Valheim with People

Yesterday was the day that Valheim reached critical mass with the AggroChat crew. This might have been achieved earlier were it not for the fact that I blogged about the game but never really talked about it on the show. We had a pretty thick roster the last few weeks of topics and as a result I didn’t feel like it was the right time to slide in a brand new game that at least then I was the only one playing. However and I were having a conversation about the game… and them this perked up Tam and Kodra who apparently tried it… and came back to evangelize the game and the rest is history. I linked my couple of blog posts on the subject as well and yesterday a server was rented and throughout the night more and more of the regulars were logging into it.

Valheim is a game that throws back to the age of renting a private server, and seemingly an entire cottage industry has sprung up around supplying these in rapid form. Granted most of the hosting provides are the same folks who have been hosting Rust and Ark servers for years, but Valheim at least is a relatively new product offering. I did what I often do and went to twitter and over the course of a few hours got not one but six recommendations for GPortal. So yesterday in a few minutes Tam set up a server and I was the guinea pig and figured out how to log in for the first time. The challenge is that so many servers have been set up in such short time that the server browser appears to be overloaded.

I took to the interwebs to glean a method for getting around this problem and encountered this write up. I am essentially doing method two that was outlined, which is comprised of setting up a custom server in Steam… something that I have apparently never done in the over decade I have been on the service. For those who don’t want to travel to another website and watch a less than amazing video… here are the steps I followed:

1. Open Steam Client
2. From the View menu select the Servers option
3. Click “Add a Server” in the Server Browser Window that pops up.
4. Copy and Past the IP Address and Port Number in the text box that is presented.
   1. For the uninitiated this should be a number that looks like this 111.222.333.444:12345 with those fake numbers representing whatever class D address and port that was assigned to your server by your hosting provider.
5. You should now see your server in the list in the server browser. Double click the name or select the connect button.
   1. If you get a message about the server being unavailable or that there is no game present, just hit the refresh button a few times. Chances are the virtual server is spinning up if no one is actively on it.
6. If there is a password on your server you will be prompted to enter that
7. The game will launch and you will be asked to enter a password again
8. Play the game

Going forward when you want to connect you open the server browser and double click the name of the server you just added and should be in relatively shortly.

Tam being the excellent host that he is, proceeded to create a massive encampment near the spawn point with lots of beds for anyone who wants to stay there. It expanded a significant amount over the night and now includes walls and a launch bay for a raft. If I remember correctly there is room for I believe six beds in there as well as some of the early crafting machines needed to function.

Being who I am however, without really meaning to… I wandered off on my own and crafted what Kodra referred to last night as Fort Belghast. Since I am further progressed than most of the folks on the server I wanted to be beside the Dark Forest biome and I happened to stumble onto it pretty early and then set up shop along the nearest coastline. I wish I had built on a coast in my single player game so I was effectively remedying this desire. Then last night I proceeded to attempt to jump start my way back to the bronze age so that I could at least repair my gear if I needed to. It took me the better part of the evening but I managed to gather enough resources to build up the crafting progression through a Tier 4 Crafting Bench and a Tier 2 Forge.

I think tonight I might craft a raft and venture across the channel to a nearby island you can see in the distance. There is a weird quirk with our server in that it seems to have a meadow biome maybe one quarter of the size of that of my single player game. It legitimately takes me at least one full day night cycle to run from the spawn to my base on the outskirts of the dark forest. On this server I can cross the meadow into either the Dark Forest or the Mountain region multiple times in the same day cycle. The challenge here is with all of us playing in the same area and the tier 1 biome being so small… we are starting to run into resource contention. I am contemplating going to my single player world and harvesting up a bunch of wood and then dropping it off in woodstack form at Tam’s communal base.

I have a very specific style of home that I like to build in this game, namely because I like having my fire inside. If you do this in a fully closed in area you will kill yourself in your sleep from carbon monoxide. So what I do instead is build a roof in such a way as to leave open eaves which allow for the venting of the smoke and exchange of fresh air, with my bed strategically placed at the opposite end of the domicile as the fire. This allows me to always stay warm and toasty during the nights, never have to deal with my fire being doused by rain and also makes for a much cooler looking inside. There however is room for a spare bed so I might go ahead and build one in case someone needs to use my outpost as a temporary save location.

I didn’t actually interact much with other players apart from chopping down a tree that apparently Neph was fond of. I just viewed it as the next tier up of wood, but I guess it was rather picturesque near her cabin. She opted for reclaiming one of the prefab damaged shacks, which honestly is a great way to start the game. I hope to maybe interact with some folks tonight as I continue this adventure. The Dark Forest is just as aggressive on this server as it is on my single player game, and as a result I spent a lot of time poking my head in for resources and then coming right back out. I’m not even sure how one would survive long enough for a proper base there. We survived the night and now have a multiplayer world, and I am sure we will be talking about it this weekend on the podcast.