I’m pretty sure Iron Gate Studio never really intended for their game to turn into a Viking architecture and city-planning game, but that’s basically what has happened. Since there’s only so much you can do in Valheim’s early access period, the end-game for most players is to construct a home base that goes way beyond what we know of Viking ruins.
Reddit user Fyxate has gone all-out to make this incredible home up in the hills. It reminds me a lot of Wisconsin’s House on the Rock, with a long winding staircase that gently ascends the hill and a vast complex that traverses the entire rocky interior of the mountain.
The view from the main dining area is incredible before you move on through the home’s many rooms, each sporting either a crafting station or rest area. There’s a collection of mounted heads on the interior staircase and in the distance a dock with a single longship.
It’s truly incredible and probably the best we’ve seen. But it’s far from the only major construction project that has popped up in Valheim. For example, this player has created an enormously long boat ramp so that they can launch a new longship in style. The only strange thing here is that the water seems to act less like a fluid and more like a trampoline, causing the ship to bounce quite a distance rather than splinter into a million pieces.
And there are the various launching mechanisms constructed as part of the Viking Space Program, which takes advantage of Valheim’s physics to send players into the upper atmosphere. This usually results in their untimely demise, but it’s certainly a fast way to reach Odin.
Valheim remains the top-selling game on Steam for the fourth week in a row and recently surpassed four million in sales. This easily clinches it for the platform's most successful game of 2021, and it seems unlikely anything will topple it anytime soon.