Valheimhas always been a complete experience since its release, but that doesn’t mean the game should stop receiving developer support. A comprehensive roadmap forValheimwas once announced, though it has since been dismissed, with some of the features ending up as minor additions in updates. Still, there are a couple of quality-of-life changes still that would be nice to see in the game that are reasonable enough to hope for within the current year.
The recentMistlands Update forValheimadded a massive amount of items and enemies alongside a total rework for the Mistlands biome. The Mistlands update is such an overhaul that the biome is hardly recognizable, and the massive amount of new content can be overwhelming for returning players. Thankfully,Valheimhas an archive for previous guides and introductions, but some of the progression obstacles come from the limitations of available player actions, so expanding on a few existing systems could make the experience all the better.
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Features Valheim Should Add
Planting and harvesting crops in bulk would be a great addition to streamlining food production, especially for the hermit players who dedicate themselves to base building inValheim. Players can already harvest crops in bulk with area-of-effect tools/weapons, though a pattern or row-shaped tool for planting crops would pair well with a counterpart for harvesting. With food sources from slain enemies being so much more abundant and able to be passively accumulated through self-defense, there isn’t much to motivate or sustaincrop farming inValheimexcept for a few ingredients in late-game recipes.
While farming crops inValheimis a slow process, inventory management, especially inside containers, takes the spotlight as a far more tedious feature. For some time now players in the modding community have been experimenting with different features, likemods for inventory management inValheim. As it currently exists in the game, the only way that container inventories can be managed in bulk is the “take all” feature, though breaking the container can produce the same result just as fast. It would be nice to see a “stack all” option for placing items into containers that already exist in the container, and vice versa for retrieving items from chests. Organization options aren’t a necessity, though faster ways of retrieving and placing items from containers are much needed.
Finding the merchant inValheim, Haldor, is worthy of celebration because of how massive the seed-generated worlds can be and the random nature of the merchant’s location. Haldor sells a handful of magical items, crafting components, fishing equipment, and a few other items, but at a certain point in the flow of progression, the merchant becomes insignificant. Especially if players are carrying existing characters over into new worlds and bringing their inventory along, the merchant isn’t always worth the effort of locating. The Mistlands update came through on the old roadmap’s promise to expand the merchant’s inventory, but this addition still doesn’t bring the merchant into permanent relevance. A couple of items that might give the merchant some importance are: a fall damage modifier, like a double-jump granting magic item, or perhaps a magic item that allows solo players to possess more than one ofValheim’s forsaken powersat a time.
With all the new enemies added in the Mistlands update as well as some of the higher-difficulty preexisting biomes,Valheimis a hard game to take on solo. However, the intuitive base building, Norse mythology setting, and stylized graphics alone are enough to keep some players in the game. Anyone looking for a more casual pace, unbothered by the difficulty of the game, can use console commands and “cheats” to emulate acreative mode inValheim. The creative mode in the game exists in a very limited capacity at the moment, with a couple of features that have some room for improvement. Particularly, it would be nice to see items from the new Mistlands update added to the item spawn catalog in the console commands, so players can experience the new content at a deliberate and casual pace.
Despite abandoning the old roadmap,Valheimhas already received a majority of the content announced there anyway. With the creative mode needing a few more features and improvements to be worthy of the name, and a handful of mechanics taking up too much time, a couple of small adjustments could help the game significantly. After the massive amount of content provided in the Mistlands update, it will likely be a while before the next major update to the game releases.
Valheimis available now for PC, and releases in early 2023 for Xbox One and Xbox Series S/X.
