A True Sense of Adventure: No Map, No Portals

One evening last winter, a friend and I downloaded Valheim as we’d heard good things about it. The whole evening disappeared quite quickly as we tried to build a house in the rain, at night, and marvelled at how great the game was. There was this incredible sense of adventure and mystery that I’d not felt playing a game for a long time.

We moved that game onto a server for us and some friends, and played all the way through to Moder. We even kept the first house we built and expanded it over time to become our boar and carrot farm. This was a while ago now, so we decided that we didn’t want to burn out and we’d come back when the other biomes were completed, and maybe even start again.

A little while after we moved on, my partner said she’d love to give it a go, and so the two of us started a new map and again went through to Moder. She loved it as much as we did in those early hours. I loved going back to the start and beating up trees, but that sense of adventure was not quite the same.

Around this time I’d read a couple of posts on this subreddit about having the map turned off. At first I thought it was completely insane, but its appeal started to build. As my partner and I approached Moder, I suggested we could try a No Map No Portal game after this one, and my partner was convinced straight away.

I found a seed online that looked like everything was fairly close, loaded it up, removed the map and portals straight away, then uploaded it to our server, and away we went.

The first few hours it felt like a different game. A real sense of adventure, and often quite worrying. Landmarks would guide you, and we started to mark features with torches. Night time in the meadows was scary again, as if you stray too far from your home, you can quickly become lost. At some point in these early hours, you realise that if you died, you could possibly never find your body again. This sense of danger meant that we would always sleep at night rather than pushing through. When evening comes, you have to head back. When it rains or the visibility was low, we’d do indoor tasks like cooking and sorting.

Rather than having a large base, we started to build up a small network of smaller homes with just a few essentials in each one. When you push on into a new area, you’d keep going until dusk started to fall and then you’d look for shelter. As we started to re-use certain routes and wanted to push further, we started to build a network of paths between the landmarks we’d noted.

Whenever you leave the safety of your home, you bring everything you might need with you. You manage inventory very differently when you can’t just pop back when you need to. Each mission out becomes more of an adventure, and a lot of strategy is required to avoiding running backwards and forwards. You can find food as you go in the meadows, and pick up and deer or boar along the way for dinner that evening, but when we pushed into the black forest, suddenly you find that you need to bring supplies for a few days incase something bad happens.

Without a map, you have to all agree what locations were called so that you could sign post towards them, or agree to meet there. The names started to almost feel like lore as they’d appear in conversation. Oak Meadow (has a big oak tree in it), Five Stones (there were actually six), Three Ancient Wood (black forest ex-spawn point), Castlemouth (stone tower on the mouth of a river), Two Oaks (two oaks in a meadow), Switchback Junction (on the side of a hill), Two Colour Tree (two trees next to each other in a meadow), Sanctuary (a pre-built house covered in leaves that saved us one night).

With all the added dangers, the black forest can become quite a dangerous place, and so we wanted to construct a road through the largest one near us to get to the other side with a guide to find our way back. And in time the Black Forest Road became the Black Road, which once we found a better route became the Old Black Road, and the New Black Road, leading to Mountain Path, which looped around a mountain connecting to the othere end of the Old Black Road. “Take Old Black Road until Three Ancient Wood, then left onto Mountain Path, once you pass Stonetower, you’ll go through a village and Two Oaks is on the other side down the hill.”

One of the most joyful moments was coming out the other end of the black forest, busting into a meadow in the late afternoon and discovering that we recognised it, and that we were only a short stroll from the landing stones.

Bosses are tricky, and I think that’s the only thing that really slows you down. We found Eikthyr quite quickly by accident, but we’re struggling to find the Elder without assistance. We’ve been quite busy trying to explore more so haven’t really pushed, but I might install the the meditation mod to help us, or maybe a compass. We’re also struggling to find the trader, but we haven’t properly combed the black forests just yet.

Everything takes longer without the map, even before you get portals. Although we haven’t been pushing that hard, we’re just past day 100 and haven’t even entered the swamps. The pace is very different, but there is an amazing sense of adventure that never seems to fade.

I’d recommend this to anyone that’s done a few playthroughs and wants to re-create that initial sense of adventure when they first opened the game. I’d recommend you pick a good seed, as you’re going to get to know it better than you might imagine.