Valheim Guide and Tips: How to Build Your Base

In this guide, we’ll give you some useful tips for building a base in Valheim.

 

Now, most players I'm sure know how to build a 4x4 little shack with four walls and a roof but I’m going to give you some tips that maybe the game might not tell you right off the bat but hopefully you'll make your life a little easier.

 

So let's jumped into the game, now you've learned how to build a workbench you've got sort of some of the basics down but you decided that you know what I want to try and improve my base. First, you must find a location where you want to build your base. Once you place the workbench down you'll notice, if you pull out a hammer you'll be able to see when you build it, there is a little ring around the area where you can pretty much build and construct things and anything outside of that ring you won't be able to build until you build another workbench to expand that space.  But we're going to just work within that circle for now.

 

The first tip I can give you is to get something else and not a hammer and is actually to use a hoe. Now, the reason you want to use a hoe is because a hoe when you right click on it there's three options for what the hoe can do to the ground around you. You're kind of terraforming the ground a little bit. First thing is you can level the ground. This is important and it requires your stamina and once it has run out you'll have to wait for it to come back and then start flattening out the area to build a base.

 

So let's say you finally built your first little home it's your humble abode and you've got the beginning foundations to a nice little base. Now, aside from building a base one thing you got to think about is warmth so you have to build a fireplace. Now, you could build a campfire right outside and use that as warm and you can sit right outside but wouldn't it be better to be inside but the problem with it being inside is you can't put fireplaces on wood floors. So one way of doing that is to break the wood floor and with the floor exposed below and what you can do then is take a fireplace and put it right on top. For aesthetic reasons some people might not want to have the fireplace with an exposed piece of dirt on the floor. You can actually then build a wooden floor underneath the fireplace and the fire will stay.

 

The next tip I want to give you is I've left a little opening because smoke gathers in the house and this is a mechanic that they put in the game which is awesome and I love the immersion. If you close off the roof you'll see smoke will start to gather in your house and what happens is it actually does damage to you and you'll actually get hurt from inhaling all that smoke. So we need to find a way to allow that smoke to escape, so we can always break just a hole in the roof and have some space for the smoke to dissipate.

 

My next tip is that when it rains your fireplace is exposed and what will happen to your fireplace is the rain will actually put out the fire. So how do you simultaneously allow the smoke out without allowing the rain in. Well it's a very simple solution the one thing you want to do is you want to build a roof except you want to flip it to the opposite direction and you want to put it on top of where the hole is. This way when the rain comes down vertically it will not go through the hole of your rooftop and then what happens is the smoke is still allowed to go out. Now, you've got your very own little chimney allowing the smoke out but not the rain in.

 

Now, the my next tip for you guys is while you're building your base you've got to think about the integrity and the structure and the strength of your pieces as you're building them. You'll see different colors when you hover over the pieces and that denotes their strength or their integrity of the actual piece. So as you go down you’ll find blue pieces and they are the strongest because obviously they're down to the floor. Then you go to green pieces that are one up from the actual base or foundation of your building. Now, as you go further up you'll notice the color will change. So if I were to build two more pieces you'll see the colors go from blue down below up to green and it still remains green until up to  where it's getting more of a yellowish color and if I were to keep going it would go to orange and then red. This is because the yellow piece is only connected down to one piece through one single connection and therefore it's not able to hold very much weight on its own. It could still hold a second piece if I were to build a second piece on the side of the yellow piece. Now, it goes orange because the yellow piece is trying to support the weight of the orange one and it's all connected just through one line of connection. So this is not a very strong foundation. If I were to build another piece on top of that you'll see it goes to red. So these are the levels of integrity and strength that your pieces have going from blue all the way up to green to yellow to orange and to red. Now if you try and force building another piece on there it'll just crumble and you won't be able to build any more on that. So that's one thing you've got to think about when you're building is looking at the color of the actual pieces you've built. You've got to be making sure that while you're building using the hammer tool to check the integrity and the strength of the pieces that you're building in order to make sure that you're actually able to put any more pieces onto them.

 

Another way of actually reinforcing them is to actually build those wooden beams and poles in order to connect them to the ground. For example through vertical poles to reinforce them further.

 

Next tip I have for you guys is to stack your chest when you build them. So built a little storage room in your base, it's really much better to stack them because you save a lot more space. Now, you can stack them in a half stack by just creating a small little wood floor and then that way when you go to build a chest, the chest actually can fit right on top and you can build two right on top of each other.

  

Now, my final little tip for you base builders out there if you really want to appreciate your base sometimes you want to take a screenshot share it on reddit or just share it to your friends and family. The best way to do that is to hit Ctrl + F3 to take away the HUD. Now, you can take those beautiful cinematic screenshots to your heart's content.