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  • Awesome Music: The background music can be considered one of the game's best points. Each boss and biome has its own personal background music to set the mood perfectly.
  • Breather Level: Arguably the plains, once the player has at least Iron Age equipment (which is 2 tiers lower than the area). It does have many powerful enemies but they are either easy to avoid/outrun/snipe (Fulings, Lox) or to kill (Deathsquito). Most importantly, the terrain is mostly flat, which makes it easy to navigate and survey, and doesn't have any adverse weather effects. Compared to the swamps and mountains, this makes for a rather relaxed exploration as long as you pick your fights carefully.
  • Demonic Spiders: Valheim is home to quite a few unpleasant creatures that can present the player with a nasty surprise.
    • Greydwarf Shamans are arguably the most dangerous enemy once the player gains access to the Black Forest, mainly due to their ability to poison the player. For many players it will be the first enemy encountered capable of doing so (Bees aside) and chances are the player's food options are still very limited. They are also often accompanied by Greydwarves and can heal allied mobs.
    • Their competitors for the title? Trolls. Enormous blue brutes, while relatively slow and clumsy, they are relentless in pursuing you due to their large field of vision and their ability to just step over or smash most obstacles to pieces. They're also just as strong and tough as their massive size implies, and you'll initially encounter them with your best equipment is flint and deer hides. A single troll attacking a player's base can erase hours of progress and trap them in a Cycle of Hurting.
    • Blobs and Oozers appear slow, but can leap in order to close the distance. If one manages to get near the player, it will release a gas cloud that inflicts a heavy poison on the player. This can quickly drain a player's health, especially if their health bar has not been buffed with decent food. To make matters worse, they are often found in close proximity to other enemies.
    • Depending on your progress in the game, archer enemies such as Skeletons and Draugrs can quickly become this, with the 1 and 2-star versions being particularly dreaded. Their bows have very tight tracking and they are able to hit you from a long distance. Skeletons and draugrs are also often found in close proximity to each other. Running out of stamina with such an enemy tracking you quickly becomes lethal.
    • Wraiths are yet another reason why the Swamp is a dangerous biome. They deal a lot of damage, approach silently and pass through objects. Given the many gnarled trees obscuring your vision and the constant ambient sounds of the swamp, it is not uncommon for the player to only notice it once the latter is within attacking range. This also means Wraith occasionally surprise players already in combat with other dangerous creatures.
    • Wolves are relatively easy to kill for a prepared player but can quickly become very dangerous when appearing during a fight with something else or while out of stamina, which is very common on the mountains. Since they both move and attack very fast, it is almost impossible to gain distance and recover depleted stamina and they usually have no problem navigating the difficult terrain to hunt their prey. A pack can potentially stunlock even well-equipped players to death if they are positioned correctly. To make matters worse, they appear in massive packs literally out of nowhere during a special event which, unlike with most events, can happen even outside of bases. Unless the player can quickly dig in or reach a nearby base or portal, it is extremely difficult to survive this.
    • Deathsquitos are arguably the most famous enemy for how many expeditions they have ruined. At only 10 hp even early game players can one-shot them quite easily. The catch is that Deathsquitos deal 90 damage a hit, fly and are among the fastest enemies in the game, being very difficult to outrun. Experienced players with the gear to bring down the damage to acceptable levels and a good shield tend to be fine, but players below the silver age are likely to find themselves in trouble. Deathsquitos have a large aggro range, can be difficult to see coming and have a habit of hanging out near the borders of other biomes, sometimes locking onto players still well into a neighboring biome. Their ability to fly means they may also fly over water to harass any boat accidentally sailing too close to a plains coast. Deathsquitos are so loathed it has spawned a multitude of memes and the developers even nerfed their initial damage output.
    • Fulings. They can be very hard to spot in the high grass of the Plains, usually attack in packs of two to three and are one of the deadliest creatures in the game in melee. Not helping things is that, despite being a grade-A Beef Gate monster, they look like goblins. In games that aren't Valheim, Goblins tend to be on the bottom of enemy power rankings and serve as tutorial enemies, which can lead to the player to underestimate them (usually fatally so).
    • A later update introduced Growths, another Plains monster; they look and move like Blobs, but their attack is a shotgun/firehose-like hard to avoid blast of tar that not only poisons you but also severely slows you down, making you easy pickings for them or any other Plains enemy.
    • Seekers are the main enemies that populate the Mistlands. In addition to hitting hard, they are resistant to all physical attacks. And unlike any other previously encountered enemy, a regular seeker can take flight to quickly close the distance between you and it, bypassing any obstacle or elevation from the biome's increased verticality. Seeker Soldiers, while unable to fly, are much more durable than regular Seekers, can destroy rocks and structures.
    • The Gjall are massive flying creatures that spit fireballs and drop ticks in combat. Signaled by a trumpetlike roar, a Gjall can lob fireballs that deal both fire damage and blunt damage, the former of which can quickly shred the player's health.
  • Difficulty Spike:
    • The Swamp is notoriously tougher than the Black Forest and Meadow biomes you are likely to explore and familiarise yourself with beforehand. The Swamp, in addition to being dark even in daytime, is filled with unbreakable fallen trees that must be climbed and puddles to swim through, both of which impede the player's navigation of the biome to a crawl without the Rested buff increasing their stamina regeneration. Of course, the Swamp is also covered in a perpetual rain, incurring a stamina regeneration penalty for as long as the player isn't sheltered and ensuring they can't get an easy Rested buff from a heat source should it run out. And then come the enemies, three of which can inflict a longer lasting and much stronger poison than what was seen from bees and graydwarf shamans prior. Accompanying said poisonous creatures are hard-hitting enemies that can be difficult to spot from a distance and can attack from range. All of the above combined is a death sentence for a player without stamina-increasing foods, poison resistance, and/or a hoe to alter the terrain with.
    • After the Swamp and Mountain biomes comes the Plains, an even bigger spike (to the point where hiding from plains foes in a swamp is a valid strategy), almost entirely due to the Deathsquitoes and Fulings.
    • The Mistlands cranks up the difficulty to unseen levels and truly test the player in ways that the aforementioned Swamp or the Plains biomes couldn't. A significant chunk of Mistlands is covered in the titular mist, obscuring the player's vision. Even with the wisplight and wisp torches to mitigate the mist, only a small amount is visible around the player, making it impossible to outright snipe enemies from afar, including the dreaded Gjall who can still be hidden in the unreachable mist above the wisplight's range. With the increased elevation present in this biome, it can be easy to fall to one's death or end up cornered by its enemies, two of which can fly and are thus unobstructed by the Mistlands' treacherous terrain. The only saving grace the Mistlands has to offer are the presence of durable outposts manned by dverger, who can fight against the biome's hostile mobs.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • Having the Stagbreaker greatly helps with exploring burial chambers as it lets you hit the skeletons behind a door without opening it, often flattening them at no risk to yourself.
    • Ore, metal and certain items like dragon eggs can't be taken through portals. One way of skipping the potentially deadly and inefficient ride/sailing back to base is to log out, log into a different world with the same character, drop off the problematic items, log back in, take the portal, and retrieve the items from the second world. The fandom is divided on whether this is cheating or entirely legal as it doesn't involve the use of console commands.
    • The "no-cost building" option added in Hildir's Request is just that, removing the resource cost from anything made with the hammer once all the components are found (food and items still require ingredients). This makes building elaborate bases much faster since you don't have to go look for/never run out of materials, safer since you don't risk trees falling on your head, and exploration is much easier since you can now create portals and ships at will instead of hunting down fine wood and cores. Smelting ores and turning them into useful items can now be done at the same site instead of sacrificing part of the metal for craft station upgrades. And so on.
    • The Feather Cape removes fall damage completely (and doesn't even require eitr to do so) and provides protection against the cold.
  • Goddamned Bats:
    • Boars in the Meadows. They're not particularly dangerous even early on, but very fast, aggressive, and particularly fond of hit-and-run tactics. At the very least the resources they drop are useful, and they can be tamed.
    • Greydwarves are numerous in the Black Forest biome and will often attempt to gang up on the player. Quite commonly they only serve to distract the player from a more powerful enemy, like a Shaman, Brute, or Troll, or even the Elder.
    • Drakes quickly become this once you've grown somewhat accustomed to the Mountains. Like Greydwarves they are numerous and will automatically spawn around you while you're busy climbing or mining, have a very high spotting distance and will chase you down for an annoyingly long time, and attack you with inaccurate and not particularly deadly but very annoying frozen breath. Their only saving grace is their hostility to every other lifeform on the Mountains which means they tend to get distracted.
    • Fittingly, Bats in the Frost Caves. They are weak and die in one hit but are VERY numerous, attack in hit&run tactics, are only really attackable for a short moment during their attack, before they gain distance again and don't even drop anything useful. A fully equipped player will usually have to stand still, wait and methodically kill those pesky things for a minute while being in no real danger from their weak attacks. Most annoyingly, they do respawn after some time, so if a player dies in the cave, they can make recovering the equipment while naked a huge pain because they are so fast and hard to avoid. Even worse is the "Stirred the Cauldron" raid, which is enabled by killing a bat. Think raids against ordinary enemies are annoying? Try defending a base where the enemies fly and any area of affect attacks will do more damage to the surrounding structures than them.
  • Good Bad Bugs: The Abyssal Harpoon is a spear with rope attached to it, and its main purpose is to pull enemies closer to you and prevent them from running away. But as SoundSmith figured out, speared creatures build up force if they get stuck on something, which when they get unstuck will send them flying a short distance. And because players can be speared as well, and sitting in a chair counts as being "stuck", this exploit could be used to send players to the other side of the map in seconds.
  • Funny Moments: Though hard to pull off as it's chance more than anything, few things in Valheim are as funny as managing to kill an enemy via falling tree.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • "The bees are happy." is often used as a stock reply to any article, post or comment found to be positive by the community.
    • "You are wet. / You are cold." Commonly phrased to reference how common it is to be under effect of either of these status effects.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • The fear of being overwhelmed by enemies while in a far away place, difficult to reach location or a high level biome. Whether the player (accidentally) runs into too many enemies at once, runs out of stamina, or loses their Rested buff, death means all your precious gear you might have spend hours on to assemble is left right where you died. Getting it back can be a tough ordeal, to the point where a community exists that will aid players for free in retrieving their gear, known as the Body Recovery Squad.
    • The Swamp. Aside from the game ramping up the difficulty it is simply an unnerving place to be. The majority of enemies here are undead and the many trees in combination with the dim lighting makes it common to not notice a hidden foe. At night the place becomes shrouded in pitch black darkness and silent and deadly Wraiths may catch you by surprise. All of this is wrapped by a foreboding soundtrack that really screams "you shouldn't be here".
    • Nighttime in general. As night falls, a particular theme starts playing regardless of the biome you're in. Enemy spawn rates increase, including the chances to encounter the more powerful star versions of regular foes. Some biomes also feature dangerous night-exclusive enemies.
    • Encountering Odin for the first time. He only appears at night, makes no movement or sound and simply stares at the player from a distance, dressed in his trademark black robes and with a single glowing eye.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Melee attack animations and hitboxes cannot be aimed and do not adjust their positions based on the relative positioning of enemies or the camera, making attacking targets on uneven terrain unreliable as your attacks tend to go over or under them. This can make melee combat against certain enemies or in certain biomes, such as fighting wolves in the mountains or anything in the Mistlands, very difficult and renders spears' melee attacks borderline unusable due to being nothing but high strikes that are unable to hit low targets at all.
    • Whenever sailing, the wind is psychic and hates you, managing to become a headwind no matter your destination. Granted, you're supposed to tack into the wind and there's a Forsaken power specifically to change it, but sailing is still undoubtedly one of the most tedious parts of the game.
  • Squick:
    • Sausages are made with meat and Draugr entrails, you know, the slimy, rotten, and putrefied undead humans you find all over the swamp.
    • Ooze from blobs can be crafted into poisonous grenades... or a refreshing energy drink.
  • That One Attack:
    • Anything that can poison you. Due to how health regeneration works, there is no quick method of replenishing health. Getting poisoned on low hp or when your food runs out can quickly seal your fate. The gas cloud attacks of Blobs and Oozers are particularly nasty, as it's near instantaneous once executed and can't be blocked by any means. The poison inflicted by Oozers also has a high duration value.
    • The heavy attacks of both types of Golems, despite being very telegraphed. Both are basically impossible to parry, deal a ton of damage and potentially knock players far away right off a cliff. The pierce variant has a massive range that requires either a precise dodgeroll or to sprint far away, while the blunt variant has more range than the graphics indicate and also tends to destroy the ground, which can be very annoying when fighting on rocks or near player-camps.
    • Growths fire artillery-like yet accurate blasts of tar that leave you poisoned and slowed. The only saving grace is that these attacks are very useful in taking out fulings.
  • That One Boss: Bonemass caps off the already notorious Swamp biome with a very tricky boss battle. All of Bonemass' attacks inflict poison, with one of them consisting of a large gas cloud that he vomits all around him. He will periodically summon Skeletons and Blobs, the latter which can release their own gas clouds to poison players. Anti-poison mead is a must in this fight. Due to how the swamp works the player is also likely to suffer from the wet debuff due to rain. It is also not uncommon to have enemies crash your encounter, including Draugr, more Skeletons and Blobs and Leeches (if puddles run through the boss arena). As with all bosses, preparation is key, but Bonemass demands it.
  • That One Component:
    • You only gain knowledge of how to build structures or gear once you've had all the ingredients for them in your inventory at least once.
    • Several end-game items and components can only be bought from Haldor the Dwarf, who is mentioned exactly nowhere in-game and spawns at a random location in the world.
    • The Forsaken require sacrifices to summon that are either rare (deer heads only have a 50% chance of dropping from deer), found on tough enemies (Ancient Seeds are dropped by Greydwarf Brutes and Nests, which constantly spawn greydwarves until destroyed), in hostile biomes (Withered Bones are easy to find in crypts, but require surviving the swamps and the crypts) or both (Fuling totems are in camps swarming with the Boss in Mook Clothing Fulings). Special mention goes to Dragon Eggs: found only in the cold, blizzard-prone mountains, extremely heavy at 200 weight-units each, and can't be teleported. Fortunately they can be seen from a distance.
    • Progressing to bronze gear requires exploring burial chambers, skeleton-haunted tombs with only a random amount of Surtling Cores inside (if any). The other options are even more dangerous as they require exploring the swamp and ashlands biomes and killing the Surtlings.
    • After the Mistlands update, some components are found only in (appropriately enough) dvergur component crates. Many players take issue with needing to steal from the dvergur (just about the only thing not trying to kill them on sight), leading to all manner of strategies to get the components without getting their hands dirty (such as kiting Seekers or Gjall towards dvergur outposts).
  • That One Level:
    • The swamp biome has all the ingredients that make swamp levels notorious. It is rife with dangerous enemies that can poison you, catch you off guard, and deal a lot of damage. The area has low light even during the day and it always rains. The many puddles and gnarled trees hamper your movement and can obscure hostile creatures to boot.
    • The mountains combine hard to survey terrain with many opportunities to die from fall-damage and some of the most annoying enemies in the game. Aside from the aforementioned Wolves and Drakes, the Golems are extremely sturdy and hard-hitting enemies that are basically immune to ranged attacks. This means they have to be fought close-up on difficult terrain while they destroy the landscape. Thanks to the cold and fast enemies, it is also rather difficult to recover lost equipment, especially during the very tedious boss battle against the flying dragon that loves destroying player bases. On top of that, the exclusive dungeons, the Frost Caves, are also much harder to discover than those in the Swamps or Black Forest.
  • That One Sidequest: Finding Haldor the Merchant. For one, there is no indication in the game he even existsnote , and finding him is almost purely RNG, with the only limitation being that he's "somewhere" in the Black Forest. With good luck he might be near your starting area or the Elder altar, but with bad luck... let's just say there's a reason most guides tell you to just turn on cheats and fly around, or use a seed with his location already known. The good thing is you don't really need to find him, his wares are nice but not required to complete the game, just make it easier.

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