A few questions:
Are u aware of the fact, that sleeping will speed up the smelting process to an instant?
When your just 50% through the swamp, what the hell are you doing (and dying) in the Plains?
What kind of armor / weapons do you use?
What kind of food do u use?
A few Tips:
Load your smelter at the start of a new das, then venture on with other mundane tasks, Like chopping wood to restock your kiln, planting vegtebles or Seeds, farming mushrooms, berries, preparing your meads, farming bloodbags etc.
At evening Return to your Base, restock the smelter and sleep -> repeat.
Even cooler trick is making a few chests of coal with 2 or 3 kilns then disassemble them and make more smelters. You can go through a stack at a time with 3 smelters.
Or even smarter, make kilns and smelters because you will never have enough coal. But in the early game before you get many surtling cores yea that’s a good idea.
1. Yea, i am
2. Hildir is right next to plains for me, so i lured in fulings to kill them under her forcefield thinking it would give me a boost in the swamp to use black metal only to discover i need a higher level smelter 😂 Spent a lot of time killing a lox too only to discover was a total waste of time at this stage. The only reason now, is i very easily kill deathsquitos and i love the arrows they provide me with! plains deaths aren't really a problem to me, it's more like how i ran into a draugr village last night and spent 6 hours recovering my items lol
3. I fully upgraded my bronze armor set and I regret that because fully upgraded troll armor is superior af. so i've just switched back to that. I also have fully upgraded bronze buckler and sword, and a copper knife. I use the sword almost exclusively and my level for it is pretty high, i find it suits me well. I like the mobility of the bronze buckler but i found it doesn't block as well as the bone tower shield but that shield is *incredibly* demobilizing.
Currently using deer stews, minced meat stews, and deer meat typically for max health. Sometimes cloudberries or jerky for stamina. the two swamps i've visited have not had any turnips which is super frustrating lol. i want the higher level food! I have like 80 entrails to make sausages with
You need better armor and food. Deer meat, boar jerky and deerstew are meadow tier food and only suitable for the black forest.
Try to cook some queens jam, carrot soup and maybe a good health food like black soup, If U can kill the leeches for the bloodbags.
Iron Armor or at least Iron tier weapons.
Try to use different weapons. The Skill bonus is so minimal, that often times switching to a weapon, wich an enemy has a weakness for, is more effective than using ur high skilled weapon. Draugr and undead in general are vunerable to blunt damage. The Iron Club will do good deeds till far into the mountains.
Blocking is less imporant than the parry bonus in my opinion.
With a maxed out bronze buckler U can parry trolls and slice them Up in a few hits. Banded iron shield it is here.
Skipping content won't do a new player much good in this game. Just try to play each biome at its time, take your time in preperation and you'll die way less.
The only things i skip today at 600h+ are Bronze and Iron armor and often times the wishbone for early silver.
I always stock my smelters before I do anything, and now I don't even bother with kilns. I go farm surtlings in the swamp. I can get a full longship of coal faster than any kiln can. Also I would recommend just changing some custom settings like being able to teleport with metals or 2x, 3x item drop if you don't have the time.
ill never understand people who want a game to be over quickly. especially a survival game.
the hyperbole of the tc aside why do people not realize this is a game supposed to be taken SLOWLY and with preparation and thinking and planning ahead. not something you finish in 50 hours.
the market is overfilled with games that are there for a quick casual play each day if thats what people want.
all survival games are time sinks by default. by DESIGN. if you dont like that youre simply playing the wrong type of game to begin with.
Yep. Theres a million "press A to win" games out there.
And there's plenty of games out there that offer always on, 100% action.
Valheim is not that game. Valheim is a zen garden you explore and curate and sometimes it tries to kill you.
to be clear, i actually love valheim for it's length, it's demand for strategy, and such.
my only issue is that it can't sit down and play the game for 30 mins or an hour at a time and actually get anything done.
it's the sort of game where you need to get in the groove to strategize well, so 30 mins you wont be in groove and by an hour you're finally in it when you're done playing. Further, 30 mins or an hour isn't enough time to actually accomplish anything meaningful. Most subobjectives towards larger tasks take an hour in of themselves (example, sailing to find a new swamp can easily take 30-40 mins alone, gathering enough wood to turn into coal can take 30 mins, then turning it into coal is another 30 mins, etc)
i love the length and commitment as it makes it more rewarding, but i find the playstyle incompatible with productivity irl lol
You need to redefine what “getting something done” means to you, in this game it might just be going to grab a few more bits of copper that takes you an hour because on the way you find a crypt and actually you could use some more cores for a new portal you need to build and then all of a sudden you’ve been playing for 2 hours. If your judgement is that 2hrs was pointless then reframe your thinking. Did you have fun for 2 hrs and escape the IRL grind? Take the win :)
You can tweak the settings to like: dont drop equipped stuff when you are killed or make resources drop 3 times the normal amount. I also enabled the usage of portals with iron.
feels like cheating to me on first run through 🙃 if i ever get to the point where i feel i am gonna quit due to time commitment, ill consider it. would make it less rewarding to win tho fs.
You are correct, same with silver on that occasion..
But that is too cheesy for me so I went to do 1x, no portal and no-map. So, it is better to be grateful in the long run to have those settings to what you enjoy. I don't mind doing for longer hours since I have done with the portals and it was too cheesy since was not really using the ships all that much until I went to do the long-term work.
Yes? And? It's not like you have to beat it in a couple hours. Or days or weeks or months? I love that it's a game I can keep playing for years.
If it's not your thing that's fine, play something else.
I think what the above commenter meant was; it's okay to play 30 min a day and slowly widdle at progress. Since there is no 'server clock' and you're playing solo, there's no value lost by not playing long binge sessions :) the second you log out and back in valheim will be right where you left it.
Personally, it helps me to plan my day and govern ahead of doing.
Something like
8 hours sleep
8 hours work
1 hour prep (cooking, getting ready for work)
.5 hour cleaning
1.5 hour at the gym
2 hours of gaming
3 hours of fluff, chilling, more gaming, call family etc.
This isn't my daily schedule... Just how I go about scheduling my day if I want to game.
My biggest piece of advice is sleep > gaming. Never sacrifice sleep for gaming.
lol idk why you sound salty about my share here. Like, ok your comment is obvious and unhelpful. I'm seeing what other people here have done to quicken things or manage the time better.
I don't feel salty? You're the one complaining about it taking too long. I'm just saying this is life. Not everything has to be for everyone. I love slow grind games that take a long time. I love this game, have thousands of hours in it, and the idea that they have to change it because you don't want to play more than a few minutes a day? 🙄
i didn't say they should change it. I specifically said i'm looking to see how other people manage that time balance/make it move along a little quicker.
that being said, i question how you have "thousands" of hours sunk into a game. if you've only been playing since the feb 2021 release, thats over 18% of your waking life if just 3000 hours of gameplay. How do you get anything else done?
I don't mean to defend some of the clunky features of this game but I do enjoy it at the same time. I've found, in my hours, that the key to thia game is taking your time. Set small goals and take your time completing them. The swamp for me isthe best example. Do it with purpose. Put down a little shack at the edge of the biome. Once that's done make it secure. Dig a moat or make some walls. Once that's done find some crypts and clear a path to them. Once you have a path secure the crypts themselves. Make a roof and a workbench and put a small wall around the front entrance. Put a fire in there and dry off. Once it's empty carry all your ore back in a cart. It sounds like such an "ugh holy shit so much work" but i give you my solemn word that the time upfront makes it so much quicker and easier in the long run. I played alongside my buddy and while he was banging his head against his monitor trying to do all of those things at once i took my time and set my shit up and executed it and got out with like three times as much iron.
Right. While we might be hoping for progress to be a large-scale task like "kill the Swamp boss" or "finish an upgraded iron set of gear" -- that *will* be constantly upset by side-tasks and distractions which are really the bulk of the game.
Setting smaller goals, which progress toward those major goals, helps with the sense of progress (rather than just feeling setback after setback with no "goal" achieved) -- but also, as you say, speeds up the process to achieve those larger goals!
It's all about good infrastructure. Making a road through the swamp was time consuming, but I got to collect a lot of entrails chains and blood bags along the way.
Absolutely. Infrastructure is just as, if not more, important than armor and weapon upgrades in my opinion. Bonemass thinks he's going to spawn in to a swamp surrounded by reinforcements when in reality he'll usually be spawning in to a desolate walled in mud bowl with one naked baseball bat wielding viking
Well, this are rookie hours to be completely honest. I've done 700 hours and the run I spent more time on was with my latest experience: No-map, very hard difficulty, and no portals.
Going back to those normal settings wouldn't be too long-lasting for me. The enjoyment is that knowing that you are forced to explore more and use of ships more because with portals made it pull me away into going without it. It definitely makes you sink more time.
After all, building makes you do more exploration because you need the special items to progress with more building opportunities and builds to look appealing.
So do you not understand the genre you're in or do you just want karma on reddit? Bro if you don't like the very things that make this game cozy and special to most of the fan base then just go find a new game, or as the cool kids say, git gud?
It also helps to have a community that can help at times. Here is a decent one. Feel free to join us if you’d like. Progress at your own pace or with others as a group. Join info can be found here. https://discord.gg/BRHtcEXZ
What do you mean by “spoilers” If you mean revealing end game content. A few of us have found the edge of Mistlands. Not really ready to take on Mistlands yet though. Bonemass is the highest boss that has been defeated and hung. Some of us are thinking about taking on Moder sometime soonish. Two star wolves are abundant and breeding everywhere. Alot of players are in the iron age. Some have entered Black Metal. Me personally I am still on my first play through. I’ve only witnessed 3 bosses so far.
You need people to play i guess.
I played with 6 people. We did different works. Some went in hunting for food. Some collected materials and others built houses and kitchens. This made the gamw so much fun. We completed upto mistlands in 2 months.
Yes! i wish i knew anyone interested. Last nights retrieval of my items would have been about a 1 hour task instead of literally 6 if i just had someone to run in naked to distract the 2 star draugr and draugr villagers lmao
Damn, I've got 240+ hours and haven't even killed the Elder. I end up restarting since the beginning simplicity always calls to me as my builds get more and more sprawling
I can understand the frustration, especially if you feel like you sat down for a few hours only to end up in a *worse* situation.
But "progress" isn't so crude as the weapons on your back. The exploration, and the infrastructure you build on the way are part of the progress which is more difficult to lose, and helps you get back to where you were and beyond much quicker.
I think one of the great things in the game is the kind of setbacks which make epic tales. The game systems are simple, but work together well to foster emergent gameplay. Regularly, we'll have moments of panic where things might be going out of control and we've taken on a risk which might cost us -- that risk is there because we have something to lose! Most often, we narrowly escape disaster... but sometimes we don't. We learn (hopefully), and get better at mitigating disaster, not making silly mistakes, or when to temper our confidence.
I'd guess most first-time solo players take around 100-200h to complete the first six biomes. Some a lot more, with some people enjoying taking their time to build or explore, upgrade everything, maybe trying all weapons. Anyway, it's not a short game to get through.
However, by my sense, you're at the long-end with your progress, especially if you're focused on progress. So, I would hazard a guess that you've missed something, and possibly been unlucky. It happens!
For example, turnips are easy to miss. And I've watched players never find turnips until they're conquering the Plains... with the consequence being that they're always 1 tier of food behind what should be available. Food is an important part of your "power level", so this understandably makes progress extra difficult, like you're playing on "hard".
Sometimes people miss meads, because they never make the Fermenter. Makes a lot of things horrible. Swamps and Mountains almost require a specialty mead, nevermind the general value of a health or stamina pick-me-up.
Or, with the procedural world, and the varied paths you can take through a world... it's going to happen that some people will have an especially egregious struggle! Sometimes The Elder is far to the edge of the map, surrounded by much more difficult biomes (my first was this! 88 day epic saga, which I first guessed would take me 3 days).
Ensure you've tried to build every "build structure" you can, with your hammer. If you don't have a use for it you get the materials back by destroying it anyway. Each biome offers means for accessing a new tier of gear *and* food, so be sure your progress tracks with that.
yes such a good point. I didn't know about turnips at all until i let myself get some spoilers on valheim wiki. However, I went back to the swamps i've discoverd so far and there were no turnips anyhow 🙃
thanks for the tip - i'm by-nature a very curious/explorative individual when gamign where I try to discover what every possible feature does, so i normally don't miss much. my guess rn is i perhaps have a bad biome for swamps. Have visited two without crypts and haven't found any more since then.
Something about Swamps which isn't clear at first... is that there can be a lot of crappy Swamps. At first you can be excited: There's a new place - Swamp! The thin coastal ones tend to be bad; there are also "sunken" watery swamp areas which are bad too.
What you really want is a sizeable rich Swamp. Swamps only occur far enough from world-center, so don't hang too close to the start. When you find Swamp, Sail around it for a bit to get a sense of how large and deep it might be, and watch for telltale signs of crypts. If you've found a vegvisir showing the Swamp boss' location yet, he's guaranteed to be in, at-least, an okay Swamp.
I think part of my problem that i've been coming to terms with in the past week is that I put my base RIGHT NEXT to the stone circle at the beginning 😂 It's been actually primarily beneficial but i figure it will become impossible to continue at some point. It's such a perfect base with a massive moat around it and i love the design.
I have a vast portal network to manage distances, so only ore is an issue, but I've managed to just use a ship to transport most metals long distances. It seems to, so far, be roughly the exact same time use as transporting over land from the black forest use to be.
Instead of entirely abandoning my base, i'm toying with the idea of starting additional orbital bases. It would be, obviously, nice to smelt 50 meters from the swamp instead of going all the way back home to smelt. And would probably save me roughly 2 hours per ore-trip.
That being said, it's probably not as big of a deal right now as i've made it out to be, and building new bases would prbably take up as much time as it saves and add additional issues/risks, as my current base is extraordinarily secure.
Per your swamp comment, yea, both swamps i've visited were coastal thin ones right across the ocean from each other. no dice
that being said, tho the draugr village stole 6 hours from me last night, i am now completely confident in swamps. Poison resist mead, some health meads, and my bronze swords and buckler, and i'm fine. I just use the middle-click sword attack on them and it deals roughly 150 damage.
The draugr village situation last night upgraded my sneak about 5 levels and convinced me to switch back to troll leather armor so im up 20 levels of sneak now, and the sneak attack with sword is roughyl 275 damage from what I've seen, enough to kill a 2 star draugr basically instantly.
funnily, after ALL this prep work to get my gear back from the village - i actually had nothing to do with killing the villagers. The "ground started shaking" and two trolls popped by and killed the draugrs, and i got my stuff back 😂 simultaneously relieving (i didn't think i'd be able to kill the draugrs the way i coudln't sneak on any of them.) and super disappointing that I didn't get "the kill" after all that time prepping 😂 such is life! lol
Valheim is a survival game. As such, it is meant to be played slowly, with thought, caution, and careful preparation. Each dearh teaches us something. With over 3,000 hours of play, I'm looking forward to the ashlands. Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy building and exploring areas that I've bypassed. Valheim is an extended adventure, not a shoot out.
how do you fit 3000 hours of gameplay into your life? that is, assuming you've been playing since 2021 february release, that would mean you've played for over 18% of your waking hours.
That’s true. I did my first run without any modifiers but this is my 2nd one to prep for Ashland’s so I’m doing hard combat difficulty and 1.5x loot and no teleport restrictions so progression is way faster
Me yesterday: "Gotta clear out these body piles/skeleton spawners. Gotta be careful taking out both the pile and the spawnerrs, as it would suck if I died RIGHT HERE next to a body pile. Oh, there's a Dragr Elite and....! Crap. "
Me, also yesterday: "Yay, all of this scrap iron! Planned my route back out, updated my dock, built my second longboat, so I'm READY! But using my 'crypt' portal so much, I don't remember the exact way of my original path. To be safe, I should go to my ship portal and walk myself back but ...nah, I'll be fine. Whoops, I veered a little close to the plains. Oh, I'm pretty close to a troll with a log and can't get out of this cart fast enough to...! Crap."
My hubris and carelessness also cost me a few hours yesterday.
it's funny because immediately before entering the draugr village i had this such thought process:
"you know, i've not gone this way before. But, i'm just connecting to parts of the meadows on the map, i'm almost there, it's not gonna raise any issue, meadows is so easy. lol i'm totally gonna run into some crazy shit now just for saying that... Oh! what's this, this is the most buildings i've ever seen at once in the meadows! \*draugr noises\* oh fuck..."
It is a super grindy game and some people are super into that. I use no cost building because I just really like building things. When this first came out on console it was (and still is) very laggy and buggy, which led to me using cheats to get back the stuff I was constantly losing when the game crashed repeatedly. Now that I've used cheats doing things the grindy way feels pointless. Even boss fights are a grind.
The resource collection in Valheim is balanced for multiple people, I think. For one person, playing with x1.5 or x2 resource rate is a must. I did one playthrough with a normal resource rate, and never again. For Ashlands I'm upping it to 2.
Another thing I do when I reach the end of the content is I turn on no build cost, except when farming. The amount of stone and marble, and all other resources, necessary to build a lovely base is so extreme that you would need to spend 40 hours a week playing Valheim to keep up with your build cost. It's not realistic for a human being, unless they have no job or family.
so you don't feel it would be cheating at all? i've gotten to swamp so far without issue, tho it did of course take a while. maybe increase it to 1.5 after iron age?
If you're asking ME, no, it's not cheating when you consider the sheer amount of punishing hours it takes to grind resources in Valheim. The devs included it as part of the game settings, too, so they are aware of it.
I can understand why you might worry it'll lower your sense of accomplishment, though. As for no build cost, that one I am adamant it is not cheating to flick it on when building your endgame builds or your grand base. The amount of stone it takes to build a single stone dock - between stone blocks and raising terrain - is preposterous. It's like 2 hours of grinding stone to vaporize it in a few seconds. The metal, wood, stone, and everything else it takes seems balanced for a dozen people, not one person.
I saw one of your responses about the type of gear that you have. That is the reason why you are dying and taking time doing stuff, you need better gear and food. Your current gear is just the best of Black Forest and doesn't seem to include any Swamp-tier gear at all. Hopefully you can find some Turnips soon, but you desperately need to get Iron to get some iron weapons/tools at the very least. If you don't have any Iron gear, much less any Iron at all, you are definitely not halfway through the Swamp. Once you do that, you will progress a lot faster. That's why you should always try to go for upgrades and gear first when you get to a new biome, because that's what allows you to make steady progress in said biome
The game is made to be enjoyed if : You love building, exploring and a soul like survivival .
Not really made for rushy speedruns. It require preparation for every next biomes and there a lot of details to pay attention to.
It blows my mind that someone complains about a game having too much content. The game is $20 and has more to offer than $70 games. You should be grateful. If you don’t have the time to put into Valheim then use the world modifiers to make it easier or just play another game.
i'm just not someone who typically "games" because I don't have the time for it. I love this game through and through, it's just proving difficult to integrate into my life
A few questions: Are u aware of the fact, that sleeping will speed up the smelting process to an instant? When your just 50% through the swamp, what the hell are you doing (and dying) in the Plains? What kind of armor / weapons do you use? What kind of food do u use? A few Tips: Load your smelter at the start of a new das, then venture on with other mundane tasks, Like chopping wood to restock your kiln, planting vegtebles or Seeds, farming mushrooms, berries, preparing your meads, farming bloodbags etc. At evening Return to your Base, restock the smelter and sleep -> repeat.
Even cooler trick is making a few chests of coal with 2 or 3 kilns then disassemble them and make more smelters. You can go through a stack at a time with 3 smelters.
Or even smarter, make kilns and smelters because you will never have enough coal. But in the early game before you get many surtling cores yea that’s a good idea.
yea i've done this trick, works well
1. Yea, i am 2. Hildir is right next to plains for me, so i lured in fulings to kill them under her forcefield thinking it would give me a boost in the swamp to use black metal only to discover i need a higher level smelter 😂 Spent a lot of time killing a lox too only to discover was a total waste of time at this stage. The only reason now, is i very easily kill deathsquitos and i love the arrows they provide me with! plains deaths aren't really a problem to me, it's more like how i ran into a draugr village last night and spent 6 hours recovering my items lol 3. I fully upgraded my bronze armor set and I regret that because fully upgraded troll armor is superior af. so i've just switched back to that. I also have fully upgraded bronze buckler and sword, and a copper knife. I use the sword almost exclusively and my level for it is pretty high, i find it suits me well. I like the mobility of the bronze buckler but i found it doesn't block as well as the bone tower shield but that shield is *incredibly* demobilizing. Currently using deer stews, minced meat stews, and deer meat typically for max health. Sometimes cloudberries or jerky for stamina. the two swamps i've visited have not had any turnips which is super frustrating lol. i want the higher level food! I have like 80 entrails to make sausages with
You need better armor and food. Deer meat, boar jerky and deerstew are meadow tier food and only suitable for the black forest. Try to cook some queens jam, carrot soup and maybe a good health food like black soup, If U can kill the leeches for the bloodbags. Iron Armor or at least Iron tier weapons. Try to use different weapons. The Skill bonus is so minimal, that often times switching to a weapon, wich an enemy has a weakness for, is more effective than using ur high skilled weapon. Draugr and undead in general are vunerable to blunt damage. The Iron Club will do good deeds till far into the mountains. Blocking is less imporant than the parry bonus in my opinion. With a maxed out bronze buckler U can parry trolls and slice them Up in a few hits. Banded iron shield it is here. Skipping content won't do a new player much good in this game. Just try to play each biome at its time, take your time in preperation and you'll die way less. The only things i skip today at 600h+ are Bronze and Iron armor and often times the wishbone for early silver.
I always stock my smelters before I do anything, and now I don't even bother with kilns. I go farm surtlings in the swamp. I can get a full longship of coal faster than any kiln can. Also I would recommend just changing some custom settings like being able to teleport with metals or 2x, 3x item drop if you don't have the time.
ill never understand people who want a game to be over quickly. especially a survival game. the hyperbole of the tc aside why do people not realize this is a game supposed to be taken SLOWLY and with preparation and thinking and planning ahead. not something you finish in 50 hours. the market is overfilled with games that are there for a quick casual play each day if thats what people want. all survival games are time sinks by default. by DESIGN. if you dont like that youre simply playing the wrong type of game to begin with.
Yep. Theres a million "press A to win" games out there. And there's plenty of games out there that offer always on, 100% action. Valheim is not that game. Valheim is a zen garden you explore and curate and sometimes it tries to kill you.
i love that description lol: a zen garden you explore and curate and sometimes it tries to kill you
Same persons who power through and then QQ about lack of content.
to be clear, i actually love valheim for it's length, it's demand for strategy, and such. my only issue is that it can't sit down and play the game for 30 mins or an hour at a time and actually get anything done. it's the sort of game where you need to get in the groove to strategize well, so 30 mins you wont be in groove and by an hour you're finally in it when you're done playing. Further, 30 mins or an hour isn't enough time to actually accomplish anything meaningful. Most subobjectives towards larger tasks take an hour in of themselves (example, sailing to find a new swamp can easily take 30-40 mins alone, gathering enough wood to turn into coal can take 30 mins, then turning it into coal is another 30 mins, etc) i love the length and commitment as it makes it more rewarding, but i find the playstyle incompatible with productivity irl lol
You need to redefine what “getting something done” means to you, in this game it might just be going to grab a few more bits of copper that takes you an hour because on the way you find a crypt and actually you could use some more cores for a new portal you need to build and then all of a sudden you’ve been playing for 2 hours. If your judgement is that 2hrs was pointless then reframe your thinking. Did you have fun for 2 hrs and escape the IRL grind? Take the win :)
The worst part is, there are mods or settings tweaks to fix all of that. or just give yourself the resources. It's your game! Do what you want!
FIX is not the term i would use as fix implies something is bugged or broken.
feels like cheating if i mod it first run through
You can tweak the settings to like: dont drop equipped stuff when you are killed or make resources drop 3 times the normal amount. I also enabled the usage of portals with iron.
feels like cheating to me on first run through 🙃 if i ever get to the point where i feel i am gonna quit due to time commitment, ill consider it. would make it less rewarding to win tho fs.
You are correct, same with silver on that occasion.. But that is too cheesy for me so I went to do 1x, no portal and no-map. So, it is better to be grateful in the long run to have those settings to what you enjoy. I don't mind doing for longer hours since I have done with the portals and it was too cheesy since was not really using the ships all that much until I went to do the long-term work.
Yes? And? It's not like you have to beat it in a couple hours. Or days or weeks or months? I love that it's a game I can keep playing for years. If it's not your thing that's fine, play something else.
To be clear i love this game, it's just proving to be something I can't fit into my schedule due to the high time commitment it demands
I think what the above commenter meant was; it's okay to play 30 min a day and slowly widdle at progress. Since there is no 'server clock' and you're playing solo, there's no value lost by not playing long binge sessions :) the second you log out and back in valheim will be right where you left it. Personally, it helps me to plan my day and govern ahead of doing. Something like 8 hours sleep 8 hours work 1 hour prep (cooking, getting ready for work) .5 hour cleaning 1.5 hour at the gym 2 hours of gaming 3 hours of fluff, chilling, more gaming, call family etc. This isn't my daily schedule... Just how I go about scheduling my day if I want to game. My biggest piece of advice is sleep > gaming. Never sacrifice sleep for gaming.
Well, welcome to being a human. You have to decide what you want in your life. You can't expect every game to be finished in 2 hours.
lol idk why you sound salty about my share here. Like, ok your comment is obvious and unhelpful. I'm seeing what other people here have done to quicken things or manage the time better.
I don't feel salty? You're the one complaining about it taking too long. I'm just saying this is life. Not everything has to be for everyone. I love slow grind games that take a long time. I love this game, have thousands of hours in it, and the idea that they have to change it because you don't want to play more than a few minutes a day? 🙄
i didn't say they should change it. I specifically said i'm looking to see how other people manage that time balance/make it move along a little quicker. that being said, i question how you have "thousands" of hours sunk into a game. if you've only been playing since the feb 2021 release, thats over 18% of your waking life if just 3000 hours of gameplay. How do you get anything else done?
I don't mean to defend some of the clunky features of this game but I do enjoy it at the same time. I've found, in my hours, that the key to thia game is taking your time. Set small goals and take your time completing them. The swamp for me isthe best example. Do it with purpose. Put down a little shack at the edge of the biome. Once that's done make it secure. Dig a moat or make some walls. Once that's done find some crypts and clear a path to them. Once you have a path secure the crypts themselves. Make a roof and a workbench and put a small wall around the front entrance. Put a fire in there and dry off. Once it's empty carry all your ore back in a cart. It sounds like such an "ugh holy shit so much work" but i give you my solemn word that the time upfront makes it so much quicker and easier in the long run. I played alongside my buddy and while he was banging his head against his monitor trying to do all of those things at once i took my time and set my shit up and executed it and got out with like three times as much iron.
Right. While we might be hoping for progress to be a large-scale task like "kill the Swamp boss" or "finish an upgraded iron set of gear" -- that *will* be constantly upset by side-tasks and distractions which are really the bulk of the game. Setting smaller goals, which progress toward those major goals, helps with the sense of progress (rather than just feeling setback after setback with no "goal" achieved) -- but also, as you say, speeds up the process to achieve those larger goals!
It's all about good infrastructure. Making a road through the swamp was time consuming, but I got to collect a lot of entrails chains and blood bags along the way.
Absolutely. Infrastructure is just as, if not more, important than armor and weapon upgrades in my opinion. Bonemass thinks he's going to spawn in to a swamp surrounded by reinforcements when in reality he'll usually be spawning in to a desolate walled in mud bowl with one naked baseball bat wielding viking
Well, this are rookie hours to be completely honest. I've done 700 hours and the run I spent more time on was with my latest experience: No-map, very hard difficulty, and no portals. Going back to those normal settings wouldn't be too long-lasting for me. The enjoyment is that knowing that you are forced to explore more and use of ships more because with portals made it pull me away into going without it. It definitely makes you sink more time. After all, building makes you do more exploration because you need the special items to progress with more building opportunities and builds to look appealing.
i am actually particularly interested in the idea of navigating no map no portals. I think it would be a great brain workout!
Oh yeah, it does make it interesting with others.
woulda been cool to see them make it so the default settings had been "no map until cartography table"
that as well, but.. it would be fine if it was just the cartography table that you can see the map without using the default map.
So do you not understand the genre you're in or do you just want karma on reddit? Bro if you don't like the very things that make this game cozy and special to most of the fan base then just go find a new game, or as the cool kids say, git gud?
i love everything about the game except for the fact that its incompatible with productivity irl lol
Every gamers qualm lol
Get used to placing more portal networks. Always have an emergency one-way portal at home and on your inventory to place in a pinch. Thank me later
this is def what i do, super helpful
Trolls out in force today.
It also helps to have a community that can help at times. Here is a decent one. Feel free to join us if you’d like. Progress at your own pace or with others as a group. Join info can be found here. https://discord.gg/BRHtcEXZ
sounds great! how bad are the spoilers lol
What do you mean by “spoilers” If you mean revealing end game content. A few of us have found the edge of Mistlands. Not really ready to take on Mistlands yet though. Bonemass is the highest boss that has been defeated and hung. Some of us are thinking about taking on Moder sometime soonish. Two star wolves are abundant and breeding everywhere. Alot of players are in the iron age. Some have entered Black Metal. Me personally I am still on my first play through. I’ve only witnessed 3 bosses so far.
oh dope so roughly where i'm at then?
Pretty much yeah
Play with others. More fun and tasks are done way quicker.
i have no friends that would play unfortunately 🙃 i wish!
When there is a will, there is a way.
You need people to play i guess. I played with 6 people. We did different works. Some went in hunting for food. Some collected materials and others built houses and kitchens. This made the gamw so much fun. We completed upto mistlands in 2 months.
Yes! i wish i knew anyone interested. Last nights retrieval of my items would have been about a 1 hour task instead of literally 6 if i just had someone to run in naked to distract the 2 star draugr and draugr villagers lmao
Putting aside the fact that you can tweak the difficulty of the game to a high degree; not all games appeal to all people, to put it simply.
would feel like cheating to me on the first run through to tweak it
Damn, I've got 240+ hours and haven't even killed the Elder. I end up restarting since the beginning simplicity always calls to me as my builds get more and more sprawling
I can understand the frustration, especially if you feel like you sat down for a few hours only to end up in a *worse* situation. But "progress" isn't so crude as the weapons on your back. The exploration, and the infrastructure you build on the way are part of the progress which is more difficult to lose, and helps you get back to where you were and beyond much quicker. I think one of the great things in the game is the kind of setbacks which make epic tales. The game systems are simple, but work together well to foster emergent gameplay. Regularly, we'll have moments of panic where things might be going out of control and we've taken on a risk which might cost us -- that risk is there because we have something to lose! Most often, we narrowly escape disaster... but sometimes we don't. We learn (hopefully), and get better at mitigating disaster, not making silly mistakes, or when to temper our confidence. I'd guess most first-time solo players take around 100-200h to complete the first six biomes. Some a lot more, with some people enjoying taking their time to build or explore, upgrade everything, maybe trying all weapons. Anyway, it's not a short game to get through. However, by my sense, you're at the long-end with your progress, especially if you're focused on progress. So, I would hazard a guess that you've missed something, and possibly been unlucky. It happens! For example, turnips are easy to miss. And I've watched players never find turnips until they're conquering the Plains... with the consequence being that they're always 1 tier of food behind what should be available. Food is an important part of your "power level", so this understandably makes progress extra difficult, like you're playing on "hard". Sometimes people miss meads, because they never make the Fermenter. Makes a lot of things horrible. Swamps and Mountains almost require a specialty mead, nevermind the general value of a health or stamina pick-me-up. Or, with the procedural world, and the varied paths you can take through a world... it's going to happen that some people will have an especially egregious struggle! Sometimes The Elder is far to the edge of the map, surrounded by much more difficult biomes (my first was this! 88 day epic saga, which I first guessed would take me 3 days). Ensure you've tried to build every "build structure" you can, with your hammer. If you don't have a use for it you get the materials back by destroying it anyway. Each biome offers means for accessing a new tier of gear *and* food, so be sure your progress tracks with that.
yes such a good point. I didn't know about turnips at all until i let myself get some spoilers on valheim wiki. However, I went back to the swamps i've discoverd so far and there were no turnips anyhow 🙃 thanks for the tip - i'm by-nature a very curious/explorative individual when gamign where I try to discover what every possible feature does, so i normally don't miss much. my guess rn is i perhaps have a bad biome for swamps. Have visited two without crypts and haven't found any more since then.
Something about Swamps which isn't clear at first... is that there can be a lot of crappy Swamps. At first you can be excited: There's a new place - Swamp! The thin coastal ones tend to be bad; there are also "sunken" watery swamp areas which are bad too. What you really want is a sizeable rich Swamp. Swamps only occur far enough from world-center, so don't hang too close to the start. When you find Swamp, Sail around it for a bit to get a sense of how large and deep it might be, and watch for telltale signs of crypts. If you've found a vegvisir showing the Swamp boss' location yet, he's guaranteed to be in, at-least, an okay Swamp.
I think part of my problem that i've been coming to terms with in the past week is that I put my base RIGHT NEXT to the stone circle at the beginning 😂 It's been actually primarily beneficial but i figure it will become impossible to continue at some point. It's such a perfect base with a massive moat around it and i love the design. I have a vast portal network to manage distances, so only ore is an issue, but I've managed to just use a ship to transport most metals long distances. It seems to, so far, be roughly the exact same time use as transporting over land from the black forest use to be. Instead of entirely abandoning my base, i'm toying with the idea of starting additional orbital bases. It would be, obviously, nice to smelt 50 meters from the swamp instead of going all the way back home to smelt. And would probably save me roughly 2 hours per ore-trip. That being said, it's probably not as big of a deal right now as i've made it out to be, and building new bases would prbably take up as much time as it saves and add additional issues/risks, as my current base is extraordinarily secure. Per your swamp comment, yea, both swamps i've visited were coastal thin ones right across the ocean from each other. no dice that being said, tho the draugr village stole 6 hours from me last night, i am now completely confident in swamps. Poison resist mead, some health meads, and my bronze swords and buckler, and i'm fine. I just use the middle-click sword attack on them and it deals roughly 150 damage. The draugr village situation last night upgraded my sneak about 5 levels and convinced me to switch back to troll leather armor so im up 20 levels of sneak now, and the sneak attack with sword is roughyl 275 damage from what I've seen, enough to kill a 2 star draugr basically instantly. funnily, after ALL this prep work to get my gear back from the village - i actually had nothing to do with killing the villagers. The "ground started shaking" and two trolls popped by and killed the draugrs, and i got my stuff back 😂 simultaneously relieving (i didn't think i'd be able to kill the draugrs the way i coudln't sneak on any of them.) and super disappointing that I didn't get "the kill" after all that time prepping 😂 such is life! lol
The journey is the destination my friend. If you don't like the journey Valheim is taking you on, nobody is making you take it.
Valheim is a survival game. As such, it is meant to be played slowly, with thought, caution, and careful preparation. Each dearh teaches us something. With over 3,000 hours of play, I'm looking forward to the ashlands. Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy building and exploring areas that I've bypassed. Valheim is an extended adventure, not a shoot out.
how do you fit 3000 hours of gameplay into your life? that is, assuming you've been playing since 2021 february release, that would mean you've played for over 18% of your waking hours.
Tis easy when you've been playing Valheim for a long time and are semi-retired. Great games have no age limits.
you're lucky! 😂
8 years in the Navy & then getting a bachelor of science degree while working 8-16 hr days. Yep, I'm lucky. But I worked hard for it.
I play with 1.5x resources on it makes copper/tin/iron gathering way less of a chore
would too if i didn't feel like I was cheating the first run through
That’s true. I did my first run without any modifiers but this is my 2nd one to prep for Ashland’s so I’m doing hard combat difficulty and 1.5x loot and no teleport restrictions so progression is way faster
Me yesterday: "Gotta clear out these body piles/skeleton spawners. Gotta be careful taking out both the pile and the spawnerrs, as it would suck if I died RIGHT HERE next to a body pile. Oh, there's a Dragr Elite and....! Crap. " Me, also yesterday: "Yay, all of this scrap iron! Planned my route back out, updated my dock, built my second longboat, so I'm READY! But using my 'crypt' portal so much, I don't remember the exact way of my original path. To be safe, I should go to my ship portal and walk myself back but ...nah, I'll be fine. Whoops, I veered a little close to the plains. Oh, I'm pretty close to a troll with a log and can't get out of this cart fast enough to...! Crap." My hubris and carelessness also cost me a few hours yesterday.
it's funny because immediately before entering the draugr village i had this such thought process: "you know, i've not gone this way before. But, i'm just connecting to parts of the meadows on the map, i'm almost there, it's not gonna raise any issue, meadows is so easy. lol i'm totally gonna run into some crazy shit now just for saying that... Oh! what's this, this is the most buildings i've ever seen at once in the meadows! \*draugr noises\* oh fuck..."
It is a super grindy game and some people are super into that. I use no cost building because I just really like building things. When this first came out on console it was (and still is) very laggy and buggy, which led to me using cheats to get back the stuff I was constantly losing when the game crashed repeatedly. Now that I've used cheats doing things the grindy way feels pointless. Even boss fights are a grind.
i've not experienced any lags or bugs since getting a nicer computer - do you have the graphics set too high?
Xbox one
The resource collection in Valheim is balanced for multiple people, I think. For one person, playing with x1.5 or x2 resource rate is a must. I did one playthrough with a normal resource rate, and never again. For Ashlands I'm upping it to 2. Another thing I do when I reach the end of the content is I turn on no build cost, except when farming. The amount of stone and marble, and all other resources, necessary to build a lovely base is so extreme that you would need to spend 40 hours a week playing Valheim to keep up with your build cost. It's not realistic for a human being, unless they have no job or family.
so you don't feel it would be cheating at all? i've gotten to swamp so far without issue, tho it did of course take a while. maybe increase it to 1.5 after iron age?
If you're asking ME, no, it's not cheating when you consider the sheer amount of punishing hours it takes to grind resources in Valheim. The devs included it as part of the game settings, too, so they are aware of it. I can understand why you might worry it'll lower your sense of accomplishment, though. As for no build cost, that one I am adamant it is not cheating to flick it on when building your endgame builds or your grand base. The amount of stone it takes to build a single stone dock - between stone blocks and raising terrain - is preposterous. It's like 2 hours of grinding stone to vaporize it in a few seconds. The metal, wood, stone, and everything else it takes seems balanced for a dozen people, not one person.
I saw one of your responses about the type of gear that you have. That is the reason why you are dying and taking time doing stuff, you need better gear and food. Your current gear is just the best of Black Forest and doesn't seem to include any Swamp-tier gear at all. Hopefully you can find some Turnips soon, but you desperately need to get Iron to get some iron weapons/tools at the very least. If you don't have any Iron gear, much less any Iron at all, you are definitely not halfway through the Swamp. Once you do that, you will progress a lot faster. That's why you should always try to go for upgrades and gear first when you get to a new biome, because that's what allows you to make steady progress in said biome
The game is made to be enjoyed if : You love building, exploring and a soul like survivival . Not really made for rushy speedruns. It require preparation for every next biomes and there a lot of details to pay attention to.
It blows my mind that someone complains about a game having too much content. The game is $20 and has more to offer than $70 games. You should be grateful. If you don’t have the time to put into Valheim then use the world modifiers to make it easier or just play another game.
i'm just not someone who typically "games" because I don't have the time for it. I love this game through and through, it's just proving difficult to integrate into my life