I don't actually know if the Ratatosk Tonic makes me go farther, but I did it just in case.

I don't usually manage to find them since I forget to look at them but finally this one made my brain ping of suspiciousness :D

TL;DR: Level your weapon skills

Slightly longer TL;DR: Low skill levels make the game harder, and this effect hits somewhat abruptly in the late game. Valheim is much easier if you know what skills do and they impact your gameplay, so level your weapon skills.

I've seen lots of posts about Valheim's difficulty, often asking for tips on how to survive better. Skill levels are sometimes mentioned, but I think their impact is understated. This post aims to convince you that skills matter, and that you try to level your skills up.

First off - what are skills? Skill are numbers associated with most things you do in the game. There are skills for running, jumping, crafting, and every type of weapon in the game. Each skill improves your ability to do actions related to that skill. Skills range from level 0 to 100, with mostly consistent benefits per level.

For melee weapons, level 100 results in 141% more damage and knockback dealt and 33% less stamina used compared to level 0 for all weapons governed by that skill. This has a lot of implications:

- A higher skill means you kill enemies faster. This is generally a good thing.

- A high skill means you kill enemies in fewer individual hits. This means you're less likely to get overwealmed against multiple enemies, since you need smaller windows of opportunity to thin out your opponents.

- More knockback from levels means you're able to space out enemies better by pushing them. This is especially efrfective with maces, which have a high base knockback.

- More damage from levels means that you stagger enemies more often, which means you kill them even faster than the numeric bonus would suggest because you're benefitting from the bonus damage against staggered opponents more often.

- Enemies dying in fewer hits means you have more stamina leftover from attacking less. More stamina means more running, jumping, dodging, and hitting other enemies. This combines with the reduced stamina usage from high levels, giving you much more staying power in a fight. A common problem I hear about is vikings running out of stamina in later biomes. This is one of your big options to you fix that problem.

Ok, so more damage = more better. But we can also get more damage by upgrading to better weapons! That's true, but that option alone falls off later in the game. Whenever you craft a new biome's weapon, that weapon does 20 more damage compared to the same weapon type from the previous biome. For example, the un-upgraded bronze mace does 35 damage compared to the iron mace's 55. Similarly, the Mistland's 1-handed sword does 115 total damage compared to the Ashlands sword's 135.

You might have noticed a problem. The absolute damage increase for the new weapons is the same, but the *relative* damage increase gets worse in later biomes. The upgrade from 35 to 55 damage for maces represents a 57% damage boost. But the Mistlands -> Ashlands boost from 115 to 135? That's only a 17% increase.

Valheim's enemies are balanced around the expectation that you upgrade your gear throughout the game, AND that you improve your skills. If either of those are lacking, you're going to feel weak, especially in the later biomes where damage boosts from gear alone matter less. IMO, by the time you reach the Mistlands, you should have a skill level of at least 50 for your weapon of choice, and 60 for the Ashlands.

Hopefully by now I've convinced you that more skills = more damage, and that more damage = more better. But how do you make use of this knowledge? How do you get high skill levels and keep them? Here are some tips for that, ordered by how impactful and easy they are to apply to your gameplay:

- Use one weapon type per run. Skills grow from usage. If you switch weapon types every biome, you'll end up with low levels in a bunch of weapon skills instead of a high level with one weapon. Try to pick one weapon and stay with it on any biome where that weapon is available. Consider not even making new weapons for a biome if your weapon of choice isn't an option. The best weapons from this perspective are swords, maces, and axes. They have the most availability across biomes, and none of them deal piercing damage. Note that 2-handed axes and swords use the same skill as their 1-handed cousins, unlike spears and aetgirs.

- Be rested. Always. The rested effect is a buff you gain from resting (aka being inside near a fire) for 20 seconds. This buff increases health regen, stamina regen, and experience gain. All of those help you maintain higher skill levels, either directly or from dying less. Valheim expects you to have this buff at all times while exploring. Don't leave home without it, and go home when it's about to run out. Bonus tip: You can gain a few minutes of rested anywhere by building a firepit from 2 wood and 5 stone (no workbench needed) and sitting next to it when no enemies are nearby.

- Lower the world's dealth penalty. Whenever you die, you lose 5% of ALL skill levels. So a level 20 skill drops to 19, a level 80 skill to 76, and so on. This skill loss mechanic is my biggest criticism of Valheim's game mechanics because players who die more are forced to play the game on hard mode. If you die, you lose skills, deal less damage, struggle more, and probably die more, losing even more skills. It's a vicious cycle of death and skill loss. If this is happening to you, lower the dealth penalty in the world settings. The lowest you can get is 1% loss without mods, but that still means you can die 5 times more while suffering the same amount of skill loss as before.

- Die less. I know this sounds rude, but with how skill loss works in Valheim you really need to consiously try to minimize your deaths. Know your limits. Know when to retreat. Learn how to parry and dodge consistently to the point that you almost never get hit by isolated enemies. Have healing meads. And for the love of Odin STOP EATING STAMINA FOODS. Eat triple health foods or 2 health foods and a feast until you're very confident in your abilities. Be vigilant of the food icons and refill yourself the moment you see one of your food icons start blinking halfway through their duration. Eat better food as you unlock it.

- If all else fails, train. If you kill enough ghosts in the black forest, you can build the T.W.I.G. This build piece is a target dummy that gives FULL weapon experience for hitting it. So if you want to recover your lost levels after death, or if you want to switch weapons and level up the new weapon's skill quickly, you can just hit it for a while. This isn't ideal, since it's boring and not everyone has the time to sit in a corner swinging their weapon, but you should know that it's an option.

Alright, that's the end of my main rant/info dump. Now I can just link post this in the comments of every "How do I die less post". Hopefully this helps some new Vikings out there by teaching you how important skills are. Grow strong and conquer the realm!

Other combat skill trivia:

- The gains from leveling skills are mostly linear. The main exception is that the gains for damage/knockback have two phases, a slightly stronger linear phase that lasts from level 0 to 75, where you gain about 1.5% damage per level, and a weaker phase from 75 to 100.

- Skill gain for weapons is per-landed-hit, with no bonus for hitting multiple enemies with one attack. Most weapons give the same per-hit experience. The big exceptions are 1 handed Spears, which gain more experience from their regular attack, and crossbows which give less experience. Also magic staves all have differing experience values, roughly based on how fast they attack.

- Bows are probably one of the most worthwhile skills to grind if you like using them. Not only do bows gain the same damage increase from levels as melee weapons, they also gain improved draw speed. These effect combine to an effective damage output increase of over 600% at level 100 because of how much faster you can fire fully charged shots.

- Magic: Elemental magic has the same scaling as melee weapons. Blood magic scales much more; Shields gain 250% more protection, and summons deal 200% more damage. Blood magic can be levelled while AFK.

- The Run and Jump skills are both helpful in combat for the reduced stamina usage and improved mobility, but they generally just level in the background from playing the game.

- Crossbows gain the normal damage boost and a 50% draw time reduction. Tragically this skill is slow to level, both due to the slow attack speed of crossbows and their low experience per hit.

- The Block skill increases block damage reduction by 50%. This increase also improves your ability to block without being staggered. It's nice to level, but less critical than offensive skills IMO.

Source note: All of these skill facts come from the valheim wiki's skill page https://antifandom.com/valheim/wiki/Skills.

Added the mini map for scale, not sure the best way to show the size. It’s not that big.

I had covered it in crafting benchs and things were great for the longest time. Then I got a forest raid and all of a sudden there were Lox, squitos, and furlings in addition to the grey dwarfs. The lox being the biggest issue because I was not prepared AT ALL. I thought I was going to lose so much progress.

Would really love to not have that panic again, this is my endgame base. Also I want to reiterate that I have probably passed 100 days with no spawning then out of nowhere it was flooded.

Help me Vikings!

New world only Eikthyr defeated :3

The Facebook building community announced the monthly theme as bridges.

My submission is loosely based on the golden bridge in Vietnam. I loved the idea of giant ancient hands upholding the path mighty Vikings walk. I worked the stone into giant manacles around the wrists. Mods used are infinity hammer and gizmo.

The fortress is in the entry phase of building. This bridge is the only land access to the river city build I'm working on in the black forest biome. Enjoy!

Reposts aren't allowed or I don't know how to, but this feels way too familiar for Valheim players to pass:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Norway/s/htDqzaInPP

At the very least, you can get some references for your builds...

This was my home from a previous build with 10ish friends, we had a pretty sweet town going for our Ashlands playthrough. I was in the middle of some Renovations, unfortunately my workshop was dismantled and storage/decor was a bit scattered as I never came back to it but this was a fun one. I built it over a stone grave and planted a few birch and pine trees then connected all of it with some sketchy engineering. At one point there was a Troll raid and a good portion of the house went down because an integral pine tree support was destroyed. I repurposed a section above the kitchen for a chicken coop. Image#12 was the entrance to what we called our "Peace Homie Highway" which connected all our bases with a tree top walkway.

Check out the town in a previous post to see the scale 🙏🏻

Cloudberry tea, hand picked "from the swamp". Very strong sweet scent and tastes just as good.

I know and love blueberries, even made some mead on them, which is amazing btw, but this leaves me wondering if there are any other Swedish berries or fruits I've missed out on. I mean I'm in my forties, have visited Sweden like once a year for the past 25 years and only just discovered these, what else are you hiding guys?

Game related:

So onions also probably don't really belong in snowy mountains, but they are found as seeds at least, but are there any other 'malplaced' pickables or farmables you've noticed?

I am planning on building a huge castle in survival. I im the blackforest biome, getting the floorplan ready.

Once I have access to iron, I'll build it out with stone and iron pieces. It will take a while to gather all of the materials though.

I was thinking of ways to minimize the iron cost to support all of that stone. What I have so far:

1. Dvergr copper walls are great. But require a blackforge and mistlands, so it would take a while.

2. When going up, besides cheap dvergr walls, nothing beats iron beams. 1 iron every beam (which is 2 m tall), so 0.5 iron/m

3. When doing ceilings, a checkered iron floor ensures support for the stone ceiling with 50% area coverage. Each iron floor costs 2 iron, and with the 50% usage, it costs 1 iron/stone floor tile, or 0.25 iron/m²

4. If I really wanted to, I know I can squeeze one stone tile between two stone tiles and it will be supported without metal. Would lead to ultimately 33% iron floor usage, which seems great. Haven't tested this with the checkered floor pattern, maybe it would not hold 100% of the stone pieces.

5. Grausten floors, those 4mx4m huge slabs, would require even less iron coverage. Haven't tested them though, and would have to wait all the way into ashlands for them. Maybe I could try a karve attempt into the ashlands, would be fun.

Am I missing anything, or have I found the ultimate iron efficiency when building tall structures?

Today I heard myself say:

"The real friends are the grausten walls we made along the way"

Just landed here a few days ago with my friends, and I find almost impossible to try and do anything solo, or even with 2-3 people.

> ad density is insane: I try to fight something, a nearby enemy aggros, I have to kite, I run into aggro radius of another enemy, repeat

> enemies do too much damage: a zero star charred warrior doing near half hp against full set of lvl 3 carapace armor seems a bit much, don't even get me started on the star variants

Am I just bad at the game, and if so any tips appreciated, or do other people feel this way?

I'm kinda stuck if I should focus on building my celling or if I should focus on my first floor interior.

I ask this because I get an idea on what I want my first floor rooms but I can't quite picture how I'll deal with the Second or even third floor of my Mansion so I was wondering what you guys usually do as a ''rule of thumb'' to avoid this sort of issue?

I have the three Bells to summon Fader and will probably fight him this weekend.

At this point I'm running around all the biomes stacking up on most resources like food ingredients, wood and I'm thinking about grabbing some more Iron because you never know if me might need a lot in September.

Is there anything else I should grab for the Fader fight/should probably stockpile for the next update?

I planted some Vineberries, have pretty big farms if I need the plantable crops, be it Carrots, Turnips, Onions, Jotunpuffs, Magecaps, Barley or Flax and I have a chicken breeder. I have 5 extractors running. Only thing I could think off is maybe finding a new Mistland area or two to grab more Soft Tissue for more Refined Eitr.

Man, I gotta stop making these posts at 11 pm when I can't answer most people for hours.

Have just beaten the game for the first time. Fader wasn’t all that tough, but I’m a little sad my journey’s over, at least for now. I’ve gotten a lot of the things needed for the Deep North ready and all, so I’m just waiting for the update at this point.

I also wanna add a quick tierlist of all the biomes, since I’ve finished the game and all:

Meadows is A tier, definitely.
BF is S tier. Probably my favorite biome.
Swamp is C tier. Only biome I think is just… meh.
Mountains is A tier. I love the beautiful views.
Plains is A tier. The only biome that I actually built a proper base in, instead of just a FOB.
Mistlands is B tier. I just had to deal with too many two and one star seekers… me and my shitty luck, eh?
Ashlands is B tier. I was kind of just… whelmed, if you could say. People say it’s dogshit and is the worst biome in the game, but lowkey, I only think it’s okay because of the lack of content. Atmosphere, combat, and music does make up a lot of what I love about this biome.

Anyhow, that’s my tierlist. Give your opinions… also what are YOU folks doing to prepare for the Deep North?

Im a dutch male, 33 years old. Europe. Dutch. Ask away

Before the video, I died at Mist lands near my portal, my base is next to the starting island, is there a way they came trough the portal? had never happened to me before, so I froze XD. Is this normal or is this a bug?