Valheim

If you’ve ever punched a tree, you’ve played a survival crafting game. There were a lot of these in 2024. Here’s the ones I played.

Getting ready for killing the Goblin King was bad enough. Mistlands is worse.

I didn’t think I’d be playing Valheim again, but here we are. Let’s try something different, this time.

With both Pokémon Go and Pokémon Sword & Shield going on, it’s pretty much peak Pokémon at the moment.

Each of these probably should get their own posts, but I am exceedingly lazy. Commander Rhade is finally dead for good this time. Starting off with Ogre Battle – about halfway through at about 25 hours in. The plot has a lot of twists and turns. Modern RPGs could learn a lot by looking at these old classics, and I really regret not playing this game back in the day. ...

Ever want to play a vampire who hides from the sun in the castle they have built to protect their riches from other vampires? Then this is literally the game for you. If you’re more in the mood for a PvE survival game, though… have you heard the good news about Valheim? Team Spode has been playing V Rising for a couple of months and I have not written about it until now. I’m not even sure if I’ve mentioned it on social media. I’ve been trying to answer the question for myself of why I am not enthusiastic about this game? ...

Those “in the know” remember how much I’m struggling in Bloodborne and Elden Ring, even as I finish up the last of the main campaigns in Wildermyth. Those, though, are all primarily solo games. When I want to hang with friends, though, there’s only two choices: DCUO, and Valheim. And Team Spode mate Calrain made a whole new world and invited me in to go through the game a second time as we wait for Mistlands to re-appear. ...

The swamp biome was already Valheim’s deadliest, in my opinion. A new “stirring in the mist” just made it a little bit deadlier – but also brought some new rewards. The Valheim devs were coy about just what was new in the swamps after the latest update, but I’m here to spoil it for you. Start right with the feature image up top: That’s the new mob, the “Abomination”, a creature made of wood and spite – probably related in some way to the gray dwarfs, who are also mostly wood. ...

I resisted running mods for Valheim for so long… but I saw some folks talking about building their homes in New World, and I was all thinking “I already have Valheim” and then “but I could make it look better”. Also, I found out how to bring tar pits into biomes we have already explored. Valheim has been an on-again, off-again game for me, once we killed all the bosses and most of Team Spode drifted away from the game back to other pursuits. But my Twitter feed yesterday exploded with people showing off their home builds in Amazon’s “New World”, and that got me back in the building mood again. ...

Valheim’s first content expansion brings a little adventure together with a lot of new things to make and build. Is it going to be enough to bring the magic back? It’s not hard to tame a lox – the large, yak-like creatures that congregate in the Valheim plains biomes. All you really need is a few stacks of barley or cloudberries, and a place to hide nearby while they eat and gradually come to love you. This also works for wolves (who enjoy meat) and boars (who love mushrooms and berries). ...