Originally posted by Armos:

Simply turning shadows to medium helped a ton for me. Lagged quite a bit on high.

I dropped them to low and it literally doubled my fps in heavily shadowed areas like forests.

The other day I realised I'd actually forgotten the shadows were on low; the game looks that great to me with that one setting turned all the way down.

I always run the game with Vulkan, as it gives me massively better performance.
I'm aware this setting can have a wide range of effects, from crashes (which I literally never get) and lower fps to smoother performance like I got, though.

I play with the "Play Valheim with OpenGL" option at launch and it preforms much better for me. Combat feels more responsive and I get about 5-10fps more with a mix of medium/high settings.

Simply turning shadows to medium helped a ton for me. Lagged quite a bit on high.

Originally posted by Armos:

Simply turning shadows to medium helped a ton for me. Lagged quite a bit on high.

Yep, same for me. There is a significant gap of framerate between setting shadow at high and medium.

Yeah, there do seem to be incremental performance boosts with most patches. Don't know how far that'll go.

Sounds like you're asking anyone who sees this thread, so: I have no plans to ever improve optimisation.

Also pretty sure the art style choice is partially to compensate for the dev's lack of resources and optimization expertise, so I wouldn't hold my breath for optimization.

Believe it or not you DO NOT NEED a moat to defend your base. You can defend your base purely through try-harding the combat. Moats create a HUGE amount of lag so if you're losing a lot of frames that could be the reason. Like, even digging a dock out or adding an entire extra land-mass out over the water doesn't cause as much lag as a moat does.

The last update made the game run alot better for me, needs more optimisation but its a small team and updates are slow but the game was cheap and I suspect it will be a year before game is finished ish.

When the game is complete. No point, or atleast little point until then. I mean for major optimization. There will probably be small optimizations before then.