It’s always great to see a game come out of nowhere and catch fire, which is exactly what happened with Valheim. The problem with success beyond all imagining (such as selling over seven million copies in its first two months of Early Access) is that all of a sudden the scope changes significantly. Valheim’s content updates got put on hold to better develop the underlying tech, squishing bugs and adding quality-of-life features to create a foundation worthy of its player-base. The wait for major content drops is finally about over, though, with Valheim’s Hearth & Home update getting a release date of September 16.
Valheim is a survival game set in the Norse afterlife, expertly balancing its combat, base-building, exploration, and crafting elements into a coherent whole. Each of the biomes has a boss lurking somewhere out in the world and in theory the point is to take down each one, earn the skill that goes with victory, and slowly get more capable of surviving what had been an unspoiled wilderness until you and your friends showed up to build bases all over it. In actuality it tends to play as a quest to take down the first several bosses and then settle into the world, building more elaborate bases and figuring out how to abuse the limits on construction to create things that technically shouldn’t be possible. Those building tools are the focus of the Hearth & Home update, with more house pieces available to tailor a home just to your liking, including new darkwood structures. Additionally new types of food will be available to not only top off the hunger gauge but also give different buffs, and of course they require new furniture like a spice rack to cook. It’s not all domestic living despite the update’s name, though, with shields and the blocking mechanic getting changes as well.
While there have been some content updates since Valheim released back at the start of February, Hearth & Home is the first of the planned major ones. It took much longer to show up than anyone expected but it’s almost here at last, and now that the foundational work is up to speed it shouldn’t be anything like another seven months before the next one. To celebrate its release the trailer has gone above and beyond the call of duty, opting out of the traditional in-game features checklist and instead being a fully animated short featuring a hunt, the dangerous walk home, and the cozy mead of victory with friends back at home.
