Just some minor fixes before the weekend! Please remember to read the disclaimers on the previous two PTB patches (0.216.5 and 0.216.6)

* A backup is made when starting a world in a new version
* Fixed a world load issue between versions

Some additional fixes to the current Public Test Branch patch! We have fixed all the known issues from before, but please do report any new issues you come across.

Finally we’re able to release this patch to Xbox as well, complete with all the changes that were added in 0.216.5.

Like last time, this patch makes your saves significantly less backwards compatible than other patches, so make sure you really do make extra backups this time. As always, we will do our best so that you will be able to continue with your save files when this goes live, but there is always a risk that you might have to restore your backups when playing on the public test.

Should this patch not be problem free, we will roll it back for the time being, and return to it at a later date. Therefore it is extra important that you make your backups this time.

* Animation & attack issues when at low framerate fixed
* Exp gain/loss correct again
* Duplicate world/character name fix and file handling fixes
* Memory leak fixed
* Minimap text input fix for certain Asian languages

Greetings vikings, and welcome to this month’s status report!

All things Valheim are continuing to move forward over here, though they have been happening a bit more behind the scenes. Piktiv and Fishlabs are still hard at work with solving Xbox issues, and we’re currently testing the most recent patch on our Public Test Branch. Please test it if you haven’t already, but also please note that it’s extra important to make backups this time! If we discover any issues with this patch, we will roll it back for the time being, and return to it at a later date.

This potential rollback would be so that we can get the Hildir’s Quest update out to you as soon as possible. That particular update might also get a slight name change upon its release, as Hildir’s Quest was mainly intended as a working title, but rest assured that the name change doesn’t change what the patch actually contains. If everything works out the way we hope it will, this should be the last blog post before the update is released for testing, so we want to give you one last teaser image before then:



We’re of course continuing to work away on the Ashlands as well! We’re currently trying to nail down some story aspects with the help of our lore writer Lee. If you want to do a more deep dive into the Valheim lore, we can recommend that you check out the podcast episode he was a guest on the other week!

Last time we mentioned that we’ve been making some drops for the Ashlands enemies, and now we thought we’d show some of them off. Here we have a feather, a tooth, and a heart – looks almost like we’re setting up for some sort of ritual sacrifice! What they’ll actually be used for though, you’ll have to wait and see:



As hostile as the Ashlands biome might look, however, it’s not only going to be filled with fearsome enemies. Some creatures will still be more afraid of you than you are of them, like this little fellow for example! We’re currently calling it “cadaver-Bengt”, but that’s most likely going to change…




For the chosen build this month, we want to highlight this island fortress by Karakasnik – nicely done! If you want your creation to be featured, use the hashtag #ValheimBotM on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. You can view previous builds in this thread on Steam.



Until next time!

/The Iron Gate team

If you’d like to discuss the content of this post, please visit our Discord, or our forums on Reddit and Steam, or make a comment on social media!

This update is for the Public Test branch of Valheim, and may therefore be unstable. Before we launch this update to the Default version of the game, we want to make sure to have a chance to discover bugs and adjust the balancing, to give you the best game experience possible.
Access the Public Test branch by right clicking Valheim in your Steam library, and then select ‘Properties’. In the new window, select ‘Betas’ and type in the code “yesimadebackups”. The Public Test branch should now be available for you to choose from.
As always, remember to be considerate towards players not partaking in the Public Test, in case they want to avoid spoilers.
As the password indicates, please make sure to make backups of your save files before playing.

This patch includes a lot of optimisations for many underlying systems of the game – this to improve in-game performance for both small and large worlds, network performance, load times and to drastically decrease save file sizes. We hope that these changes will be a significant improvement for some of you.

This does mean, however, that this patch is extra prone to have introduced some new and obscure bugs that we have yet to find, so any additional testing and bug reporting on this is greatly appreciated! Be sure to report them in our Discord in the public test channel or by filling out this form.

On a very important note, this patch makes your saves significantly less backwards compatible than other patches, so make sure you really do make extra backups this time. As always, we will do our best so that you will be able to continue with your save files when this goes live, but there is always a risk that you might have to restore your backups when playing on the public test.

Should this patch not be problem free, we will roll it back for the time being, and return to it at a later date. Therefore it is extra important that you make your backups this time.


* Many performance, memory and networking improvements for both small and large worlds
* World save file size greatly reduced
* Fixed hitbox issue for close combat and spear throwing issue
* Minimap pin input fixed on steam deck & big picture mode
* Added "UI scaling" to settings on Xbox
* Fixed endless loading of save manager when switching tabs too fast
* World save files that are corrupt, have load errors or have missing meta files can now be restored from the most recent backup directly from within the Select World menu by pressing the "Start" button.
* Save file stability & issues fixed
* Decreased load times in the Manage Saves menu.
* Fixed a bug that would cause the GUI to not update when deleting the bottommost backup in the Manage Saves menu.

Welcome to another peek behind the Valheim scenes!

First things first: Xbox players will likely (unfortunately) be aware of some issues that are still persisting with the console version, but you can rest assured that our Xbox teams at Piktiv and Fishlabs are working as hard and fast as they can to solve these issues. Keep an eye out on our website and our social media channels for updates and patch notes!

On a more fun note, we of course have some new content to tease you with this month as well! The Ashlands are continuing to develop, both art-wise and mechanics-wise. Last time we mentioned that something called “Fortress time!” would be an important aspect of the biome, and you might have seen something relating to that on social media recently. Here’s another look at that particular something, because you can’t have Fortress time! without some sturdy siege engines, right?



Of course, it won’t be just the fortresses themselves that are challenging, but also the creatures who guard them. We’ve already shown you some concept art of the Charred a while ago, as well as some earlier models of the Fallen Valkyrie, but now we want to show you their current state:





And though it won’t be guarding the fortresses, we also want to give you a new look at what shape the Bonemaw Serpent is taking, though it’s still a work in progress! As you can tell, the Ashlands creatures have been getting quite a bit of attention lately, and we’re also working out what their drops will be. And then later comes the question of what those drops will be used for…



When it comes to Hildir’s Quest, things are starting to really fall into place! There will be mini-bosses, new clothing, a wide range of server modifications, and more! With mostly testing left to do, we hope to be able to bring it out to the Public Test Branch and Flight in the next month or two. For now, we want to show you one more sneak peek of the clothes you’ll be able to add to your viking’s wardrobe – though they will not be all that easy to obtain:




This month we have our eyes on this longhouse that Versaugh1 built! If you want your creation to be featured, use the hashtag #ValheimBotM on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. You can view previous builds in this thread on Steam.



Skål!
/The Iron Gate team

If you’d like to discuss the content of this post, please visit our Discord, or our forums on Reddit and Steam, or make a comment on social media!

Today’s patch includes some further fixes for Xbox issues, among other things! There will be a few more patches before all the Xbox issues have been fully resolved, but this is at the very least a step in the right direction.




* Backups are no longer deleted after being restored, so the same backup can now be restored multiple times.
* World saves with missing .fwl files now show up in the Manage Saves menu so that they can be deleted.
* Fixed a bug where backups couldn't be restored if the main save file was missing its .fwl file.
* Fixed a bug that made world saves in cloud storage create a blank .old file when saving, instead of no .old file.
* Player & ship markers are now shown correctly above map pins on the minimap
* Lighting effects reduced when using “reduce flashing lights” setting for Eikthyr antlers, all boss spawning, guardian power and boss stone activation
* Network compatibility version is now displayed separately in the console and log file and each non-pc platform has a platform prefix in the version text

* Improved stability and performance of world saving to decrease chance of saves being corrupted on microsoft store and xbox
* Save files that were corrupted as a result of incomplete file operations in cloud storage are detected and can no longer be started as empty worlds
* Fixed a bug where the time stamps of cloud saves were retrieved as UTC instead of local time.

Some further fixes today!


* Backups are no longer deleted after being restored, so the same backup can now be restored multiple times.
* World saves with missing .fwl files now show up in the Manage Saves menu so that they can be deleted.
* Fixed a bug where backups couldn't be restored if the main save file was missing its .fwl file.
* Fixed a bug that made world saves in cloud storage create a blank .old file when saving, instead of no .old file.

* Improved stability and performance of world saving to decrease chance of saves being corrupted on microsoft store and xbox
* Save files that were corrupted as a result of incomplete file operations in cloud storage are detected and can no longer be started as empty worlds
* Fixed a bug where the time stamps of cloud saves were retrieved as UTC instead of local time.

Unfortunately everything wasn’t as patched up as we believed last time, and there are still some issues with the world loading on Xbox. We’re working as fast as we can to fix it, and this is hopefully a step in that direction (although it’s not entirely done yet)!



* Improved stability and performance of world saving to decrease chance of saves being corrupted on microsoft store and xbox
* Player & ship markers are now shown correctly above map pins on the minimap
* Lighting effects reduced when using “reduce flashing lights” setting for Eikthyr antlers, all boss spawning, guardian power and boss stone activation
* Network compatibility version is now displayed separately in the console and log file and each non-pc platform has a platform prefix in the version text

In this patch we finally have a fix for the issue that caused worlds of a certain size to be reset to Day 1 on Xbox consoles. We are deeply sorry that people have been losing progress, and we hope that things will run smoothly from here on out.

If you have lost progress, you should now be able to restore some of it by using the “Manage saves” section in the main menu, provided that you still have backups with sufficient data.

This version may be displayed in the logs as .305 but .300 in the menu because of platform differences, but these are in fact the same version. We will rework the versioning for this in an upcoming patch and apologise for any confusion.



* Minor UI performance fixes
* Fixed a bug that could occur when rebinding keys

* Worlds on Xbox will no longer reset to Day 1 once they reach a certain size

Time for some hotfixes! This patch should fix an issue where Xbox players and PC players got different heightmaps, which could cause a player to appear to fly in the air or walk below ground. Unfortunately, if an Xbox player has built in an area like this, this change will cause buildings to collapse. We sincerely apologise for this, but it was important to make this change now to prevent further issues later down the line.

Something else that we are working on is a fix to the issue where Xbox worlds have been resetting to day 1 after reaching a certain size. We have identified the problem and believe we have found a solution to it, which should be featured in the next patch. For now, we apologise and thank you for your patience.

Remember that you can use the “Manage Saves” button in the world selection to recover an earlier version of your world if you’ve run into any world issues. And also, if you are having an unplayable game in the latest patch, you can always run the last stable version by changing to the ‘default_old’ branch on Steam.


* Left handed mouse fixed
* Manual saving bug fixed
* Swap Triggers controller option added
* Text & UI fixes
* Performance & various bug fixes


* Manual save no longer causes you to respawn where you saved and can be called to a dedicated server if you are on the admin list
* Left handed mouse should now work correctly again
* Added “Swap Triggers” to control options, to be able to fix a potential issue for PlayStation controllers
* Fixed performance issues in main menu
* Fixed some special characters appearing as squares and symbols should look more like they did before
* Hovertext and text input on signs should now be displayed correctly and can use \t and \n symbols
* Text on signs should now be lit correctly and no lower glow
* Various UI & text fixes that were being displayed incorrectly
* Fixed an issue where the scrolling was slow and inverted on linux
* Engine updated to unity version 2020.03.45
* Settings for keybindings should now be saved correctly


* Added graphic setting “Balanced Mode” with 40 FPS and 1440p on Series X and 900p on Series S (this will only display as an option of you have a screen which supports 40 FPS)
* Right stick now only controls the character rotation in character screen
* Right analog stick no longer has double functionality in the character creation menu
* Heightmap differences between Xbox and PC have now been almost entirely eliminated (this means some areas in Xbox worlds will have a significant terrain change, and if you have built in these areas the buildings may unfortunately collapse)