Early on i looked at building guides to improve my building skills, (they were very poor as it turned out) everything else I learnt as a team, there were 6 of us. So a bit of both.

But after your first run defeating all the bosses & progressing, you really won't need guides at all, I typically teach myself new things all the time in this game.

I learn by playing. I gather tips here (like the building on top of crypts, or raising level of tracks in the swamps, but that doesn't mean I xill use them).
From time to time, I go read some pages of the wiki (for example, I was too much curious about those new chains dropped by Phantoms, or was wondering how useful would be those piles of ancient bark in my barn).

Compared to other games (ARPG, RTS, TBS, 4X), Valheim is very light on the spreadsheet level, and no manual is required. Also min-maxing or time optimization (like sequences of actions) are not required.

I learn by playing. I'll wiki if I get hopelessly stuck. I only watch videos for amusement or little tricks I might not have figured out after I have out leveled the content.

If I really can't figure out something for myself when playing, I'll jump into a youtube videos and watch just enough to kick me off again. If I want to fine-tune my knowledge of a game, I will wiki/google afterwards. :) I have a very short window of patience before I get tetchy and want to figure things out before I move on.

I prefer to learn by playing, so I avoid articles and videos with 'guides' before I play a game. But, once I am playing, when I do have questions for which I don't get a clear answer through gameplay, I will google and then read to get the clarification.

Just an example, from this game (which I started playing around 5 to 6 days ago), after my first 'house' got filled up with smoke, I googled to get a better understanding of what was needed to prevent that from happening...because the game offers absolutely no guidance (or even warning) about that.
As it was I was going to have to rebuild once, I didn't want to have to rebuild again and again until it worked. I like to "learn" by playing, but there's a limit to how much time I'll waste trying to do it when a game offers absolutely 0 guidance.

And yes, I think developers these days do balance their game around the fact that most players use outside-of-game resources to learn everything. Which is fine by me, because I like challenging games, so that just means there is some challenge to be had, at least until I know what I'm doing.

One of my favorite genres is RPG games, and sadly the modern approach to playing these in a multiplayer environment is just gross to me. Every 'raid group" expects all of their members to have watched YT videos, and learned everything about fights before doing the fights. It takes all the joy out of those games, imo. I no longer play MMO's because of it.
Modern gamers, in general, just really don't seem to appreciate 'playing' games. They just want to "finish" them.

I went in totally cold, no guides, no YT. that lasted about 20 hours play time. I could have figured it out myself eventually but this game can be rather unforgiving and I'm no masochist

How can you expect people not to use guides when there are too many mechanics to force-learn in even your first week of the game. If you really got to the end-game without guides, congrats, but not many people would find this type of masochism enjoyable.

I hit up the wiki time to time—saving myself frustration from making wasteful mistakes or running around blind trying to figure stuff out is more important to me than being 100% spoiler free.

This game does not fight fair, I don't see why I should either.

Partake in whatever helps you enjoy the game- naysayers, purists, and gatekeepers be damned. This game isn't pvp, nor does it have leaderboards of any kind, so the opinions of others only carries what weight you grant to them.

Some people prefer not to progress in the game in favour of building in creative, or even having a "fresh" world without any bosses killed on it, to use as their base of operations.

I use a map generator to locate stuff in this game, and the wiki to plan much of my strategies and crafting, among other shenanigans, and may consider mods in the future. I am having plenty of fun

Originally posted by Honorable_D:

I hit up the wiki time to time—saving myself frustration from making wasteful mistakes or running around blind trying to figure stuff out is more important to me than being 100% spoiler free.

to be fair, i hit the wiki to look up resistances and weaknesses since the game seem to be a bit lacking in that regard even though most of it has been like "it makes sense" that something which is undead is weak to spirit and so forth

Originally posted by SSJPrince:

How can you expect people not to use guides when there are too many mechanics to force-learn in even your first week of the game. If you really got to the end-game without guides, congrats, but not many people would find this type of masochism enjoyable.

not masochist in the slightest, im extremely curious as a person and often pick up a lot of different hobbies and try a lot of different things

this game is just down my alley, a lot of different things to do even if a lot of things are impossibly inconvenient and can get boring to follow through simple processes

the change of scenery and with many different things to switch things up with has been great even if its impossible to deny that theres a lot of room for much needed changes/improvements but in general, its been a blast.

I learn by playing unless something is excessively difficult to find. My first black forest had no crypts so I googled why I couldn't find them.

Couldn't build mistlands items at all after finding a fair few materials, turns out I was having the same problem I had with surtling cores with black cores.

Otherwise I just learn the game by playing, and maybe look up precise stats once I've already done it (like finding out the exact damage a fuling berserker does after i've already killed Yag)

Bits amd pieces off wikis, if possible. Nothing crazy, mostly just what's needed to build things beforehand.

Originally posted by Eightball:

As an long time gamer (yes, read old) I find it interesting that many people prefer to learn all the nuances of a game -to include puzzle solutions, locations, meta gear sets, etc- via a wiki as opposed to learning through their own in game experience.

Granted many of the resources available now were not around when I first started gaming and if they were I may have used them, I can't really say.

So do you think 'learning how to play the game before playing the game' through things like wiki and YT videos is considered the norm now?

And do think developers take into consideration that players will use such out-of-game resources so they feel less constrained to use game mechanics that can be 'figured' out by the average player and can instead use more obtuse mechanics?

Is some of a game's potential 'fun' affected by a wiki/YT approach or do these resources allow a player to 'get to the good parts' of game sooner?

Just curious what your thoughts are on the matter as it came up in a conversation recently.

As I grew up playing games on various different consoles and the first few computers capalbe of running games with the help of multiple floppy drives and the start of the first wave of massive online games, its not really that type of games that we see anymore.

just about every single game provides a lot if not too much automation in modern times to guide the players through pointers, text and voice acting and practically every successful game seem to cater to the norm in order to please shareholders.

as for valheim, the mechanical fights is almost completely nonexistent and youll be fine just following simple attack patterns along with their respective cooldowns to know when to preserve stamina or when to exhaust stam for burning the boss healthpool.

i dont really watch a lot of youtube in general but i like to build an educated understanding of the game raw and learn from my own mistakes

sadly most games tend to suffer due to poltics and catering towards content creativity with a lot of censorship and soulless content

Honestly if a game can't be played without a tutorial or at most really quick grab info, I am not interested. I mean a quick reference is ok on a max/min game with a bajillion choices but only a few that work well, sure. Valheim isn't a max min game, its a right tool for the job game.

Im not exactly a spring chicken myself so perhaps im not the target audience for this question specifically, but I tend to use a bit of both. I prefer to go into a game blind and figure it out as i go, but once I am comfortable with my understanding of the game I also enjoy checking out what other players have come up with as well. My solution to a given challenge may be vastly different than another player's approach and I do enjoy trying out different approaches I may not have considered myself.

I did grow up during the era where trying to get external info on a game meant getting ahold of gaming magazines (specifically the right one that actually talked about the game you were specifically interested in) or the joys of old dial-up where you'd spend an hour unable to use your phone because you were online while your modem screamed at you and the webpage you needed took 15 minutes to load the 3 pictures the page had (and game wikis were not a thing yet) so you REALLY had to want it if you wanted to check something about a game. So admittedly i'm a bit more patient about gaining game info than some of my younger gaming friends are.