You can quite safely ignore the skill system entirely.

If your playing normally (i.e. not spending hundreds of hours grinding specific skills) you'll float between 30-60 for your active skills and 10-30 for your seldom used ones as you level up and die repeatedly in new biomes. Skills softcap around 60-70 for normal gameplay as thats where the 5% penalty for dying outweighs the gains from living.

There is a large difference beween 0 and 100 in a skill (about 40% stamina/etir drain) but the difference between your practical skill levels is close to 10%, which is why i say worrying about them doesnt matter much.

Every time you switch to a new weapon type for a new biomes set of weapons, your old weapon skill will gradually descent back to mediocre. By the time i reached the end of mistlands my Chopping skill was at 23 for example, even though i've felled literal forests.

Shocking no one mentioned that the jump skill number also effects the height of your jumping, not just the stamina usage. This is huge!!!

The only thing I don't like is an entirely new characters with no skills. Once I'm past those really early and quick level ups I don't give skill levels a thought. I don't die very often so I can be confident that they will continue to climb for a long time, and never once has it felt like my skill levels have changed an outcome. They are just nice to have.

They don't matter. They never have. I can safely say that after almost 900 hours in game.

For the most part no, the skills don't make a big difference. There are some that I have certainly noticed the difference with, like jumping and as weirdly useless as it is, swimming have saved my bacon before. Sprinting is also a really helpful one, but the first boss you beat gives you the ability to flee a whole lot better when you really truly need to so even when you dont have much sprint skill you have a major compensation for it.

Jumping is a big one, especially if you like building actually. The higher your jump skill the higher you can jump and you need to boost this up a bit to be able to jump up a full wall height like i tend to be doing when trying to build taller homes. So this one is usually the one I notice the most when first starting or when i suddenly cant make a jump around my base that i used to all the time because i died and am just a little too unskilled to now.

Swim is an odd one for me to praise, it's practically pointless. The one thing about it worth noting is that you dont drown quite AS fast at higher swim skill. The only reason this has been noticeable for me is moments I lose my boat unexpectedly and find myself stuck swimming and just plain praying i can reach shore before both my stamina and health have run out (and this kids, is why we stay fed on boats to). Losing my boat happens so rarely though that it's really one of those skills you never think about until its already too late anyway. heck the last time I lost my boat wasn't even to an enemy, it was to a desync with a multiplayer server while sailing that saw me spawn back in a ways behind my boat in open ocean (thankfully there was a sand-bar chain within swimming distance but playing castaway until i could get a raft to go get my boat back was not the most thrilling way to spend what was meant to be an iron trip originally).

Sprint, same thing, better stamina usage so you can do it for longer (and you can make longer horizontal leaps with it and you do actually run slightly faster to...just fast enough to escape certain mobs you just cant seem to shake at the start of the game at least). Makes a noticeable difference when you spend most of the game constantly running everywhere mostly, but since that is exactly what you do it isnt like this isnt going to rebuild itself quickly.

The rest of the skills have their own perks to that generally mean you can do the skill slightly better, but especially the combat related skills you just get used to using them regardless what your skill level is actually at. Sure a high block skill helps you block, but you generally also know that your gear and current food contribute to so you aren't relying on the skill itself to make the difference, it's more a useful little boost to reward you for not dying all the time as you keep playing and make it slightly easier to keep it that way.


TL:DR: technically yes, the skills do matter to a degree as they give nice boosts at higher levels that can alter how you play in some cases (some more noticeable than others) but overall they do not change the gameplay so significantly that you have to be incredibly concerned with them either. Mostly just try not to die too often and they will usually grow faster than you lose them. That part comes down to experience a lot of the time though, so at first you just have to deal with your mistakes getting you killed.

at 100 skill get +31% dmg and -33% stamina usage. So the games alot easier if you dont die.

Originally posted by Gregomoto:

They actually do matter a lot. The higher the skill the higher the damage output for weapons and the lower the stamina use (bows, run, jumping f.e.).

Often skill levels don't matter, unless you are going to 2 shot an enemy which would otherwise be a 3 shot doing an extra 20 damage doesn't do much, often you can achieve equal efficiency at the low 80s.

Skill points are absolutely unnecessary to beating the actual game though you can beat the whole game at level 0 however you can get to level 100 in blocking using a skeleton archer farm and bow skill makes a big difference in draw back the other skills are just vanity doing 19 damage or doing 25 damage against an enemy with 30 health is still 2 hits so it doesn't do much so ignore the skill points completely they are basically just a KDR.

its not so much the dmg but the stamina use. with the cheap skills you can really feel the difference. As above the damage is not the issue.

Skills matter, but not enough to bother trying to focus on leveling them. The higher they are when you die the more xp you lose, and the more xp it takes to level them. Unless you already know how to ace the game, you are likely to die at least once or twice with each new zone you encounter as you acclimate to enemy moves and gear up. Or just from dumb luck like running into a 2* archer drauger while you are still wearing troll hide, or running into your first pack of wolves on the hunt when you are no where near an object to hop on etc. Just play as normal and ignore the skills. You'll spend a lot less time not having fun (doing a repetitive task just to gain skill points you are gonna lose anyway)

Originally posted by Damnion:

Skills matter, but not enough to bother trying to focus on leveling them. The higher they are when you die the more xp you lose, and the more xp it takes to level them. Unless you already know how to ace the game, you are likely to die at least once or twice with each new zone you encounter as you acclimate to enemy moves and gear up. Or just from dumb luck like running into a 2* archer drauger while you are still wearing troll hide, or running into your first pack of wolves on the hunt when you are no where near an object to hop on etc. Just play as normal and ignore the skills. You'll spend a lot less time not having fun (doing a repetitive task just to gain skill points you are gonna lose anyway)

Thus far, blood magic seems to be the most relevant / useful to raise if you intend to utilize it.

I can't remember what the default value is for the shield, 200 I think? It goes all the way up to 700hp at max lvl so the scaling there is pretty huge. I want to say 5hp per level. That's absolutely worth it, at least getting to lvl 50ish which isint too difficult if you cheese a spawner.

But I otherwise agree about the tedium. Raising skills takes way too long and I feel like the exp gain needs to be increased. Having skills above 75 and maintaining them is a huge chore that is not fun. Games should be fun to play. While not "required" to beat the game. It's kinda silly to have them the way they are.

yes. look at your weapon, it will have a number, say it does 50 damage, and then your skill level will have real numbers, like (20-25) next to it.
Running, jumping and such use less stamina, by a LOT, when you are skilled up.
Those are the 2 main effects, weapon damage and stamina use. You can look at the wiki for any other details, but I would not even attempt some bosses (eg, bonemass) without proper skill (here, blunt weapons in the 40s or so).

Arrows... there are 2 or 3 playstyles here. A casual archer may lob a wood arrow at a deer or use it to anger a distant enemy to fight on better terrain. A more serious archer would get a sneak attack hit to do 3x damage before swapping to melee, weakening the toughest enemy in a group or whatever. And of course the full time archer.
For anything more than potshots at deer or the like, wood arrows are useless: use something else cheap to make that does lots more damage. Fire is cheap to make and useful for quite some time. After that, I just move to needle and the newer mistland ones which are also plentiful and easy to make. Your limiting factor here is feathers, but birds are all over, and a harpoon takes a bird ammo free, or a wood arrow works here too. In that gap between fire and needle, if not playing a full archer, you can FIND enough arrows in the iron mines to keep you covered usually, or make just 1 stack of something intermediate.

Anyway, you can make do with vastly inferior equipment, depending on how you want to play, but good luck one-shotting a fuling with a wood arrow.

The reduction is -5%, so you must have died more then once. And yes they do matter, quite a bit actually.

The wiki has a good article written about it that will break it down far better then I can.

You are quite wrong about arrows. The wooden arrow might have similar base damage to arrows with effects (poison arrow and fire arrow), however the damage goes up quite a lot. Whatever test he did is probably flawed. Remember the damage can vary and different enemies have different damage reduction. Test the arrows again shooting several arrows at the same target.

Advanced arrows are not pointless. Some have dual damage (like fire arrows). Others deal only pierce damage, and every single damage point in difference may be the one that allows you to one shot this monster, or not. Given that any surprise attack grants an immunity of 5 minutes, sometime, a single point less means that one, two, three arrows are not enough, that the monster is running toward you on top of others, and you are not prepared, etc.

On the other hand, arrows may be costly.

As for skills, I think that you died several times in a row (that's easy to do).
On each death:

1. all skill progress bars are reset: all skills are set at 0 XP in current skil level.
   
2. 5% of skill levels are lost in each skill. This equates up to 5 levels at level 100. The loss leads to a fractional level, that is; new level plus some progress on the skill bar.

For examples, and also the effects of being skilled, you can look at this:
https://guidescroll.com/2021/03/valheim-skills-xp-and-combat-guide/

They actually do matter a lot. The higher the skill the higher the damage output for weapons and the lower the stamina use (bows, run, jumping f.e.).