Valheim, an open-art and survival sandbox taking place in the Viking purgatory, is filled with deadly enemies. There are goblins, skeletons, Draugr and trolls that will fight against any player they see. But the absolute greatest danger in the world is to prove that it is not a gray dwarf or a lightning-shooting elk, but the humble tree.
It is not at all a supernatural phenomenon like a frightening graft or a natural enchantment. Only normal, large trees in the world are surprisingly deadly. Valheim has a robust physics system, especially compared to many other survival games. When you mine ore, the rocks around the copper are driven away; enemy corpses will tumble up a steep hill.
This also applies to trees. In some games, a tree falls harmlessly and then disappears without detecting collisions. In Valheim, if a tree trunk goes down, it goes down difficult. Falling trees can shoot unprepared players at once and break through wooden bases. They do not waste. It’s a game where ‘TIMBER’ is shouted, or that your friends (or yourself) will express like little bugs.
To make matters worse, enemies can overthrow trees by attacking the area. There is nothing that makes a Viking feel more foolish than to stay at a distance and pepper a troll with arrows, just to miss the giant wooden stump on their head.
If you are not yet worried about deadly trees, trolls and other large monsters can grab fallen stumps and use them as improvised weapons. There’s nothing more frightening than flying a troll through the Black Forest, and feeling a surge of triumph as their health declines … only to hit them with a stump and turn you into Viking salsa.
Players mostly take it with good humor, but some are already trying ways to find the tree issue. Some groups build logging camps, far away from their main base, where they can cut down trees without worrying about losing longhouses or carefully built workstations. Other players try to use the logs as temporary bridges – or even as the basis for other construction projects that go up in the air so far that nothing can touch them.
Valheim is a very new game, which still has early access. It’s likely that developer Iron Gate, if development continues, will add many more deadly threats to the world. But for now, tree trunks seem to be one of the deadliest elements of Valheim. No one suspects that a tree that looks innocent is a weapon of mass destruction. For now, the best thing players can do is keep physics in mind, shout “TIMBER” when necessary, and never stand at the bottom of a hill while cutting down trees. If you die, it’s not a concern – at this point it’s basically a rite of passage.