The five-year wait for Valheim 1.0 doesn’t seem to have hurt the survival game behemoth’s popularity all that much. After leaving early access, the crafty viking sim is enjoying a huge resurgence in Steam player numbers.

Valheim’s early access tenure ended earlier today, and it seems like lots of people were waiting for exactly the right time to jump into (or jump back into) the viral hit’s adorably polygonal world. At the time of writing, around 160,000 folks are simultaneously playing Valheim’s Steam version – the game hasn’t reached such a huge crowd since April 2021. (Thanks, SteamDB.)

Still, Valheim hasn’t been able to capture lightning in a bottle twice. At least, not yet. The game peaked over five years ago when 502,387 people logged on at the same time, aided by memes that sailed across the web and a playerbase that wasn’t totally pandemic-free yet.

Today’s Steam stats may also be skewed by the fact that Iron Gate’s breakout game is now available to play on PS5, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X/S consoles. The Valheim crowd on Steam no longer represents the entire Valheim crowd, then. We’ll see how high those numbers soar as the game heads into its first proper weekend of release.

The Valheim 1.0 update arguably matches the game’s incredible launch stats, too. Iron Gate’s new patch notes are almost 1,800 words long and include too much new newness for me to neatly summarise here. Long story short, if you’ve not touched the procgen afterlife in a while, Valheim 1.0 adds a new biome called Deep North, over 40 fresh weapons, lots of new bits and bobs and hammers to craft, a graphics setting to stretch draw distances, and much more.