Time flies and it’s already been a little over a month since we released Hearth & Home. It’s been very inspiring to see how everyone is using the new building pieces to make even more creative things than before, and your reactions upon discovering the new stuff have been so much fun – especially the things we made into a bit of a surprise, like the lox riding .
Releasing Hearth & Home was a big milestone for us as it was our first big update, and it feels really nice to have finally gotten to share that with you. There are always more bug fixes and balance adjustments that can (and will) be made, but we have also begun looking at things for future updates, this time focusing more on adventure and exploration than on building.
Those of you who follow Richard on Twitter might have noticed that he’s experimenting with the terrain and textures for the Mistlands, which will be our next big biome update! However, please keep in mind that this is not a final version, and that the landscape will likely change quite a bit before we figure out just exactly what the Mistlands will look like. It’s also still too early to say what the implementation of the Mistlands will mean for your existing worlds, but we will keep you updated once we know more.
While the groundwork for the Mistlands is being done, some of us are having a look at smaller updates. A biome update takes quite a while to develop, and like we’ve mentioned before we also want to offer you some smaller updates before that. Currently, our dungeon master Erik is teaming up with the art department to work on something to make the Mountains a bit more interesting, especially for those of you who love to explore new places. There is no final version of what this will look like yet either, but we thought we’d show you some concept art to convey the general feeling:
We hope you haven’t missed that you’re now able to craft Jack-o-turnips in the game! The vikings didn’t exactly celebrate halloween, but it’s still nice to have something to brighten up the homestead when the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting darker… At least in our part of the world
Back in June we had an AMA over on our subreddit, and we’re looking into organizing another one pretty soon. Keep an eye out for announcements about this.
We hope you’re just as excited as we are for what’s in store! Until next time!
Further post-Hearth & Home-tweaks This time we’ve made some more adjustments to make everything feel more balanced. Some food stats have been changed, but more importantly all melee weapons will now cost less stamina to use. We also taught the Fulings some new battle tactics and told night-spawning monsters to go to bed once the sun is up. And since fall is properly setting in, you can now make your home even cozier (or spookier) with a Jack-o-turnip!
0.203.10 * Oven & cookingstation drop food items when destroyed * Gamepad sensitivity save fix * Acorn & Birch seed drop rate increased * Onion seed icon tweak * Player number difficulty scale tweaks * Removed comfort from Crystal wall * Atgeir, Blackmetal axe, Bronze spear tweaks * Lower melee weapon stamina drain * Knives have more durability * Tweaked some food stats based on effort to craft (blood pudding, boar jerky, bread, deer stew, mincemeat sauce, wolf jerky) * Night-spawning monsters despawn faster in the morning * Parry ranged attacks staggers caster again (illogical but fun) * Fuling AI tweaks (Spreads out & circles more) * Longer Lox attack cooldowns * Frost damage slowdown fix * Shield tutorial trigger fix for wood shields * Wood log 26° & 45° stability fix * Jack-o-turnip enabled * Torch + weapon jog animation fix
* Rebalanced hp/stamina on most foods ( more stamina on hp foods and more hp on stamina foods etc ) * Fixed tar-pit not spawning on dedicated-server worlds * Slightly lower hp on Fulings & Fuling shamans * Slightly easier to stagger Fulings * Fixed issue with pressing I in server list while trying to filter servers * Lower bow stamina use * Cage wall 1x1 physics fix ( Already placed pieces will probably need to be repositioned ) * Boars now also eat blueberries, raspberries & mushrooms * Chinese translation fix
Where the grass grows underfoot, And the sky is blue overhead. There will always be a Hearth & Home.
(Spoilers ahead! If you want to discover the rest of the content yourself, you might not want to read this post just yet.)
Another month has passed since we spoke to you last, and what a month it’s been. First of all, the feedback from our cinematic trailer was incredible, and it has been great to see so many excited comments ahead of the update!
But now the wait is finally over, Vikings – Hearth & Home releases today. We’re incredibly excited to bring our first major update to you all, as well as a new video to show off some new gameplay!
As many of you will now know from the series of short spotlight videos, the Hearth & Home update brings plenty of new content to Valheim, expanding your gameplay options by introducing new mechanics, furniture, building pieces, food, weapons, optimizations and more.
The name of the update is Hearth & Home, which means that the cooking and the building got a bit of extra attention. For all the builders out there we have added a whole bunch of new build pieces and furniture, ranging everywhere from sturdy shingle roofs to a mighty stone throne.
We’ve also done our best to listen to community feedback, and several highly-requested features have made their way into this update. You’ll now be able to share map data with other vikings in your world, find seeds to plant more types of trees, and finally destroy your unwanted items with the new obliterator.
If taming animals is your thing, you’ll now find that you can name your favorite pets. We also suggest that you spend some extra time with your Lox...
While many features introduced in Hearth & Home have already been revealed, not even Odin has spied some of the new features being added with the update, including something dark and mysterious that seems to spread across the plains… Brave vikings should go and find out for themselves!
We hope you all enjoy the new content and want to thank you all again for your continued support as we continue our journey through Early Access together.
General improvements * Weapons rebalanced (All weapons have been rebalanced to be more viable as main weapon and also have more unique playstyles) * Blocking system overhauled (Current maximum hp now greatly affects your ability to block attacks, stagger bar gui added) * Naming tamed creatures * Gamepad sensitivity settings * Auto-pickup toggle button added * Graphics settings (Active point lights & Active point light shadows) * Tamed creatures affected by friendly fire setting (i.e you can’t hurt a tamed creature unless you enable friendly fire or use the new Butcher knife item) * Various other improvements and bugfixes
Food * Food rebalance (Most food items now give mainly stamina or mainly health to make food choices more interesting) * Food GUI overhauled to work better with the rebalanced food * Over 10 new things to eat (Actually 12)
World * Tamed Lox now have a purpose * Slimy locations & creatures added to plains * New plantable seeds: Birch, Oak & Onions
Items * New weapons: Crystal battleaxe, Silver knife * New shields: Bone tower shield, Iron buckler * Butcher knife (Special weapon for butchering tamed animals) * Thunder stone (Sold by trader) * Lox accessory
Building * New Darkwood building pieces like shingle roofs, beams, decorations and more * New types of furniture, including but not limited to a mighty stone throne and a steamy viking hot tub * Crystal walls * New types of stacks to show off your treasure and resources * Cauldron improvements: Spice rack, Butcher’s table, Pots and pans * Cartography table (For sharing map-data with other players) * Oven added (For baking bread and pie) * Obliterator added (Items be gone) * Iron cooking station (Required to cook some types of meat) ... and more!
A month has passed since we spoke to you last, and we’ve got more exciting news to share. As many of you might have already seen, our Hearth & Home cinematic trailer debuted during Gamescom Opening Night Live, announcing that the update is going live on September 16th. It brings us joy to finally be able to share the trailer with you - here it is in case you haven’t seen it yet:
A million thanks to our awesome friends at animation studio Brikk for bringing the Viking purgatory to life - Bragi is surely smiling down on you.
From September 16th, we’ll be introducing new content that will expand your gameplay options, including new furniture, building pieces, food and more! We’ve begun introducing some of the core Hearth & Home gameplay changes through a series of short walkthrough videos on our socials, so make sure to check those out here.
We know you’re eager to see the new content as soon as possible - do not fret, children of the Allfather! While we’ve already revealed some of the new items in our previous Steam posts, here’s a peek at two other notable additions:
We cannot wait for you to dive into the game and discover the content update for yourselves. We’ve created Valheim to be a world of intrigue and mystery, and while we would love to share a full list of items coming in Hearth & Home with you right this very moment, we think it’s best if you discover these yourselves.
Last but not least, we have some exciting internal news as well. Our team of five will now welcome three new individuals as we continue to work on future updates. Please meet our new animator Christoffer Solgevik, our new programmer Jonathan Smårs and Andreas Thomasson who will be managing our QA.
Thank you for your continued support, whether it be amazing fan art, breathtaking builds or just really good memes. May your axes never dull, and may Odin’s blessing be upon you.
We’ll see you on September 16th - may the gods watch over you.
We can’t believe it’s been over a month since we shared more details on Hearth & Home, and it’s time to share more! We have begun wrapping up our summer break, and wanted to share some new content we’ve been working on.
We’re still on track to deliver the update this very quarter, and as always, thank you for your kindness and patience. Your response to our roadmap post in June was super supportive, and the questions that came through in the reddit AMA gave us lots of inspiration for future updates.
Here’s a small haul of loot related Hearth & Home content: Coin stack and Coin pile - so you can build a dragon worthy hoard with all your excess wealth (sorry trolls)
Treasure chest - to keep your additional excess wealth and supplies safe
Iron grate - to lock up your treasures, or maybe a captured greydwarf or two
We’re also happy to share that we have three new vikings joining the Iron Gate team next month, a programmer, an animator, and a QA Manager, who we’ll introduce you to soon.
May Frey bless you with a bountiful summer harvest!
Tiny AI tweak patch. We hear you!! =) , some tweaks to the monster AI to make them behave better when attacking structures etc.
0.156.2 * AI tweaks (Monsters should always target creatures [including players] first if they have a clear path to them & monsters should only attack low priority structures [walls etc.] if they are trying to get to a player)
Fun with AI patch. Gameplay wise this patch mostly fixes AI issues, as we tried to make monsters slightly more aggressive and attack your buildings etc. When they are not able to attack you. It’s fun for the whole family! Also it's midsummer here in Sweden, so we celebrate by temporarily making the Maypole buildable.
0.155.7 * Random save bug-fix (Solves a very unusual case of world corruption caused when shutting down) * Monster AI tweaks (More aggressively attacking structures when unable to attack the player among other things) * Open container fix (Fixes issue where you had to click a container multiple times to open it in multiplayer) * Taught Greydwarfs to throw better * Event trigger tweaks (Wolf event only triggers after Bonemass has been killed, Moder army can trigger in mountains etc.) * Long forgotten Blob event enabled * SFX volume setting fix (Used wrong DB conversion) * Maypole enabled (Happy midsummer!) * AI flee behaviour tweaks (Bosses don’t run from you anymore)
We want to start by thanking you all for the patience and kindness you’ve shown us since we launched in February. We launched into Early Access because we want to build the game with you, but never in our wildest dreams could we have imagined how many of you want to join us on this journey!
As we’re sure lots of you suspected, we won’t be able to deliver four updates this year. Instead, we’re now planning to launch Hearth & Home in Q3 2021, and we’re temporarily taking down the roadmap whilst we make some changes. We are sorry it’s taken us so long to update you.
We weren’t prepared for such a large influx of players, and this highlighted a thousand new problems and bugs that needed to be fixed urgently. Our priority has been to make the current experience as stable as possible and this has meant new content has taken a backseat. To put it clearly; we haven’t been able to focus all of our resources on Hearth & Home until May.
We hope that one of the reasons Valheim has resonated with so many of you is down to attention to detail. We don’t want to launch an update that we’re not confident in, and that isn’t deserving of your time. With that in mind, the new roadmap will be much smaller, but we’ve made the decision to focus on the big Mistlands update directly after we’re done with Hearth & Home, putting aside the smaller updates for now...
That being said, we would like to share some of the upcoming Hearth & Home content here. This is by no means a complete list but a taste of what’s cooking.
New build pieces – Darkwood roofs and window hatches.
New cooking station extensions – spice rack, butcher table, pots & pans... In addition to this we've also implemented a new food system that places more importance between boosting health and stamina, making food choices more interesting based on your playstyle. To this end, we've also made some changes to how stamina/health affects your poise in combat. If you want to play a tanky, defensive viking you should now stock up on health, since this will boost your ability to deflect incoming hits and mitigate damage.
New foods to take advantage of the new system and cooking station extensions– more than 10 new recipes including Eyescream, Shocklate smoothie, various wolf meats, and more.
Plantable onions with pretty onion flowers.
We’re pretty flexible when it comes to what we want to add to the game, and we’re often inspired by a meeting or an awesome comment from the community, which means our roadmap is always going to be fluid. Valheim is also a game about exploration, and we don't want to spoil that feeling of discovery for our players. That said, we do want to be more open with what we’re currently working on, even if it is just our artist Robin working on a piece of content that he's enjoying, but that might never make it into the game. Striking a balance between being transparent about what we are working on, while at the same time not spoiling it for those of you who want to discover it yourselves is tough, but we think it's important to be more informal and open as an Early Access game.
Tomorrow June 11th, at 2PM CEST, we will also be heading to the r/valheim subreddit for an AMA. We’d love for you all to join so we have an opportunity to try and answer as many questions as we can on Hearth & Home and the new roadmap.
We’ll also of course keep posting our monthly development updates and hotfixes as always. Thank you again for continuing to support us, and for your feedback and creativity.