into the one above it. When you arrive in a new ecology, if you were able to handle the previous one with comfort, you're already capable of handling what's coming next.

Moving onto the plains in the gear I made for the mountains I was able to take on a couple of regular goblins at once. Deathsquitos no longer took huge chunks off my health and they died in one hit. All I had to do was not panic and they became no more of a threat than boars or necks. 

That didn't really come as much of a surprise. I'd already skirmished with both around the hinterlands where biomes meet and I'd generally come off best. Even in bronze I'd managed to kill a couple of single, stray goblins.

Go ahead, gobbo! Report me! See how far it gets you!

Where I wasn't expecting to enjoy myself was in going deeper into the plains, away from the safe haven of the forests and meadows, with nowhere to retreat if, or more likely when, things went badly wrong. And I particularly wasn't relishing taking on the goblins in their camps, some of which looked worryingly like small towns.

Just goes to show what I know. I've cleared several of those villages now and it's been a real pleasure. It reminds me, like a lot of things about Valheim, very strongly of early EverQuest. Clearing a fuling village feels incredibly similar to breaking one of those large bandit camps in the Karanas or a dervish settlement in the Ros. Or, most of all, an ulthork camp in Eastern Wastes.

The main difference is once you clear a fuling camp it stays cleared. There are no respawns. That makes it practical, even advisable, to take your time. It takes me three or four game-days to completely annihilate a fuling tribe. I have a procedure I mostly follow that entails picking off the scouts and the tower guards first, then gradually working inward to the center, finishing with the big, troll-like berserkers.

It's almost exactly how I would have soloed an ulthork camp when I played my druid, except that instead of kiting them with a bow I'd have snared them and dotted them to death. It would have been the same whittling away of their forces, the careful pulling to separate the linked spawns, only there I'd have used Harmony instead of kiting three or four until two lose interest.

The behaviors of the fulings are fascinating. They seem to respond to certain sounds, particularly the sound of things breaking. It's possible to keep one on you while his friends give up just by putting an arrow in his back as they turn. The berserkers are so keen to show off their size and strength they often leave themselves wide open. 

Mist rolling in, looks like. Or my crop's on fire.

And so on. Working it all out is exactly the kind of thing I loved about soloing in EQ. Valheim also offers some great opportunities for using the z-axis which would have been very much not allowed in Norrath. I cleared a quarter of one goblin camp from the top of one of their own towers and I filled my bags with lox meat just by standing on a boulder. The real problem is running out of arrows.

So, it's fun clearing camps just for the gameplay but is there any more practical reason to do it? Of course there is. Despite their aggressive nature, goblins are surprisingly agricultural. They grow both flax and barley in their camps. Once I got my hands on those crops (and built a spinning wheel and a windmill to refine and process them) all those missing recipes showed up at last.

You'd need to raid a lot of villages to get all the flax and barley you're going to need but luckily you can grow your own once you have a seed crop. Neither will grow anywhere but the plains but, hey, the goblins already prepared the soil and left a bunch of buildings they won't be needing any more, what with being dead. Why not use that?

So I moved in. So far all I've done is install a portal in one of the huts in the village on my home island. I'm not too keen to live there full-time. The camp won't ever respawn but the roaming patrols do and there are always a few deathsquitos buzzing around. 

For now I just port in every morning, check the crop, harvest what's ripe, re-plant half of it and portal home again. 

The plains are astonishingly beautiful. Living there would be like living inside an impressionist painting. My longer-term plans definitely include a beachside plains house and maybe an island home, if I can find a suitable plains archipelago.

Dorothy! Dorothy! No-one breathe in!

In combat terms, two goblins or a couple of deathsquitos are barely a threat any more. I've taken on and beaten four goblins at once, although I had precisely two hit points left at the end, so I won't be repeating that little test. I can kill even two star fulings so long as I see them coming in good time, although I've yet to meet a two star berserker and I'm happy to keep it that way.

I'm working on farming and growing enough linen to upgrade my black iron axe to tier four (it's at three now) and to make a set of padded iron armor, the somewhat surprising progression from the wolfhide I have on. There are a few other odds and ends, too, and of course the all-important barley and lox meat to make the big health and stamina buffing foods. Having enough hit points is key to feeling comfortable when crossing the savannah, I've found.

All in all, the plains have been a delightful surprise. It has a lot to do with the progression, pacing and gameplay I've outlined but it's also that it feels so glorious just being there. The colors, the movement of the grass, the whisper of the wind, even the chittering of the goblins and the grunting of the lox. It's all so damned atmospheric.

The next two biomes, undeveloped as yet, don't have the same allure. The mistlands are spidery and spooky, the ashlands a volcanic wasteland. I'm confident that, when they become available, the challenge will contnue to play out in a measured, manageable, ultimately satisfying fashion. Whether they'll ever become somewhere I'd want to live? That I'm not so sure.

Then again, that's exactly what I thought about the plains.

Settling Down

 

I think I'm about done with Valheim. Well, at least until the next major update, which I hope and trust will be Heart and Home, the one with the focus on building and basemaking. 

I don't mean I'm going to stop playing altogether. I still have quite a bit of work to do in the Plains to open up all the available crafting recipes. The gameplay there, once again, reminds me intensely of EverQuest, so I'm nervously looking forward to it.

As Tipa pointed out, though, killing Yagloth, the last of the five current bosses, doesn't really add anything positive to the game right now. Unlike all the others, his death doesn't open any new tech lines or biomes. Worse, it reportedly unleashes the fuling horde onto the normally peaceful meadows. I can't see any good reason to do that.

If anything, it rather points up what I consider one of Valheim's few significant design flaws: the way the viking afterlife becomes less and less attractive the deeper you explore. It's something that makes a lot of sense when you look at the game as an rpg. Of course you'd want to make your character more powerful by taking on greater challenges and progressing towards some kind of narrative resolution. That's how the genre works.

In a builder or a simulation or even a survival game, though, it's not at all clear why you'd want to do any of that, something that goes doubly so for Valheim. In some ways Iron Gate have painted themselves into a corner with the sheer quality of their procedurally generated world. 

The first two biomes, meadows and black forest, have the potential to be so breathtakingly lovely it's not at all uncommon to come across places that look like they should have preservation orders slapped on them to ensure their natural beauty is sustained for future generations.

There are plenty of spots that look like suitable locations for the architect-designed homes of the super-rich, not hunting camps and lean-tos. It becomes increasingly difficult to see why any post-life viking would want to leave the lush, green meadows, with their abundant game and delicious berries and mushrooms all just there for the taking. A hammer, an axe and a few hours cutting down trees and you can have a home fit for a jarl.

The craft progression does provide good reason to explore the otherwise entirely unattractive swamps, the inhospitable mountains and the frankly terrifying plains. Iron and silver, flax and grain, they're all worth having but it seems to me that any viking worth his mead would choose to stage raids to sieze what they needed, then return with the spoils to their meadow or forest home.

There will be new biomes added as the game develops. We already know of three- Mistlands, Deep North and Ashlands. None of them sound even remotely like somewhere even an eternal viking would want to spend any longer than absolutely necessary. 

It's going to be very interesting to see how the developers try to balance progression into ever more hostile and unforgiving environments with an enhanced and expanded housing system. It's not just that there's so little incentive to set up home anywhere outside the first two biomes. It's also that, almost by definition, the more possible it becomes to build a truly comfortable, luxurious home, the less likely people are to want to move.

I'm already feeling that quite strongly. I spent most of this week building what I now expect to my final home in this iteration of Valheim. I'm no specialist builder but I've put twenty-five or thirty hours into this one and I'm pretty happy with the result. It's certainly the best home I've built from scratch in a game and I have quite a few more ideas for it even before we get the new building options.

On of the big attractions is the peace and quiet there. Except for the occasional raids, that is.

I'm at the stage now where I find troll or skelton attacks purely annoying. They serve no purpose other than to interrupt what I'm doing. Neither creature drops anything I want and they can't get past the stone walls so all an attack means is some noise pollution and a time-wasting check for minor repairs.

I never did figure out how the attacks work. The forest risings ended when Eikthyr died but killing Bonemass didn't put an stop to the "foul wind from the swamp" events right away. I haven't seen one of those for a while and neither have the surtlings raided since Moder died although I never understood how or if those two things were connected. 

The supposed drake raids never appeared at all but trolls and skeletons seem to carry on no matter which boss is currently next on the list. Based on past experience I really can't predict what effect killing Yagloth might have but since I do know there's definitely no actual benefit to ending his reign it seems prudent to leave him well alone.

There's another, potentially bigger problem with both housing and progression, one that stands outside the internal logic of the world. It rests squarely on Valheim's unstable pedestal in Early Access. Iron Gate have confirmed that when a new biome is ready to be added, everyone then playing will need to move to a new world to access it.  

That seems likely - indeed certain - to cause major headaches for anyone who's invested a lot of time in getting their home just so but there are potential solutions. It's already possible to move materials from one world to another by carrying them in your personal inventory. You should be able to tear down your existing home and re-use the materials to rebuild in the new world. Perhaps some form of bulk transport container could be created to make it less time-consuming and tedious.

Rebuilding would be a pain but Landmark had a blueprint system whereby you could copy a building and clone it at a new location. All you needed were the mats. I tried it a few times and while, like everything in that game, it was awkward and rough around the edges, it did work. With something like that it would be possible to move an entire castle across worlds in a few clicks.

Or, I guess, we could all end up keeping our original world as our home and going on expeditions to new ones to progress. Whatever happens I think we can assume it's going to be less than optimal until the game reaches whatever Iron Gate calls "launch". A couple of years at least, then.

All of which leads me to think it's probably time to back off a little. Or, at least, to change tack.

Before I call it a wrap, I do want to explore the plains some more. It's a shame they're so nerve-making to travel. The scenery is superb. If it was possible to clear the fuling and deathsquitos out of an area for good I'd say it would be worth making the effort just to set up a home there. 

Unfortunately, although the goblin settlements don't respawn when cleared, the wandering fuling patrols do. And deathsquitos are like deer and boars in the meadows, respawning constantly, with no regard to predation. I've picked up a few ideas on how to make a plains home secure but I can't see any way to make it truly welcoming.

The meadows, though, are peaceful and beautiful nearly all the time. Who wouldn't want to live there?

What's more, I've marked several really lovely meadow islands on my map as I've sailed in search of swamps and mountains. I could set up a network of island retreats linked by portals, all secure from attack by dint of their size and isolation.

And maybe I will. When the House and Home update arrives it would be nice to have a few places prepared and ready to benefit. 

Maybe I'm not quite ready to take a break from Valheim just yet after all.