Valheim patch adds more storage space and other quality of afterlife changes

Another week has passed and another patch has arrived in the Viking afterlife. This isn't a massive patch for Valheim, like the upcoming Hearth and Home update we're holding our breath for, but it does contain a number of fixes, changes, and tweaks, most of them good.

Among the quality of (after)life variety, there's been a fix for the 'comfort' calculation, which is increased when you have certain items in your room, such as rugs, chairs, and beds. There was an issue where a stool and simple bed would override the comfort level of better items, like a chair and a higher quality bed. That's been fixed. 

If you're wearing heavier armor, you won't be knocked back as much in combat, which makes sense. If you swing a battle axe around, you're more likely to hit multiple foes now, which sounds useful. And get happy, Vikings, because your reinforced chests now have 24 storage slots instead of just 18. Huzzah! It's the perfect place to keep six more of your 2,345,921 spare dwarf eyes.

Monster tweaks are welcome, too, like a higher trophy drop rate for deathsquitos and drakes, and wolves that spawn at night won't be so quick to flee and despawn while you're taming them. All boss drops now float, so if you happen to ice Bonemass while he's lurching around in deep water, you'll be able to collect everything he drops more easily. 

A few changes might make certain aspects of Viking life a bit harder, though. Campfires, bonfires, and hearths now take damage while dealing damage, so if you've set up fires as part of a mass-culling operation to farm resources, those fires are going to need some repair work from time to time. Same if you're using campfires to help take down Valheim's second boss, The Elder, because they'll degrade while they're burning him. A slight delay has also been added to using the hammer, hoe, and cultivator, which has some players worried about farming and landscaping, though I jumped in to test it out and I barely notice the delay at all. I think it might just be an attempt to prevent constant spamming on busy servers, which may affect performance. But we'll see if it's tweaked again further down the line.

Finally, there's been a change to how console commands work. The console has been disabled by default, so to activate it you'll need to add a line to the game's launch properties on Steam.

It's easy: just right-click Valheim in your Steam library, select Properties, and in the General tab, at the bottom where it says Launch Options, type -console. (No period at the end.) When in-game, press F5 and the console will open. Rather than using "imacheater" to activate cheats, you'll now have to type devcommands instead.

Here are the full patch notes:

• Campfire,Bonfire & hearth take damage when dealing damage
• Reinforced chest inventory space increased to 6x4
• All boss drops can now float on water
• Sunken crypt entrance tweaked (to stop tombstones from getting stuck)
• Fixed rotation of Wood tower shield on item stands
• Deathsquito & Drake trophy drop rate increased
• 1 & 2 Star creature HP fix
• Night-spawning wolves should be easier to tame now (should stop trying to run away & despawn after starting to tame)
• Harpoon does not work on bosses anymore
• Ingame console disabled by default (add launch argument "-console" to enable)
• The console command for enabling developer/debug commands has been changed to “devcommands” from “imacheater” and a warning message has been added.
• Improved enemy projectile reaction system
• Battle axe tweaks (hits multiple enemies easier)
• Player knockback force is affected by equipment speed modifiers (IE heavy gear will reduce the knockback from enemies)
• Blackforest stone tower tweaks
• Ward system fixes (You can no longer place a new ward where an enemy ward overlaps)
• Comfort calculation fixed
• "Failed to connect" error message fixed
• Serpent trophy stack fix
• Missing Moder spawn location in some worlds fixed (NOTE: For existing worlds "genloc" command needs to be run manually in a local game with dev commands enabled to generate new locations, this is only needed if your specific world has this issue, this is not very common)
• Megingjord item-collider fix
• Added a slight use-delay on Hammer, Hoe & Cultivator
• Hammer remove auto-repeat added
• Better network bandwidth handling (should work better on low bandwidth connections & also use higher data rate if possible)
• Dolmen location fixes (Stop top stone from falling for no reason)
• Fixed removing item from item-stand not always syncing item stats
• Server list refresh button can be pressed before the entire list has been downloaded
• Better bad connection detection
• Fixed issue causing server to send more data the longer a client was connected
• Localization updates