Valheim has only been out for a little over a week, but it's already making a powerful impression on the community as the most successful Viking invasion in centuries. Hot on the heels of its recent milestone of selling one million copies, developer Iron Gate Studio has pushed out a new update for its Norse-inspired survival sandbox title.
The 0.143.5 update for Valheim is a relatively small one but it adds several quality-of-life adjustments for players, notably with regards to stealth. Enemies now have an awareness indicator that shows players whether their wily Viking has been spotted and streamlines the process of creeping up behind foes and landing a powerful sneak attack.
Not every sneaky trick has been made easier, though. A common exploit to instantly transport large amounts of ore across the world using portals and the chest storage UI has been patched, and a resource-duplication glitch has also been addressed. It seems Iron Gate has certainly been keeping an eye on how its players are playing and wants to try to clamp down on this type of behavior, so expect to see any future exploits patched in good time as well.
It's not all bad news and slaps on the wrist, though. Many players will no doubt be thrilled to find out that the appropriately-named deathsquitos have been nerfed, making the Plains that much more manageable to traverse. Previously, even a well-equipped and experienced Viking could fall to these mystifyingly overpowered monsters, but hopefully now the fight will be a little more fair. The team have also made some small AI fixes and made servers filterable in the Steam server-browsers for ease of use, among several other behind-the-scenes tweaks.
Valheim has enjoyed enormous popularity since its release into Steam Early Access on February 2nd, and with over 20,000 positive reviews on the platform it's still sitting comfortably at the top of the Top Sellers list at the time of writing. Its success seems to be due as much to its interesting confluence of genres and inspirations - one reviewer has described it as "if Terraria, Skyrim and Dark Souls had a baby" - as to its extremely high level of polish, despite its Early Access status. The developers also seem to be fully engaged with the player community, citing large amounts of "fantastic feedback and suggestions" that have helped them perfect their wildly well-received Viking sim.
Fans have fallen in love with Valheim's sprawling procedurally-generated worlds, intuitive systems and solid social gameplay options, and the developers seem to be pouring that love straight back into the game with each update. If their 2021 roadmap is any indication, there's plenty more on the horizon for players to get stuck into, including new biomes, new systems and updates with intriguing names like "Cult of the Wolf", to name but a few. As the team themselves put it: "We've Odin just begun."
Valheim is available now on PC.
Source: Iron Gate Studio/Steam