Waiting on Valheim

I was working on the month in review post for this month, doing the hardest part, which is pulling together the One Year Ago section… for all of the older ones I just go back and copy, paste, and occasionally edit, what I wrote in a past post… and it was pretty clear that the instance group was all in on Valheim in the March of a year ago.

Valheim on Steam

You will get the full sense of it on Thursday, but 10 out of 31 posts in March 2021 were about Valheim. We had gotten past the stumbling first stages of playing in February, setting up a shared and server managing to log in, our first shelter, the perilous raft journeys, the somewhat unnecessary amphibious night assault on another island, building a base in line of sight of a troll spawn, the whole death skeeter incident, and had settled in to expanding our reach in the game.

And we certainly carried on into April with the game, but before the end of that month we had defeated Moder, built a secure base in the plains biome, and were mostly pottering about, exploring, stocking up on supplies, and engaging in base building.  There was still another boss to slay, but after that the next biomes up the ladder in the game were as yet unfinished.

We carried on base building and exploring into May, but we were slowing down and kind of waiting for development to catch up and populate the next biomes.  Something that we’re still waiting for.

Yes, the Valheim development team is very small and they spent most of the first six months just trying to keep up with the runaway success of their game.  A good problem to have.  And eventually they were able to get back to delivering some updates to the game.  But, so far, the further biomes remain unfinished.  Not only are the unfinished, but there is a disincentive to exploring them as Valheim shares an issue with Minecraft in that new features and updates don’t necessarily show up in places you have already explored, and I spent quite a bit of time in May of last year sailing and exploring.

I think, as a group, we’ve decided to roll a fresh world once we get some new content to play.  There have been other changes to the swamp and mountain biomes to change up the game that would give some additional spice to another play through.

But the question remains as to when we will get there.  This past Friday we got an update from the dev team about the next biome, the Mistlands.  But the message in the middle of that was that the release of that update was “quite some time away still.”

That makes it much further out than even the “soon” of developer legend.  When they can’t even promise soon, it is very far away indeed.

And so we wait.  Valheim is the third most played title in my Steam library, not far behind RimWorld… which has been pulling ahead this month.  The Mistlands release and a fresh start would push it into second place.