Today we are going to talk about everything you need to know about Valheim, it is becoming very popular among gamers nowadays. Only three weeks have passed since Iron Gate Studio, the small team of just five people, launched Valheim.
Even though they had great and very ambitious expectations for their game, they never imagined the enormous treasure hidden in their hands. Still available as Early Access, and exclusively for PC, this Viking-themed co-op survival game has already managed to accumulate a whopping four million copies distributed.
Last weekend, it reached over 500,000 active players. That is why we wanted to make a quick review of everything you should know before venturing into this mythological adventure.
What is Valheim?
Valheim is a Viking-themed game and it has a huge amount of content, historical details, and documented references to Norse mythology and the customs of these warrior people, something that undoubtedly enriches it enormously.
Valheim takes place in a procedurally generated open world, where you’ll start with little more than your molt. You will have to search for food and materials and create tools, build shelters and fight against gods and creatures, explore the mystical lands in search of food and shelter, through forests, mountainous and inhospitable areas, facing different legendary creatures to get stronger and survive.
This survival game is notably more accessible than many other games, with details such as the change of hunger meters, which instead of killing us, simply reduce our stamina bar. Besides this game is focusing heavily on the cooperative factor, you can enable or disable friendly damage or PvP.
Although this will not prevent us from finding other new and quite curious factors such as the weather, which can kill us with cold. Role-playing is of course a part of this game. By performing normal actions such as running, jumping, cutting down trees, or fighting, we will be improving the capabilities of our character permanently.
Or at least until we die. And the game will have a small penalty when we die, in addition to forcing us to recover the objects of our previous body, will slightly cut the experience of our skills.
In addition to the huge repertoire of materials for the collection, creation and improvement of our equipment, which we will use for the construction of settlements, houses and workshops, the possibilities are endless.
How to download Valheim?
As we said, at the moment this game is available as Early Access exclusively for PC through Steam, although currently, we can find it slightly discounted on some websites like G2A.
Valheim minimum system requirements
- Operating system: Windows 7 (64 bit)
- Processor: Quad-Core, at least 2.6GHz
- Memory: 8GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 or AMD Radeon HD 7970
- Storage: 1GB available space
- DirectX: Version 11
Single-player or co-op
Currently, we have two game modes, a solo adventure or multiplayer mode.
First of all, with each new player that joining the game, the enemies will become more powerful to adjust the difficulty and maintain an experience always according to the optimal experience. Although one of the great advantages of Valheim is that, in the same way, if a player leaves, the difficulty will be readjusted again.
Thus, creating our own game will be very simple: we will only have to start the game, create our character, and select a “New” world, after which we can adjust whether we want it to be private or public.
The second tab in the menu after the character selection is “Join the game”, with which we can see the rest of the servers created by the huge community of players, as well as our Steam friends. However, one of the big disadvantages of this second one is the fact that the servers that host the worlds of each game will be linked to the player who creates them, so we will not be able to connect to them when he/she is not online.
How to create a dedicated server in Valheim?
That said, creating a dedicated Valheim server is another option, although again this will still be subject to the requirement of a person in charge of it. Even though we can always leave the server on perpetually, the existence of random events and the progression of the days could end up causing some unpleasant surprises when players are not connected.
Also, while this is a pretty useful feature, it won’t be as easy as setting up local servers. Even so, we will show you below how to do it in detail:
- From the main page of the Steam desktop application, we will make visible the “tools” in the library search to be able to see and install “Valheim Dedicated Server“.
Now you need to create a world or transfer the world you were using before to the server if you are on another PC (if you want to host the server on the same PC you play on you can skip this step).
- Go to the folder where you installed the Valheim dedicated server.
- In another window, find the folder:
“C:\[UserName]\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\worlds”, and transfer the files from this folder to the same folder on the PC that will be the server.
- Now you must edit the server startup script file, which is located in the folder where you installed the Valheim Dedicated Server (defaults in Windows 10 to “C:\Program Files (x86)\SteamSteamSteamServer”). There you will go to a batch file called “start_headless_server”. Right-click on that file and select the option to edit it.
- The line there now says something like “start valheim_server -nographics -batchmode -name X -port 2456 -world X -password X -public 1”, replacing each X respectively with the server name, the world name (which cannot be identical to the server name), and the password. So if we want the server to appear in the list of community servers, leave the number after public as 1; otherwise, we can change this value to 0 so that it can only be entered by directly searching for its IP.
- Once all the changes have been made, save the file.
- Finally, we will have to make a backup copy of the start_headless_server file, because when the game is updated, it will delete that file and we will have to replace it again.
- Now you can exit that editor.
But the process is not over yet. Now it is time to open the ports to allow the connection:
- From the configuration software of our router, opening the ports 2456-2458 TCP / UDP.
The host port must be 2456. If there is a firewall on the server PC, you will also need to open those ports in the firewall. - Now start the server by double-clicking on “start_headless_server”. That should open two windows, one with the server logs and one that selects and press any key to stop the server if you want to stop it.
- If you change the public number to 0, people will have to join using the Steam server browser, found under View > Servers in the Steam client under the Favorites tab, then using the “Add a server” button at the bottom right.
- The IP address of your server is the external IP of your server PC with the addition “: 2457” at the end of the port, “XXX.XXX.X: 2457”.
It is worth mentioning that, although we will be able to enter our server in just a few seconds after launching it, the community server list can take between 10 and 15 minutes to be updated once a server is activated, so it is possible that it will take us some time to see it.
However, if it still does not appear, it is probably due to an error in the name of the game world, the server name, or the password, so it would be advisable to review the previous steps if this happens.
The future of Valheim
It remains to be seen whether Valheim can maintain this level of interest and momentum in the long term as Iron Gate continues to work on the game. The studio has undoubtedly had to change its development plans in the short term, having even announced the hiring of new members in order to speed up the process.
As they explain, the game’s development is 75% complete, although currently the available content barely reaches 50% of the final target. In fact, among the current code, you can already find some objects referencing the future DLCs.
Even though for the moment their efforts will continue to focus on the PC version, the creators have already expressed the desire to release Valheim for consoles and even mobile phones.
