valheim

For the past year, newbie and numbers have been playing Valheim on-and-off. I’ve been loosely following their adventures. There was The Boat Incident, where they were returning from an expedition on their raft at night and got ambushed by a serpent. There was the time they spent an hour+ following the branches of Yggdrasil in hopes of finding the trunk, and eventually sailed off the edge of the world. There was the whole “newbie and numbers hunt birds” arc. (“My blood is boiling all over again,” said numbers. “Wait. Never mind. I was thinking about the ‘numbers and newbie hunt rabbits’ arc, and mistakenly blaming birds for my anger.” It’s tough for Vikings every day.) Recently they reached the ashlands for the first time, and spent the next 15 minutes running around screaming while being chased by hordes of mobs.

HGR has mostly not been following their adventures. Open world survival craft is not his thing. But he did watch a couple of the boss fights, including the fight against the Queen, which he proclaimed “the jankest shit ever” (both derogatory and positive, somehow).

On Monday, I woke up from my afternoon nap and got on discord to hear loud bickering between HGR and newbie. Turns out they started a brand new Viking adventure together. Totally did not expect HGR to pick up “the jankest shit ever,” especially since he’s in the middle of a Tactical Nexus phase. It sounded like there were immense difficulties with things like finding stones and building a shelter for the night. So I bought the game and hopped on.

HGR was in charge of the server parameters, so it’s on Very Hard with enemy raids set to max. I’ve mostly been hanging out at base and treating it as House Simulator: Viking Edition. I built our starter house (technically the “side base” since the very first shack that HGR built was the “main base”), and more recently a lakeside house (the “tertiary base”) that is our main base of operations since we need water access for expeditions by boat. The crafting mechanics are kind of jank in multiple ways. If you’re making a ceiling-to-ground support beam, you need to place the constituent beams quickly before the column collapses under its own weight and you have to start over. (Once you’re fully connected to the ground, it’s all good.) Leveling the ground is nigh impossible, even for builders with much more experience than me; the standard solution is to leave the ground uneven and just build the house on stilts. newbie and I had a whole conversation about leveling the ground and HGR was basically facepalming the whole time. It was an important discussion!!

Anyway, the tertiary base is looking great. We are fully moved in now. It was a great stress test for the house when HGR arrived at dusk and couldn’t find his way around (MORE TORCHES. we need MORE TORCHES. two torches at every entrance, torches in the sleeping area, torches in the crafting room…). At one point he got himself trapped underneath the house (I’m not even sure how this happened) and newbie had to bust him out and then rebuild the affected area.