Expanded Weather System

Hi everyone,

Back to Valheim after Mistlands and I started thinking of some new ideas about the game. I had posted about Shrines and Rituals some time ago. We didn't get that, but we did get the obliterator.

This time, I thought about expanding the weather system! To be clear: I'm not saying this is how the game SHOULD have been, I'm just exploring the idea. I would mod it if I had the technical capacity.

So, how I imagine it is that different types of rain (drizzle, light, heavy, storm) or simply jumping in water has different tiers of being wet, instead of even 1 second of stepping out in light rain causing you to get the same 2 minute wet debuff that you get for spending 5 minutes when its pouring.

I called the 3 tiers of wetness Wet, Drenched and Soaked. I'm not a native speaker, I hope that makes sense.

Lighter rains can only get you wet or maybe drenched. Heavier rains get you wet pretty much immediately and drenched very quick. Soaked doesn't take long either.

Each comes with debuffs, with Drenched being closest to current Wet. Even as "just wet", exposure to rain can make the debuffs worse. Same with soaked: Keep staying outside under a storm and you are getting worse stamina debuffs.

But it's not just stamina. Ships are slower, especially with sails. Storms can generate lightning that can hit trees, buildings or ships and NPCs are also affected from rain. Heavy rain can even increase stealthiness and decrease detection ranges for NPCs.

Finally, kind of related to the Shrines idea, maybe we use Obliterator to ask for a certain weather to Thor: Sacrifice a certain set of items, and he may grant you calm weather for a couple of days.

With all the changes, heavier rains are more terrible but lighter rains aren't as strong buzzkills as heavy ones. This, I hope, allows you to work under rain without that much inconvenience, but also brings new risks, challenges and emergent adventures: Do you really want to sail under a storm, or would you rather "park" and put up a make shift house (maybe some sort of tent item could be added) to wait the storm out? If so, you might expose yourself to enemies on the coast and have a little adventure (who knows – maybe you'll find a dungeon to stay in and it will turn out to be full of cores!)

What do you think? This is very fitting to my play style and what I like about the game and I'm very curious to hear which parts works for others and which parts are clear no-no's.

PS: I'm not a blogger or anything, but keep a record of ideas like these. There are more details here in my Medium article. You don't need to follow through, but if you find the idea interesting, you might enjoy it.