4Game

Gonna try to keep this shortish and to the point, so if there's anything you misunderstand then ask about it. Some spoilers about Mistlands, so don't read if you want to avoid those.

While the first half of the game feels like a steady progression up to the end of the silver tier, I think the progression into and through the Plains and Mistlands is much lower quality than the early/mid game. The problems I see are:

1. The explosion in the number of crafting structures needed to progress. At Plains, suddenly you need an Artisan's Table, a new smelter type, a spinning wheel, and (for food only) a windmill and oven. The blast furnace doesn't even work with previous metal tiers, only Black Metal. With Mistlands, only the Artisan's Table and the oven are expanded. Actually, Mistlands introduces even more crafting structures! Black Forge (plus a couple improvements!), Eitr refinery, and Galdr table. I don't have a problem with new crafting structures as a rule, but adding 8(?) new crafting structures in the final 2 biomes seems excessive considering that the first 4 biomes involve 8 (at a stretch, counting Stonecutter, Beehive, and Fermenter). The problem is partially that so many of these crafting stations are single-purpose. I would have liked to see a) more of the Plains crafting stations developed in the Mistlands update – for example, a new fiber that we can use the spinning wheel for – and b) more restraint in adding new crafting benches (for example, Galdr table could have been consolidated with Artisan table + upgrade).

2. Highly unequal distribution of material requirements – iron especially. Iron is notorious – it's needed for most Swamp-tier weapons/armor, then mostly forgotten in the Mountain-tier, then for some reason critical for Plains gear (armor, and some weapons), and now needed again in decently large quantities for Mistlands gear. I think this is a common complaint, and Mistlands at least adds another way to get it, so I'll say no more on iron. But there are some other materials I'm thinking of – flax for example, which is only needed for Plains armor (perhaps Eitr-infused armor set I don't have the recipe for?). Black Metal was like this, I think they added enough uses for it in the Mistlands that it's a lot better, but its few uses are still completely disproportionate to the large amount you gather through casual play. Another material seems to be Soft Tissue, absolutely essential to Mistlands progression. I believe it's a rare drop from some enemies and can be mined from some giant skulls lying around the Mistlands – supposedly. We haven't found any yet; the mist and terrain makes it both necessary and extremely frustrating to go over the Mistlands with a fine-tooth comb. At least the dungeons have a lantern you can sometimes spot a distance away through the mist. Not so with Soft Tissue deposits, which it seems we will need in similar quantities to Tin in the Black Forest tier. This is merging a bit with the Mistlands progression gripes, so I'll move on to that.

3. In the Mistlands specifically, the path to progression is highly unclear. You start killing some Seekers and Gjalls, maybe some Misthares, chopping Yggdrasil wood, maybe mining some black marble, and unlock maybe only 3 new structures/recipes. In order to actually progress, you need to make some key chance discoveries: First you need to raid the Dverger to get the extractor, and second you need to bust into a dungeon to get black cores. The first is confusing because the Dverger are neutral and are often your allies against the Mistlands enemies, so I did not expect to have to fight and kill them to progress. The second is more reasonable, similar to raiding Black Forest dungeons for Surtling cores, but frustrating due to the mist and terrain that hides dungeons until you are practically on top of them. I found it frustrating playing Mistlands with my friends for a few days, getting all these new items, and still having no indication at all how to actually progress. Short of looking it up online, the Hugin/Munin hint that we will surely annoy the Dverger eventually, and happening to stumble on a dungeon, were our only path forward.

Those are my main points, a little longer than ideal, but I hope convincing enough. I like that Plains and Mistlands depart from the pattern of the first 4 biomes, and I don't think we should necessarily keep using Forge/Workbench/Smelter forever. However I don't feel like they are setting a new pattern; I think that there is too little cohesion between Plains and Mistlands. The early and mid game in Valheim are well-designed and tightly focused, while I think the late game is pretty messy. I feels to me that in the year+ of Mistlands design and development, they either didn't settle on a clear vision for endgame Valheim, or left the Plains out of the vision as an awkward middle between two clearly defined visions. I would be kind of frustrated if the next biome again introduced 4 new crafting stations for items/materials specifically introduced in that biome. But these are just my opinions, curious to see how others find it.