After more than five years in early access, Valheim 1.0 is finally here, and can be played from start to finish for the very first time. While Valheim’s gameplay will feel familiar to fans of the survival crafting genre–and has influenced other games released in the years since–the viking-themed game has a few unique mechanics that take some getting used to. 

If you’re headed to the tenth world for the very first time, here are some important tips that will make your Valheim experience so much smoother. This guide avoids progression and boss spoilers.

Stay Well Rested

Being in your base grants you the rested buff, which appears in the upper right corner as a red symbol. While this is easy to overlook when first picking up the game, having the rested buff up as much as possible is vital to your survival on Valheim–dramatically increasing your HP and stamina regen, as well as increasing XP gain. 

The duration of the rested buff depends on the comfort level of your base, which can be increased by decorating with furniture, rugs, banners, and other decor. In a pinch, you can get a basic rested buff by sitting next to a campfire, even if you aren’t sheltered. You can also place a campfire in the entrance to a dungeon if the buff runs out while dungeon-crawling.

Eat Good Food

As in most survival games, food is vital to your journey through Valheim, however the food mechanics are a little different to other games. Valheim gives you three slots for food, meaning you can have three different meals active at once–and you should make sure you always have all these slots filled. 

Eating food doesn’t directly increase your HP, instead food dictates your maximum HP, maximum stamina, and how quickly each of them auto-regenerate. Some foods give you mostly HP, some give mostly stamina, and others are mixed, giving you many different ways to build your character. Food buffs become less effective as they start to run out, leaving you to decide whether you want to refresh your food as often as possible, or conserve resources and play cautiously.

Don’t forget to upgrade your cooking station to unlock more complex recipes, as these will give you better buffs and more options than basic food.

Sleep Through The Night

In time-honored survival game tradition, the nights are far more dangerous in Valheim than the daytime. Plan to get back to your bed to sleep through the night where you can, avoiding the more dangerous monsters and refreshing your rested buff.

While nighttime exploration becomes a little less dangerous when you get further into the game, you should always avoid exploring new biomes during the night–many biomes have uniquely deadly mobs that only come out at night.

Repair Your Equipment

Valheim has a durability system, meaning weapons, tools, and armor will wear out as you use them. The good news is that none of your equipment can permanently break, and it is relatively easy to repair. To repair your damaged equipment, all you need is to access a workbench with a roof, and then click the hammer button on the side of the workbench menu. 

Repairing items doesn’t use up any resources–though higher-level equipment requires a higher-level workbench for repair. As you get further in the game, some equipment made with different workstations will require those workstations for repair.

Walk Don’t Run

You might feel tempted to dash everywhere, however conserving stamina is a vital skill to master in Valheim. Stamina is used for sprinting, attacking, blocking, dodging, swimming, and much more, so having a full stamina bar will often be the difference between life and death.

Get used to taking things slow early on. Many enemies can be dodged simply by walking perpendicularly to their attacks, which is a useful skill to master. If you need to retreat, a full-out sprint is rarely necessary or well-advised. Instead, try walking until your enemy gets close to you, then sprint for a short burst.

Escaping a sticky situation often requires using your wits more so than speed–try making use of the terrain around you, or distracting your enemies by leading them to a different mob. If you do need to run, remember to put your weapons and tools away. You’ll run faster without anything in your hand.

Level Up Your Skills

Your Valheim character will level up skills simply by doing them, meaning skills like running or jumping are easy to level up. Some skills, especially combat skills, take a lot more effort to level, so you should start training them early in the game.

Some of the most important skills to start levelling early are blocking (which includes parrying), dodging, and sneaking, which will all come in handy as you start to traverse more dangerous biomes and face stronger enemies. 

These skills can only be levelled up in actual combat–while it’s possible to dodge roll and sneak when no enemies are around, you’ll only gain XP if you’re dodging actual attacks or sneaking in the range of an enemy.

Avoid Skill Drain

One of Valheim’s most punishing mechanics is skill drain–every time you die, you’ll lose valuable levels in all your skills, setting back your character’s progression. This is why it’s important to play Valheim cautiously and strategically, planning your outings and not over-extending yourself to avoid unnecessary deaths. If you get cocky, the game will punish you severely.

There’s one exception to skill drain on death, and that’s when you’ve already died recently. The game grants a short immunity to skill drain after death, saving you from losing too many levels if you die repeatedly attempting to retrieve your equipment.

Make Use Of Portals

Portals are an important part of exploration through Valheim, and they unlock surprisingly early in the game. As soon as you unlock portals you should put them to use, setting up portals on distant islands, near bosses, and near abundant resources. 

It’s also good practice to keep an unlinked portal at your base and carry the materials to create another one while you’re exploring. This will let you go back to base if your food or rested buff runs out, if you need to dump an inventory full of loot, or if you’re in a sticky situation. If you leave this emergency portal with a blank tag, it will connect to base as soon as you construct it. If you’re in a multiplayer server where this isn’t feasible, you can instead set a single-letter tag that’s easy to type in an emergency.

Portals notably cannot be used when carrying metal, which is an important part of the Valheim experience. When mining for metals, you’ll have plan a return journey to your base by boat or cart, or set up an outpost to process them closer to the source.

Always Carry Your Hoe

The humble hoe is one of the most useful tools in your Valheim inventory, both for base-building and exploration. With the ability to level and raise ground, the hoe can help traverse uneven ground and create paths through tricky biomes. The hoe’s raise ground ability can be used to create cheap earth walls, raising fast fortifications while exploring dangerous new biomes. While you need stone and a workbench to raise ground, it doesn’t require a stonecutter like true stone walls do.

Terraforming can also be a useful tool in your fight for survival–you can use the pickaxe to dig pits, which with some planning can trap dangerous enemies and neutralize them while you pick them off.

Using World Modifiers

Valheim offers difficulty settings in the form of world modifiers, which allow you to make the game more or less punishing across a whole world. For the most part I recommend keeping the standard settings for your first playthrough, however if you ever find the game too punishing you can always come back and change your world modifiers.

The one setting you can change without too much impact to the vanilla game experience is to increase resource drops to 1.5x or 2x. This will make Valheim a little less grindy, speeding up your progression through the early parts of the game and giving you more time to explore instead of mining metals and stone for hours.

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