It’s been five years since Valheim revitalized the survival craft genre. At the time I remember thinking “why would anyone want to play a new game in this style when there’s already Minecraft, Ark and Rust?”. With the benefit of hindsight I know that two things worked in Valheim’s favour. One was its clever finetuning of survival and building systems that still felt really clunky in competing games, and which many have since adopted. The other thing was Vikings. Valheim ruled so much that it was our favourite game of 2021, and that was largely thanks to Vikings.

Five years later Valheim is still in early access, but its updates come thick and fast and its community seems, by and large, pretty happy with how things are going. To celebrate the milestone, Iron Gate has issued a special anniversary update, or “Patch 0.221.10” in more prosaic terms. It features a bunch of nice things, like “a celebratory hat”, a new weapon in the form of early axes (they’re basically ancient dual-wieldable axes), and frosted sweetbread, which is a new consumable.