This weekend I spent a significant chunk of time working on my bases in Valheim single player. On my original save game of Beltopia, I had been slowly migrating everything over to a new area where I had set up two buildings. One served as a sleeping quarters and portal room and the other a big crafting pavilion and storage. The above is a screenshot from this phase of development but ultimately this doesn’t really jive with my current sensibilities in game. As such I set forth to expand this into more of a vision of the type of base that I want to keep for the long run.
This is now what my base looks like while approaching from the ocean. From the outside it is a pretty nondescript wall with roofing along it and a portico that leads inside across a custom draw bridge. Essentially I have landed upon a style for my bases where I build a stone wall around the perimeter and then erect an inner sheltered area that contains all of the important bits of the base. Essentially my first step in this process was to dig a moat as far down as the game would let me and this ultimately would inform what the perimeter of my base would look like. The moat thing seems to be an ingenious way of protecting your base from raids and random monster encounters. While working on my plains farm for example I got raided by trolls and they could not figure out how to get into the base and eventually de-spawned without actually causing any damage.
So for reference this is a picture of the inner courtyard of my base. The building in the foreground is the same building in that very first picture. I’ve made some significant changes to the roofline, but structurally it is effectively the same. Instead of serving as a sort of inn with multiple beds, the top floor is now basically just my master bedroom. The ground floor is entirely dominated by portals to lots of different far off places that I found with my boat. One of which is the area where I set up my farm in the plains biome. What I did some time ago was craft a number of portals and named them after various norse gods, and then I keep a spreadsheet of what each connects to. That way when I go travelling I take portal materials with me and can craft my way back to the main spawn no matter how far I might stray.
The other building that still stands from my original structures is now the mead hall. There isn’t a whole lot of that original crafting pavilion left, but it did sort of inform the overall shape and structure of the building. While I don’t necessarily use this as a multiplayer map I did build additional beds into the attic of this building. I’ve recently started trying to switch everything over to using coal based braziers instead of torches because I personally find it way easier to renew the fuel source than to farm a copious number of Grey Dwarves for resin. What I want to do at some point is set up a Surtling farm in a swamp in the hopes of getting enough trophies to start adding those in as well for a permanent light source. There are few things more disheartening than logging in to a completely dark base and then trying to haphazardly fuel all of the light sources in the dark.
The base of course has a fully kitted out crafting area with a lot of specific dedicated storage. I wish had gone with this sort of scheme when I built my giant wall of chests in “Fort Belghast” on the multiplayer server. Honestly the hardest part was trying to come up with some generic taxonomy for the items that makes a reasonable amount of sense for storage purposes and easily finding whatever you might need. What I eventually landed on was this… which is by no means flawless but works for now.
- Gear – storage for any spare armor or tools, most specifically things I have outgrown
- Treasure – things that sell for gold at the vendor or things that are just more rare than others
- Forage – tree saplings, feathers or other things largely picked up off the ground
- Trophies – so many grey dwarf and deer heads
- Metals – mostly finished ingots because I have another batch of chests by the smelters where I keep raw ore
- Wood – some of each of the types of wood, but I have bulk wood storage elsewhere in the base for just mass amounts of plain wood
- Flint and Stone – this is where I keep my flint, obsidian and stone but I have bulk stone storage as well elsewhere in the base
- Cloth – I have a feeling that this category will expand over time but right now it is just my linen refined from my flax
- Eyes – Yes I dedicated an area just to Grey Dwarf eyes because I end up with so freaking many
- Bones – Skeleton bone fragments and wolf bones mostly but I end up with a lot of the former because of skeleton attacks
- Leather – catch all for the various kinds of leather including troll hide and lox hide.
There are a few categories missing but those are actually located elsewhere in the base. For example in the Mead Hall I have two separate sets of dedicated storage with one representing anything I need to craft mead and the other any raw food for cooking. I also have storage there for finished potions/mead and cooked food. As I mentioned above I have separate storage over by the smelters for Coal and then some catch all boxes for ore that is waiting to be smelted up. Given how much time smelting takes I try my best to batch this up and then shorten the total time of smelting by sleeping.
Another tweak that I have learned over time is that I am now keeping my hives up on my roofline because it allows for them to have plenty of open space around them. You can access my roofline by the tower in the corner of my property which is cool but largely useless to actually use as a perch to fight much of anything from. For most fighting I do better just hanging out on my roofs and plinking things below with arrows.
The only things that are really missing from the main base, can be found in my outpost in the plains biome. One of the tricks of this game is that the two most valuable crops you can grow can only be grown in the Plains biome… aka Barley and Flax. As a result I have set up ALL of my farming efforts over in the Plains. I dug a similar moat around an area in a pretty safe region, not near any goblin camps and not really likely to get a lot of goblin roamers. It is right up against a mountain biome but not close enough to that to really get random wyverns or wolves either. Essentially this area exists solely for me to have a safe space to grow lots of crops. In the main courtyard I have smaller beds for each of the four crops: Flax, Barley, Carrots and Turnips.
Then beside that courtyard I have a larger farming area with just bulk crops or a place to also grow back seeds for carrots and turnips when my reserves are running a little low. I have crafting machines at this outpost, but really I am not expecting to do much here other than pop over and fiddle with crops and as such the overall footprint is much smaller. Largely I wanted to get my house in order given that I have so many bases in multiplayer but had started to lag behind in functionality of my solo bases. This way regardless of what might happen in the future with the server I plan on, I still have a stable base that I could keep playing if I want to.
Over the weekend I did a base walk through video, but at that point I was still actively working on the outpost in the plains and did not actually go there to show it off. It does however walk through all of the areas of the base that I showed off pictures above.
