Seeing the absolutely gorgeous caves teased in the developer blogs immediately made me excited for the potential they have as both a new dungeon and as a way to get around the in game limitations of the engine.
As of right now, the game has no practical way of digging below the earth. You can mine inside or under a static rock, but it is very finicky, and if you mess up the damage is not fixable. Allowing players to build inside premade mountain caves would be an excellent workaround for this issue that wouldn’t require any fundamental changes to the engine or voxel mechanics.
Allowing players to build inside a cave also solves a very annoying problem the Mountain Biome has. As someone who has built a fair share of mountain castles and cabins, drakes pose a significant annoyance to buildings compared to the equivalents from other biomes. Their extremely large aggro range combined with the fact that they fly and the nature of their attacks makes managing buildings and especially rooftops in the mountain a pretty huge hassle compared to other biomes. While there are some players who are fine with the extra time towards repairs there are others still who would prefer a safe place within the biome to set up their base.
There’s also the obvious that dwarves are awesome and a big part of Norse mythology. We already have a dwarf friend in game and I want to role play as his buddy with my own dwarf fortress up in the mountains.
Thanks for reading. Thoughts?
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/r48z2c/please_let_us_build_inside_the_mountain_caves/