Originally posted by cannonbo:

well i learned something today. and GunsforBucks made me chuckle. So well worth the post.
Personally i'm surprised that Birch is a hard wood. In my mind i equated fast growth with softer wood.

All nut and fruit trees are hard woods. Its why those type woods are used for smoking and fermenting. They burn hotter, longer, and don't leave unpleasant after tastes in food.

Well there are a couple of good reasons.

Pine trees grow both straighter and taller than Birch, Beech, or Oak with fewer flaws like knots and the weak points in a structure are where beams are joined. So a taller straighter beam allows for a sturdier structure. (This is why White pine trees were used for masts on sailing ships and why President George Washington set aside several acres of White pine forests as a strategic reserve).

Hard woods like Oak, Birch, and Beech are harder to work with especially when you haven't got access to iron. The Beech in question is likely the European Beech tree that yields a tough but dimensionally unstable beam.

I'm not sure why the developers decided that Beech trees were a soft wood equivalent to a fir tree and fir and pine logs are not suitable for fires because of the smokey residue left behind.

They seem to be similar to the real life equivalents of hardwood & softwood. Conifers like pine, fir, spruce are softwoods and are commonly used for framing and housing exteriors, while hardwoods like birch & oak are generally used in manufacturing desks, tables. Valheim does sort of have it backwards in the sense that using hardwood is preferable to softwood for heating & cooking fuel, as it tends to produce less smoke & resin when burned. Having birch & oak produce both regular wood & fine wood has a level of realism to it in the sense that the branches of both would in real life only be good for kindling/firewood & roof thatching.

well i learned something today. and GunsforBucks made me chuckle. So well worth the post.
Personally i'm surprised that Birch is a hard wood. In my mind i equated fast growth with softer wood.

Surprised more people don't use core wood for framing & building larger structures to begin with, it can be found super early on. I use it to build with quite a bit, especially now there are angled core wood beams.

If I remember I'll chuck a few screenies in here of Core Wood type builds I did recently.

honestly they probably just didn't want forests of birch trees everywhere

Originally posted by shadowscion:

honestly they probably just didn't want forests of birch trees everywhere

That's the Plains ha ha

@OP Don't know how many people are educated enough in wood stuff. Maybe DIY homeowners or people in the trade/hobby. Kids today play with metal, plastic and transistors.

But as you say, it's only a game. Not something that made me think twice about it. The barking deer had me going WTF though ha ha. European deer, go figure! It's all Greek to me!