The immersive and impressive world of a game like Valheim is providing a potent canvas for its more creative players, if the numerous and remarkable feats of art and engineering coming out of it are anything to go by. Just this month, Valheim players have managed to create a giant wooden statue of Pixar's Wall-E, a model of the ever-elusive GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card, and an actual working airship in-game, and this latest achievement might be one of the most intricate.
Valheim is best known as a survival game, but a neatly hidden Creative Mode can be accessed in order to take the heat off a little and more easily manipulate the environment, spawn items, and get rid of pesky enemies: a handy toolset for a budding artist or architect. This was used to great effect by one determined Redditor, who managed to recreate a bust of Michelangelo's David in the game made entirely out of item stands.
Sculpture aficionado britzerland managed to create their work of art, based on a model by 3D scanning enthusiast Patrick Thorn, using 3,000 wooden item stands carefully rotated and placed to mimic the contours of the famous statue. The build, along with other sculptures and artworks, will be uploaded to their public server soon. While some of the other pieces, such as a number of impressive-looking replicas of paintings, will require the use of some of Valheim's available mods to view them, britzerland assures fans that his David will be viewable in the vanilla game.
It's quite the feat, although commenters on Reddit joked that people would inevitably complain that they didn't manage to accomplish it in Survival mode. That task, britzerland calculated, would require 3,000 bronze nails and 12,000 pieces of fine wood, equating to around 600 birch trees and 150 bronze ingots. Still, for all the intricacy of the build, it thankfully didn't have too much of an effect on how the game ran, unlike some other bigger constructions that left player's computers chugging along at catastrophic frame rates.
All of britzerland's work may have been done in the vanilla game, but plenty of other Valheim players are expanding the game with mods to give themselves even more to do. Some are simple tweaks to make quality-of-life adjustments to the game, while others bring swathes of new content into it, such as recreating World of Warcraft's Azeroth in the world of Valheim.
One thing's for certain, though: players aren't going to be getting tired of Valheim any time soon. With a truly sprawling map comparable to plenty of other survival games, regular updates from its own developers, and a dedicated community creating mods and coming with inventive new speedruns and challenges, the game clearly has plenty left to show its fans before it ascends to Valhalla.