22 | March | 2024 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Having defeated Yagluth and feeling ourselves, if not masters of the plains, then at least not fearing to tread there day and night, it was time to turn our gaze towards the mistlands biome.

We had actually been poking our nose into the mistlands a bit already after Potshot came ashore on a stretch of black forest that bordered on the new biome. There we started to try to come to grips with what we were facing… and it was not pretty.

The mistlands are the first new post-early access launch biome and the developers clearly felt they needed to dial things up a bit as we were all traipsing through the previous biomes pretty quickly. Even on our first run at Valheim, the gap between “deathsquito encounter becomes corpse run nightmare” and “I’m hunting deathsquitoes for drops to make arrows” wasn’t all that long, even given our slow pace.

The first thing is that, of course, the place has to live up to its name, so there is a thick, enshrouding mist in the biome that obscures your vision completely at times and creates, at best, a small bubble of situational awareness around you.

A thick mist at high noon

And even that bubble ebbs and flows, drawing in and swirling about you, hiding then revealing what is around.

Yeah, there is a building right there

And that is in the bright sun on a clear day standing still. When it is raining or night time or when you are moving, the visibility situation becomes worse. Often much worse. Above is almost ideal. When you end up fighting a mob they can be within melee range and disappear into the mist.

It would be cool if I could see this guy

So we were treading carefully along the border line that Potshot had discovered. But we spent a bit of time probing the new biome to see what awaited us and to find some new resources.

Along the way were found that particular building in the mist had a stairway down that turned out to be broken. Potshot, who was leading the way down ended up falling through the missing section (mist and darkness combined) to the floor where he found a pair of seekers ready to attack. He died and it was late enough that he called it a night, leaving his corpse down there.

That seemed a grim location and I went over to our swamp base to harvest some more scrap iron in case it meant a full re-gear operation. As it turned out the gap in the steps kept the seekers from coming up so later, with a fresh bow, Potshot was able to get back there and kill the seekers at range and retrieve his stuff, but it was a sign we needed more of an edge.

One of the promised upgrades available after defeating Yagluth was the wisplight, a utility slot item that was said to be able to clear away some of the mist to make the mistlands easier to navigate.

To get that we needed wisps which meant building a wisp fountain in the mistlands, which requires one of the torn spirits from Yagluth. So off we went after Yagluth.

On achieving that, we grabbed some smelted iron and set sail for the mistlands… we had to sail because the wisp fountain requires a stone cutter in order to build it and a stonecutter requires some iron. I brought along 10 pieces of iron, just to have some extras around.

The journey was long… this would takes us to the most distant point explored… and we were harried by sea monsters and thrashed by storms and when the Moder buff expired the wind seem obstinate in its need to blow exactly the wrong direction for us. There was a moment of terror in a big storm when Potshot was suddenly propelled over me, I was at the tiller, and into the water in our wake, the apparent victim of a some sort of client/server sync issue where I was sailing into a trough of a wave but at his end we were sailing through the wave, which dragged him into the drink.

One problem with the little boat from OdinShip addon is that it doesn’t have a place for passengers to grab onto. We should probably have been using the karve at this point, which I think is slightly faster and much more durable, but with the little boat costing just 8 leather scraps and 40 wood (which always makes me thing of 40 Hommes et 8 Chevaux) we just build them everywhere and leave them laying on shores across the world.

Anyway, I was able to turn around and get close enough for him to climb back on board, but it was a near run thing as his stamina was low.

Sailing through the night

We sailed through another night and the morning found us pulling up to the far shore where the mistlands lay.

Going ashore, we headed to our outpost just inside the biome and built the stone cutter then the wisp fountain… and then had to wait. We had to wait because the fountain requires darkness for wisps to appear.

Wisp fountain in daylight

Once darkness began to fall, the wisp fountain changed its tune and suggested that wisps might be on their way.

The wisps foretold

And, sure enough, a little wisp showed up and began circling the wisp fountain, and then another showed up. We quickly figured out that you had to target them and grab them out of the air.

There is one, grab it

Once we had about a dozen we took the portal back to base and made our wisp lights, equipped them, and noted the wisp now circling around us. This was the way to clear the mist.

And then we went back through the portal, fought of a bat invasion event, then went poking about in the mistlands to see how our wisp lights fared.

Spoiler: not well.

If you stand still, the wisp light does seem to push back the curtain of mist a few feet at times, but you still feel like you are in a pretty limited sphere of visible space. And as we were poking around a Gjall, the great floating blimp mobs of the mistlands, managed to sneak right up on us. If it didn’t come with its own ominous warning sound it might have caught us completely by surprise.

There it is, in the mist!

We pulled it back to the black forest boarder where it was easier to see and hit and shot it down, but the extent to which the mistlands are going to be navigable remains to be seen.

But there we are, a forward base now setup in the mistlands.