Valheim (Part 4)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

Dang, already at 4 parts? Guess that’s what happens when a review doubles as a full-on guide...

The Mistlands – “The Queen”

This guy must be eating spicy. Look at that fire.

Not a pretty sight this close. Or from afar, really.

Yagluth, you’re going down. When it’s summoned, you find yourself fighting a giant skeleton top half with a crown. The undead king of the fulings, allegedly. A spitfire on his best days, and when he’s angry, he can rain meteors on your head. Beware the explosion when he smashes the ground with his fist. He has no weaknesses to exploit, but his attacks all involve fire in some way, making fire resistance barley wine vital in this battle. You can also take cover behind the stone pillars surrounding his altar.

Right, the meteors. This guy gets points for theatrics.

A long battle eventually won – and for that, you get Yagluth’s trophy, which unlocks his power, granting massive temporary resistance to magic, fire, frost, and lightning. You also get Torn Spirits, with which you can build wisp fountains, which summon wisps at night. Those wisps can be made into wisplights, which will follow you around and disperse the mist of the Mistlands; you can also craft them into wisp torches to plant on your path.

I know it's in the name, but still - it's annoying that
you can't see shit around here.

Not unlike the swamp, the Mistlands mark an intense difficulty spike. Everything turned up to 11. You’ll need to be brave and well-prepared to face it. It’s an infamously nasty place, home to the worst monsters yet. When I played in the multiplayer server, the streamer grew to hate the new biome, and wouldn’t go there unless they absolutely had to. Or had a team to explore it with. I guess now is as good a time as any to discuss multiplayer a bit.

When I said we become hoarders, that wasn't a joke. This
is all in one solo game. Not shown are 30 more chests
in other rooms, as well as 15 more where my portals are
so I can quickly empty my pockets when necessary.

It helps that I had my two solo runs to see what the game was like on my own, as it let me see just how many resources a single player needs. Now take that amount and multiply it by the number of folks in your multiplayer game. If you want everybody to have the best equipment and food, that is. That’s probably not gonna happen. Depending on how the team gets structured, everyone may get equipped with everything, or folks might settle into roles, as is often done in MMOs; one who can take damage, one who uses melee weapons, one who uses ranged weapons... Due to the variety in threats across Valheim, it may be better to stay prepared for anything.

I swear, ever since that Seeker Surprise while I was sailing
towards Moder, I have HATED Seekers. I got ambushed
by three of them while capturing for screenshots.

Playing with friends can help a lot, especially in difficult stretches. Imagine you die in a tough area that’s still guarded by enemies, ‘cause that can happen, a lot, yes I speak from experience, and you come back with friends to deal with the monsters and recover the stuff from your gravestone. On the other hand, enemies get tougher the more players are in the area when they spawn. According to the wiki, an enemy gets an extra 30% HP for every player beyond the first in the 100m vicinity when it spawns, and its attack power is also increased by 4% by the same metric, though both stat changes are capped at 5 players to prevent enemies from being too dangerous.

Mushroom omelette? Make sure you bring enough
for the whole class.

But of course, as I just pointed out, the issue with having many players on a server is to make sure everyone’s equipped to face the new threats. Remember when I said there’s a meme about never having enough iron? Imagine when everybody needs mountains of iron to be all set. Or enough materials to build all the amenities necessary to make new equipment or the higher-tier foods to fight the next biome.

And there is the option to play Valheim non-cooperatively. As in, friendly fire on, battles for dominance of the world. I see it like those players who try the “you die, game over” mode without a map or portals: Sure, you can do it, I personally don’t see the interest, ‘cause damn – isn’t the game hard enough already? Then again, I’m speaking as someone who only has 350 hours on at time of writing, compared to the thousands some dedicated folks have accumulated.

Said folks are likely to have also tried out...

Animal taming

Keep eating my food, and soon we're gonna be buds.

I did try this for a bit in my very first game. Didn’t go well, and I got too busy with progression to bother. It’s something that can give great advantages, at least more than some other features like fishing. There were three wild animals you could tame in this game: Boars, wolves, and lox. (The Ashlands added the Asksvin.) To tame a creature, trap it somewhere (preferably between four walls), then regularly feed it food it likes and watch from afar as it becomes friendlier, until eventually accepting to become your pet. Then, take it home, or tame a second one, take it home too, and see them breed. This can be done for 1- and 2-Star variants of the animal, and if you can do it, their babies will have the higher Star variant.

You can even craft tools for your taming needs. A butcher knife to kill the animals you don’t need, granting you free materials, as an example. Or a saddle if you tamed a lox, letting you ride it. There are stories of players conquering the game thanks to a massive pack of tamed wolves.

Not the best pen ever, but it'll do the trick.

However, it is a lengthy process, and once those animals are tamed, you may want to protect them, especially if you want these free materials. Hence the need to build pens for them, as well as places where they’ll be protected from raids and so on. The one time I managed to tame a boar, it was killed in the next raid, because a troll decided “Fuck this boar in particular” and came in, tree swinging, through my defenses. Time wasted. It was worse than that time a Greydwarf raid destroyed my very first carrot crops.

Did I say that Valheim could be brutal? Well, I hadn’t today!

My only other experience with taming was in the multiplayer server, where one of our players loved the mechanic and made sure to tame boars and lox for the crew. Succeessfully! It was quite the spectacle, to see this fluffy giant walking around the village, often with someone on its back.

Good thing eggs are so useful!

Beating Yagluth updates Haldor’s inventory, adding eggs that cost 1500 coins apiece. Near fire, these hatch into chicks, which grow into hens that can lay more eggs when adult. When you kill a hen, you get free feathers and chicken meat – this is the only way to get the latter. Eggs and chicken meat are ingredients for high-tier, Mistlands-level food. Hens are the only animal I bothered raising in my second playthrough, and I quickly went overboard. Must’ve had some 20+ hens in there. I ran out of nickname ideas!

Misty threats

It’s been a leading thread in this review/guide, might as well do it here too: A look at the creatures of the Mistlands. First is the harmless hare, which drops meat and hide when killed.

Gonna need an upgrade to that bug spray from the Plains.

The main enemy here is the Seeker, a gigantic insect that comes in two flavors: The base one, which can fly, and the Soldier, which hits harder and has more HP, but is confined to the ground. An enemy that can fly is nothing new, but Seekers are fucking tough. Not only will they tank everything you throw at them, but their weak point (their underbelly) is very difficult to hit.

The Mistlands in one meme:
"Oops! All Cliffs!"

Oh, and the main feature of the Mistlands (well... barring the mist) is horrendously difficult terrain that requires massive amounts of stamina to properly navigate. Lots of cliffs to scale by running. Since Seekers fly, they can easily close the distance between them and your pathetic attempts at running up that hill. What’s even worse, one major flaw of combat in Valheim is the difficulty in hitting enemies in melee at a different elevation to yours, an issue made more prevalent by this terrain.

And of course, whereas previously it protected you from fire,
since the Ashlands update the feather cape, almost a
requirement to exist in the Mistlands, is now weak to fire.
Huzzah.

However, you should dread the Gjall even more. These fleshy masses float around Mistlands areas and announce their presence with a blaring horn reminiscent of the Tripods from War of the Worlds. When they spot you, they rain fiery, lava-like death from above. Their weak point is also their underbelly, but they fly high, so it’s a lot easier to hit with arrows. Also worry about the Gjall’s babies, the Ticks. It will sporadically let a few loose, and when these things spot you, they latch on and suck out your HP. You can dodge-roll to shake them off, but killing them is difficult since they lunge at your Viking and usually come in large groups.

Usually, when I hear about an ass-chewing, that's not
what I have in mind.

And, speaking from personal experience, all these threats combined also make the Mistlands the worst place to die in, as it’s practically guaranteed that your gravestone will be surrounded by whatever it is that killed you – a bunch of tough Seekers, a lingering Gjall, a crowd of Ticks, or any combination of these. Have fun. I sure didn’t have fun when, in the multiplayer server, I faced a cycle of hurting where any attempts at retrieving my better equipment was met by creatures I was now less prepared to fight. Holy fuck, did I die a lot.

You know what else I did on the multiplayer server?

Beware the Dvergr

Me? Causing a ruckus? Have you seen the things floating
in the sky around here?

Dvergr ice mage versus gjall: My money's on the dvergr.

The Dvergr are the dwarf species Haldor and Hildir belong to. They are well-equipped and can brave the Mistlands on their own. Every now and then, you’ll find a camp inhabited by a group of these blue-skinned bearded folks. They will not attack you, and might even be pleasant to be around, if lacking in conversation. In fact, if you find them while running from another threat, they might take up arms and kill your enemies for you. How useful!

That is... if you don’t piss them off. If you so much as punch a wall of the structure they’ve protected with a Ward, or try to steal anything from them, they become hostile.

Guess what I did. Go on, fucking guess.

Solo game, during capture: Pounced by three ticks, start
attacking around to kill them, whack lantern.
Thankfully I WAS planning on killing these Dvergr later.

Multiplayer server, very first time meeting Dvergr, we were still not accustomed to the deadly terrain. Trying to hit a hare, my axe accidentally struck a pillar in their perimeter. Cue a bunch of angry dwarves coming damn close to inflicting a total party kill. I don’t hate myself, but I made a good case for it! Not helping matters is that these dudes come in a few flavors; their rogues have crossbows to hit you from afar, and their mages can cast fire spells, ice spells, or support magic. All of them are resilient little shits, and if you die near them, good luck getting back to that gravestone. Again: Speaking. From. Experience.

As you can see here, as I'm aiming for one in the water,
another one is shooting at me.

I would say “so uh, yeah, don’t do that”, but... you need to do it at least once. Remember what I said about not stealing? Dvergr structures come with component crates containing extractors, thanks to which you can build sap extractors on the pulsating ancient roots to obtain sap, which you need to craft refined eitr, necessary for all Mistlands-tier equipment. Steal that item and face Dvergr wrath. On the upside, you can bring the local fauna to them to do your dirty work.

Sap: The magical material. Literally. I can't wait for these
extractors to finish doing their job.

Sap is used for most new items in the Mistlands, and both it and some local foods (such as the Magecap mushroom) work towards a new form of energy, the Eitr, which is the setting's Mana. You can craft wands, each of which cast one specific spell. I first saw their usefulness in the multiplayer server, where one user was summoning friendly skeletons. Necromancy for beginners. Hopefully this is gonna be useful against the Queen, which we have yet to find...

We can probably end this in Part 5.