Valheim and a Strange Lack of Trolls

I think I might have gone with a dud seed.  Or maybe my settings are wrong.  It is hard to tell.

It could be the mods.  Iron Gate has made it so the app will not grant you achievements if you are running mods.  This attempt to maintain the purity of the game has, of course, backfired and people not running mods immediately reported things like being told they have “summoned items through cheating means.”

The perversity of the universe almost demands this sort of outcome.  Odin himself would laugh at this.  So there is now a console command that will fix this… it is in that Reddit post I linked in the previous paragraph… as well as a mod that will use that to ensure you get achievements even if you are running mods.

(Also, I had a copy of our original world with my original character and just logged him in to it and at least got the achievements recorded

So did we learn our lesson about enforcing purity?  I bet not.  But this is a bit of a digression away from the topic at hand, in which I can’t find any damn trolls.  Which, I guess could be because of the mods.  Or maybe not.

But first, let me pull back as when we last left off with me and Valheim 1.0 I was marveling at the serenity of being in a new world and doing the simple things like gathering wood and stalking deer and just enjoying the play of light on the leaves as the sun rose in the morning.

Light shining through the trees

And then I decided I wanted run off and do a little sailing, so I built the raft, the only water craft available early on, and attempted to get somewhere with that and was immediately, “Screw that noise, I need to get me the karve, the first real sailing vessel!”

I didn’t even sail it back to base… the wind was blowing the wrong way to start with… I just steered it to the shore and abandoned it where it made land, preferring to walk home rather than put up with that nonsense.

For Sale: Wooden Raft, Never Sailed

I have no idea how Bhagpuss carried on as long as he did on that miserable raft.  One you have a taste of something better it can be hard to go back.

Of course, this is how they get you.  This is how they hook you into the progression cycle of the game.  I like things now, but I REALLY want that next thing, the thing I can only get by getting to the next tier of crafting.

That meant defeating Eikthyr, the first boss.

Slaying Eikthyr gets you the antlers to make the first pick to mine the copper and the tin to make the bronze that are needed for the bronze nails as well as the bronze axe, needed to harvest the fine wood, all of which is needed to build the karve.

However, one does not simply walk up and slay Eithyr.  Sure, he is the easiest of the bosses.  But I was also walking around in rags and swinging a stone axe.  So before I could get onto that I felt I had better do a bit of upgrading.  That meant hunting more deer to get more skin and picking up a bunch of flint to get at least a flint axe and dagger together.

I also needed some bones for the armor upgrades.  They’re like a corset, not all that impressive without the boning.  Skeletons, though, were kind of scarce on the ground.  Like, nowhereville.  And there should have been some wandering around at night.

To solve that I decided to head over to the black forest.  Not too far in.  Just far enough to find myself a crypt.  There are always skeletons guarding the burial chambers in the black forest, and more inside the chamber if you dare enter.  And, coming up with only a few bones outside, I did in fact dare to enter.  The locals were not exactly happy to see me.

Skeletons lining up to have a go at me

I held my own for a bit with my shield and my flint axe, but that one star skeleton that followed them up was a bit much.  I had my second, and then my third, death for the save on that run.

Back for the corpse run

By that point I had changed the world settings to boost the amount of resources one gets from each pass… so extra bones from skeletons… as well as reducing the death penalty so that you come back with your equipped gear and fewer skill points lost.

That is the minimum penalty… though you could set the mobs to passive if you wanted to avoid conflict.  Again, Bhagpuss is giving that path a try and, while interested in the results, I still feel like I need the tension of hostile mobs out in the world.

I got my bones… and some surtling cores…. and had my deer hide so went back and upgraded all my gear as much as I could.  Then, with a belly full of three kinds of food, a flint knife, a wooden round shield, my bow and some fire arrows, I set out to face the first boss.  Eikthyr was summoned!

A wild Eikthyr suddenly appears!

I summoned him, he summoned the storm, and we set about our dance.  While I had turned the death penalty as low as it would go, I did leave actual combat set to normal.  Even so, I’ve probably fought Mister Lightning Antlers close to a dozen times at this point.  I got in a few stabs, then stepped back to hoist my shield to block whichever special attack he chose to toss at me.

I took a couple of hits when things were not timed correctly, but for the most part stabby stabby block won out his stomp and lightning routine.  He went down while I had barely been scratched.  See, I do occasionally learn things!  And once you’re done you get the new victory cinematic.

Eikthyr all electric

That done, it was back to the workbench to craft the antler pickaxe.  I also hung up his trophy on the right stone to receive the ability to summon his forsaken power… which I constantly forget to use.  It is like that bag of marbles from Goldshire.

It was back to the black forest then to start mining a copper vein I had spotted while looking for skeletons.  I had at it, something that almost always attracts all the locals.

Swinging for copper

Seriously, it is practically a meme at this point that fastest way to find a troll is to start mining in the black forest.  But the best I could muster was a couple of greydwarves.  It seemed like a win at the time… but was it a sign?

I mined a bunch of copper until the pick wore out, then ran it all back to my base and started feeding it into the smelter.  Out came copper bars and I was momentarily bemused that this did not unlock the bronze axe.  Yeah, you need tin to go with the copper to make bronze.  You’d think every MMORPG ever would have taught me this annoying fact.

So back out for some tin, which spawns in nodes along the shore.

Smashing some tin for a skill upgrade

As I did that for a while, knocking off the occasional greydwarf with my new copper knife… copper alone does get you something… I was finally interrupted by a troll.  But I also know about trolls at this point.  So I kited him around, hitting him with my crude bow and simple wooden arrows.

This troll appears to be following me

It was a bit of work with the crude bow, but I managed to get him.  And that was good.  My favorite armor set from the game is the troll hide armor.  I would be back… back with a fine wood bow… to hunt for more trolls.

I went back to base with my troll hide and my tin and smelted and made bronze and made the bronze axe.  At that point I cut down all the birch trees in sight to get fine wood as more metal smelted so I could make some bronze nails and then a bronze pickaxe.

I also made the first piece of the troll hide armor set, choosing the cloak because I did not have a cloak yet.  And I built a karve to sail myself around in and help haul ore back to my base.

Then I set out once more for the black forest, keen to mine more copper and tin and to make as much noise as possible because I needed a few more trolls if I was going to finish up that armor set.

Swinging for more copper with my bronze pickaxe and troll hide cloak on

But no more trolls were forthcoming.

I got a few more greydwarves, but that is like saying you found a leaf in the forest.

I had a bear show up.   But bear baiting is practically a solved problem.  With a torch in one hand… because bears run from fire… and my dagger in the other I chased the bear around until it got itself jammed up against the terrain and stabbed it to death.

Tell me again how to prevent forest fires!

Trolls however made no appearance.  After a couple more loads or tin and copper I started going out into the black forest specifically looking for trolls.  I sailed along the coast looking for a troll standing by the shore… a likely location for trolls… or for troll dens that might be visible.

I stopped now and then to delve deeper into the black forest in search of any sign of trolls, but I spotted not a single one.

I ran into some ghosts.  Those were… different.  Ghosts were a cool blackish blue smear before, weren’t they?  Not a bunch of green guys who arise when you walk to close to their green marker in the middle of the day, right?  That seems to have changed.

Fighting a ghost with the marker for another off to the left

I mean sure, it is raining, so they aren’t out in direct sunlight… but still.  It was daytime.  And they were all over this one section of the black forest, but then nowhere else.

Then, in thinking about where else to look I realized there had also been a serious lack of burial crypts.  Aside from that first one I had stumbled across, I had yet to see another.

Also, when I had been in that crypt there had been one of the runes… the vegvisirs… in there and I had clicked on it, which is supposed to put the location of The Elder on your map, but it failed to do so.  Strange.

So I decided to take the seed value and go check it on the site that translates your seed into a world map. (Thank link goes to the site with the seed I used.)

Seeing the map laid out, I went in search of The Elder, stopping along the way at a couple of the spots where Haldor the trader is supposed to be.  He is only at one, but it is the first one you arrive at.  But he wasn’t at any of them, and the alter of The Elder wasn’t where I expected it… which is to say I couldn’t find it at all.

It seems like something is wrong with my current save.  Is it the few mods I am using? (I just want larger stacks of things and to be able to craft from nearby containers.)  Is it the seed I chose?  Is there such thing as a bad seed?  Or is this just another of the 1.0 bugs?

I did get some exploring in, and got some more nice sunsets and sunrises.

I forget which this is, but it is pretty glorious

I might have to try a new world/seed and see if the problem follows me or if something in the save was corrupted.