Hi there,

Two weeks ago I asked how to make the gameplay more interesting without emphasizing the cargo transport element too much. I found a way that works really well for me, and figured I'd share it with you in case someone can get any ideas from this (or to get input from you – there's room for improvement here).

The short version:

1. The world is not punishing enough.
2. The world is too accessible.
3. The ore grind has too much focus in the gameplay.
4. The enemy AI pathing is too easy to abuse.

The longer version follows…

"The world is not punishing enough"

I felt that running into the wilds should be a scary thing. Imagine yourself running into a dark forest, knowing there's wild animals and even monsters there. You _should_ be scared. If you know how to parry in vanilla Valheim and have proper food with you, that scare isn't really there until Swamp / Mountain at the earliest.

Additionally, unmodded Valheim has a creature level system (the stars you see on monsters) that feels very binary – they're either weak or very strong. There's too little diversity. If there is a level 2 (2 stars) enemy nearby, you can feel very confident that's the only one. So you deal with it first, then whatever else remains is trivial. And since everything has the same movement speed, you can apply the same combat tactics to everything. This means you can do pretty daunting stuff. You can run early into a biome you aren't fully ready for in preparation for when you actually make the switch, such as gather supplies like cloudberries / needle for Mountain while in Swamp gear etc, kill trolls before Eikthyr, kill Fulings before defeating Bonemass. Pretty degenerate stuff.

Creature Level And Loot Control takes care of all of this.

A quick tl;dr of the mod is it gives you control of the properties of the enemies that spawn, such as their damage, their health, but also new modifiers like speed, elemental infusions, unique affixes etc. It gives a needed spice to the combat gameplay.

This is the unmodified (vanilla) valheim creature power level distribution according to the Wiki:

This means you can get one of the three levels, and the damage difference between all three will be huge. But the strongest one will be so rare…

This is the modified creature power level distribution i added through Creature Level mod:

There's a lot more levels, which allows for a more smooth gameplay experience where you encounter a lot more diversity. You can control the spawn chance of the starred mobs, but I actually have it set fairly low. Randomly spawning arbitrarily strong enemies is not where the fun lies…

Sector-wide enemy levelling

In Creature Level you can enable a setting that divides the world into sectors. A sector can be levelled up, as in – the enemies spawning in that sector can receive a + modifier to their starting level. For instance, after making 15 enemy kills in a sector, any enemy spawning in that sector will receive a +1 level to their starting level. Then after +30 more kills (arbitrary number), another level. You can grant 3 levels this way, such that any naturally spawning 2-star enemy is now a 5-star enemy.

This has massive implications for any adventurer advancing beyond their capabilities!
If you're like me, someone who enjoys diving into the swamp with low bronze/troll gear and kill stuff thinking you're tough s**t, you'll quickly invest in your own demise if you aren't cautious. For example – you enter the Black Forest and quickly dispatch the Graydwarf Mafia that attacks you. The next one will be a mixture of levels 1-3, then some time after that you'll be fighting brutes with the health pool of trolls, shamans that just won't die – or god forbid, a troll that deals the same damage as a lox if you get caught. In short, you'll be fighting the consequences of your own actions.

I could say a ton more, but this fixed most gripes I had with combat. I now may meet a group of enemies whose combined properties (Quick, Splitting, Regenerating, Armored, Aggressive) make them much harder to deal with than I can if I am careless about levelling a sector.

"The world is too accessible"

Travelling in the world has no consequence. Because of the map, the minimap and the map markers, you don't navigate in any exciting fashion. You don't need to know that after the next river you should follow the path and then take a left to get to the stair to the base, because you'd just open the map and look where to go anyway. So in short – you don't look at the terrain because you don't need to. The world is just literally a journey from A to B, and you're annoyed at the distance it takes because there is no risk involved. You can't get lost, you can outrun any enemy etc.

Remove the map – I dare you.

I use the mod No_Map to enforce a console command that just straight up hides the map in-game.

This is the single most immersive change I can recommend. Suddenly you're scared of exploring too far, in case you'll get lost. You'll start memorizing the terrain, you'll pay attention to world markers, you'll build roads, you won't go on asinine boat trips without having a plan. This increases the longevity of the game by a massive amount, but not in the grindy way that the ore-focused hauler gameplay does. If you're curious about just one thing, let it be this one. It's great.

"The ore grind has too much focus in the gameplay"

I say this because once you don't care about the terrain because you have the map, all that is left is getting from A to B with your payload (iron, silver etc) intact. As I believe I've covered above, there's a ton of fun that can be had in this game that does not require you to become a cargo transport freighter only. I enabled ores/ingots through portals and focused on emphasizing other fun aspects of the gameplay and instantly the game became a tonnnnnnnn more enjoyable for me and my friends, less centered around the logistical hurdles of iron over ocean or silver down a mountain.

To enable ores through portals (and a load of other interesting configs) check out Valheim+.

"The enemy AI pathing is too easy to abuse"

Ever fought any enemy that was massively stronger than you, and then you just… Jumped onto a rock, saw the enemy have to pivot & walk 30+ feet just to get around a tiny ledge before you wait until it get close, jump down and see it have to make the same walk back? This is an example of the enemy pathing being easy to abuse. In vanilla valheim there are very few monsters that disallows this, but they do exist (Deathsquito, Growth, Drake). If you aren't fighting any of the aforementioned monsters, you can abuse this way too reliably.

Creature Level mod allows mobs to have infusions that increase their movement speed, meaning some enemies will challenge this strategy. This is the closest 'fix' I can think of to this issue, but this one is on the devs imo – I don't see a good way to fix it, but it's what I've got currently.

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If you read this far, I applaud your patience. This turned into a much longer post than I started out intending, but I'm just so enthusiastic about this small set of mods and what it has created for me in terms of gameplay. It's less grindy, more combat-oriented and exploration is now it's own reward.

Here is tiny gallery of some roads we've been using. We have roads stretching 6-7km ingame now, mostly through meadows and black forest, skirting mountains etc. It's great fun.