I dipped a toe back into Valheim during my final stream of May for the first time since January at least. It felt nice to get back to the game, especially when I needed to get my mind off my move, even if it came with a few bitter moments of realizing just how much work I had to do to set up a sustainable base in a new world. I wasn’t starting a new character, after all, I was just starting a new world. My main character has a bunch of good, upper-mid-tier gear since I was in the “I have mastered The Plains but not yet fought the boss” portion of the game on my previous server, so even my casual “running around” gear was powerful enough that I would need multiple crafting station upgrades to repair it. I considered starting fresh with basically nothing but my skill levels, just to avoid needing to streamline basic repair abilities, but that was not very appealing after all my time playing the game. Plus, most of my gear needed a bunch of rare materials to be crafted or upgraded, but almost everything (with two notable exception) could be repaired by a 2nd-tier crafting table and I had all the tools I needed to make that.

Normally, if I were starting a new server and didn’t want to start fresh, I’d spend some time moving gear, tools, and resources over to the new server once I got basically established and freely port between the two to repair gear and get food until I was finished setting up in the new server. Unfortunately, my old server was run by someone who I am no longer on speaking terms with, thanks to the decisions he made around the release of that wizarding game, so I wasn’t exactly prepared to start over when I logged off for what would turn out to be the last time. I was low on food, had zero resources for starting over, and wasn’t carrying any of the boss items I’d need to properly launch a new server at more or less the same place I was at. Now I’ll need to do all the boss fights by myself (or with some friends if I find anyone who’d want to play with me who didn’t decide to stick with the server I left) if I want to repair my black metal axe (which requires a teir 4 blacksmithing bench). I was able to get the things together for a tier 3 workbench and blacksmithing bench, but it took an entire evening of play to get myself to the point of sustainability.

At least as far as gear goes, anyway. I’m still not there when it comes to food. One of my favorite parts of Valheim is that so much of the difficulty and your character’s power is dependent on having access to higher-tier food. Having amazing armor will save you, sure, but you still need the high hit point and stamina boosting foods to survive the battles where you’ll be leaning on that armor. Since I don’t have access to the various farms of that server, my ability to access that high-tier food has been significantly hampered. I can’t even remember where to get onions [pretty sure it’s The Plains, though], much less all of the things required to upgrade my cooking pot enough that I could even make onion soup. Sure, I could go hunt some wolves, but without all of the beehives and readily-accessible honey, I can’t make wolf jerky. And yeah, I might be able to find some swamps to collect the stuff I need to make sausages, but I’m going to be risking my life to wander around there if I don’t get some better food before then. Right now I’ve got deer meat, mushrooms, and raspberries. I’ve got some carrot seeds planted, but it will be a while before I’ve got a large enough garden that I can actually cook with them again. It’s just a matter of time and effort, of course, but it’s annoying to be starting all over again.

Still, it’s better than starting completely over. I can walk around beating my enemies to pieces (they explode into smoke and magic-looking particles when they de-spawn after death) with my bare fists because I’ve got a good shield to protect myself and I’ve put in the effort to raise my fist-fighting skill in the past. Sure, it’s annoying when my stamina bar during combat moments is half the size it usually is when I used to just noodle around the various bases of my previous serve (and maybe a quarter to a third of my combat stamina bar from that same server), but I’m also not really fighting enemies of the same tier that I was on that server so its just a matter of time and effort once again. After I get my crafting situation a bit more settled and can either repair my black metal axe or can afford to splurge on a bronze axe (my melee weapon of choice is the axe), I’ll be back in business. Also, since I mostly do archery, I’ve been in business this entire time as long as my enemies are far away. Problem there is that most of the wood I’ve collected has gone to building a basic, “oh no, I need someplace to put all this junk but I’m a relentless perfectionist so it also needs to look nice” base so I keep running out of arrows.

Still, I’m enjoying myself. I’m going to need to find more people to casually play this game with, since the only people I know who play Valheim are either super into it (and who usually burn out fairly quickly) or people I’m not talking to after they chose to support the number one transphobic bigot over remaining friendly with me. It’s more fun with friends, since I can send them to collect things while I do the drudgery (that I enjoy) of building roads and managing infrastructure and logistics. I do love me some infrastructure work. It just feels silly to do it when I’m the only one who will be using the road I’m building and I won’t even be using it much since I don’t need nearly as high a volume of various resources as a multiplayer server would need. Making roads is fun, but only if they’re going to be used.