Smash hit Viking game Valheim will eventually be completed and have a final ending, developer Iron Gate Studio has promised, as today's big Hearth and Home update arrives.

There's no suggestion we are close to that yet, but Iron Gate said it wanted to eventually polish off the project and move on - rather than keep it continually updated as a live service game or an MMO.

"Spoiler alert: this game will eventually have an ending. There will be a definitive ending where you beat the game, just so people understand," artist Robin Eyre explained in a 30 minute fireside chat developer video.

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Valheim's first major update comes out 16th September.

Publisher Coffee Stain Publishing and developer Iron Gate Studio confirmed the date for Valheim Hearth & Home, and released a new cinematic animated trailer, below, during Gamescom Opening Night Live.

The hugely successful open-world co-op survival game gets a raft of new content with this update.

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Hot on the heels of the news Outriders may not have broken even despite sales of up to 3m units, comes confirmation Biomutant broke even a week after launch with sales of 1m.

Biomutant, developed by Swedish studio Experiment 101, launched 25th May, and has sold more than 1m copies, parent company Embracer Group said in a financial report issued this morning.

"The full investment into development and marketing as well as the acquisition cost for Experiment 101 and the IP, was recouped within a week after launch," Embracer said.

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Iron Gate has served up a few more morsels of information about upcoming Valheim update Hearth and Home, and this time, it's all about changes to the game's food system. The way snacking works is being given an overhaul - and it looks like some food items are getting a nerf in the process. Ah crumbs.

In the game's current form, simply shoving some food in your mouth will result in (somewhat) even amounts of health and stamina, but the system arriving in Hearth and Home will change that. Food will soon be divided into three categories: items that provide more health, items that provide more stamina, and items that provide an even split. As explained in the video below, that means you can bulk up on meat and HP before a big battle - or slurp down a stew to increase your stamina for an afternoon of building.

The different categories will be marked by a coloured fork icon, with red indicating a focus on health, yellow for stamina, and white for a balanced meal. The food bar is also being replaced by a timer system to indicate how long the foods will last.

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We've all been there - chests overflowing with gold, rubies on the floor, amber pearls somehow floating around in your food storage. And not a merchant in sight to help you spend it all. But the upcoming Hearth and Home update for Valheim should help with your treasure storage problems, as it's due to add a bunch of shiny new items to help you create your own bank vault.

As explained in a blog post, the developers at Iron Gate are now returning from their summer holidays to continue work on Hearth and Home, which is the first major update for Valheim since its launch. The team are apparently still on track to deliver the update "this very quarter", so we shouldn't have to wait much longer to see all the delicious goodies arriving in the patch (like Eyescream, Shocklate Smoothies and the ominously-named "wolf meats").

This update isn't just about food, however, and you'll soon be able to create your very own treasure trove. Coin stacks and coin piles will be added as items that can be crafted from your excess gold. If you don't want it all on display, you can store your bling in a special treasure chest. And if you want to secure all your earnings, you might want to craft the new iron gate.

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Good news for anyone particularly attached to their Valheim buildings, as developer Iron Gate has tweaked the AI to make monsters slightly less keen on smashing up structures.

Iron Gate recently made a change to enemy AI that made monsters much more aggressive towards buildings, and players started to complain the monsters had become a bit too rowdy. Enemies were seen running past players to destroy their buildings instead, while some monsters became so confused about what they should be attacking that they essentially froze in place. I checked the patch out for myself and discovered local greydwarfs had stripped our village walls of decorations, while a run-in with a troll ended in disaster when it became a bit too interested in my friend's treehouse:

In any case, it seems Iron Gate noticed the AI change was causing a fair bit of chaos, and the AI has been tweaked once again to solve the problems.

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We're still waiting for that big Heath and Home update, but in the meantime developer Iron Gate has rolled out another small patch to fix some of Valheim's bugs. This patch makes two previously-bugged raid events actually trigger in-game, and provides a number of other handy fixes to make your time in the 10th world slightly easier. Slightly.

The two events fixed in this update are "you are being hunted" and "the horde is attacking", which were previously in the game files but didn't trigger as expected. According to the Valheim wiki, the hunt event is supposed to spawn a bunch of wolves, while the horde event should summon a goblin army of Fulings (including Berserkers and Shamans).

The exact conditions for triggering these events are currently unknown, but the pattern established by previous events suggests the hunt event could require killing one wolf and Moder, while the horde raid should occur in-between killing Moder and the final boss. So if you're currently in the late-game, things are about to get a bit spicier.

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A popular pastime in the Valheim community, for some reason, is the construction of slides and ramps on which to ride boats down mountains. Most of these typically try to launch the boats (and accompanying riders) into the sky, but the latest one is more about navigating your way to the bottom with skill - and hopefully not dying in the process.

As shared by Reddit user okayshima, this "mountain raft luge" is possibly the most complicated Valheim slide I've seen so far. Complete with start and finish signs, it's an enormously long slide complete with named points of interest. One area decorated with dragon eggs is called The Nest, for instance, and there's a particularly hairy jump through a ring called Moder's Fall. Riders need to constantly repair the raft to prevent it from breaking (if you were wondering what all the hammering is about).

What's even more impressive is the group did this manually, without the help of game mods. The group did use debug mode on a separate server to prototype the whole thing, but the construction of the final product was done using vanilla Valheim. "Started gathering wood from our tree farm and building about two weeks ago, mostly on weekends and mostly done by one person, although with a bit of help from others at certain parts like the big ring," okayshima explained. "Not sure about the actual number of hours."

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What's going on over at Iron Gate these days? Giving trolls sculpted biceps, apparently, as the dev team has unveiled some upcoming changes to Valheim's creatures - and that includes toned muscles for the big blue boys.

In a dev blog on Steam, Iron Gate gave players an update on how development is progressing, and what they can expect from upcoming patches. Along with more tweaks and fixes, some graphical updates are coming for the second and third bosses to give their models "new fresh looks, and have their designs better fall in line with how we envision the enemies of Valheim". Trolls are also getting a facelift, with "more hair, nairs and more defined muscles". Here's a before and after:

These graphical changes are due to arrive in the next patch, but Iron Gate also teased a couple of images for Valheim's first major update, Hearth and Home. We've already seen a wooden bird image for this update, and now we have a pair of shoes and a rock-filled trench to add to this cryptic mix. The latter is apparently a "pretty big part of the update, with many new items relating to it".

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One of the worst feelings in Valheim is wanting to create a big old hill, then almost immediately running out of stone. Huh? Who got my rocks off me?

It turns out the hoe tool charges a whole bunch of stone to raise the ground, making it quite expensive to complete dirty projects. But at long last, developer Iron Gate has stepped in to solve this issue with an update.

The patch notes released on Steam explain that Iron Gate has "lowered the amount of stone required to raise ground using the hoe". Previously one use of raise ground would cost you four stone: that number has been halved to two. So that's double the amount of hoeing for your resources, hooray!

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