There is an interesting website with a Valheim World Generator. It reverse engineers the world generation in Valheim, so that you can enter a seed and get the map of your world with all interesting locations. The only problem is that you probably need to have played Valheim for a lot of hours before you actually know what shape of world you might want. Until you have a certain knowledge of the game, the maps all look a bit the same. But it is a fun tool to play around and get a bit of insight into procedurally generated worlds.

The most visible difference between worlds is whether the islands are more round and separated, or more elongated and connected. In extreme cases of elongated worlds, you can have all 5 biomes reachable on foot from your starting location. However, that would be some long walks. And unless you want to cheat, the restriction on teleporting ore means that a long walk to the nearest swamp would be a path you'd have to take very often. Personally, I would prefer a world with a starting point near the ocean, and the nearest swamp easily reachable by boat, because then you can transport the iron ore by sea.

If you use the function of the Valheim World Generator to find where the boss mobs and the trader are, it becomes very obvious that some worlds are much better than others. The first boss is always close, but there are big differences in how close the nearest trader, second and third boss are. The bosses are a bit less critical, because the game will tell you where the closest next boss is; but on some worlds you basically have no chance of ever finding the trader, which will lock you out of some parts of the game, like fishing.

The center of the map is always the meadows biome, and if you zoom out you can see clearly how the other biomes are further and further away from the center. But the earlier biomes reappear further out as well. So one thing you can look out for is whether there is an island further away that has several or even all five initial biomes. Even if the starting island isn't great, you would just need to build a raft to get to a far better place. Of course that depends on how nomadic you want to play this game.

The one thing I don't like is how opaque all of this is. Without a cheat or external website you will never even see your whole map. While you can exchange "best seeds" with other players, you can't influence the creation of the world with some parameters, like you can when making a world in the game Civilization. The best thing you can do is try out a bunch of different seeds on the above website, until you find one you like. For me that would be something like the seed Tobold0102 (link takes a minute or so to load); I'd build my base southwest of the starting point, and have easy access to different bosses and traders, with a possibility to ship iron over sea.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:26 AM Permanent Link