Ive played it both ways. Its nice to look ahead for home building -- if you want a specific thing, like a meadows island or whatever. Its nice to not know; knowing where the vendor and iron are kills exploration and lets you avoid much of the challenge.

Personally, if it's your first play through I feel like you should experience it yourself first. After that go nuts, but do what you want either way.

I've done it both ways.

It really depends on whether or not you love sailing. If you love it, don't look at the map and explore everything. If you get bored after spending real life days of not finding what you're looking for, to the point of not wanting to log in, then go look it up.

I don't think of it as cheating. Most of the time I do look it up. But I've decided to try not doing it on this playthrough. The trader wasn't that bad, but finding a good swamp that wasn't merged with the plains was driving me nuts.

Cheating? lol
Look up a map.
Use multiple worlds to swap items and store things and farm in.
Park your character in one world next to the trader so you can easily get there when needed.
Make a farm in one world, make a crafting center in another, exploit resources in another, hunt bosses in another.

looking for some friends who play valhiem. hit me up only game i play lol

Agreed with the above. Why cares what anyone else thinks. Do whatever you want. Its your game and your time.

I think it’s fine. If you’re playing solo - it’s not fun to spend hours searching for Haldor. I looked him up. I feel fine about it. I still did countless hours mining iron and sailing it back

Originally posted by Normonator:

Personally, if it's your first play through I feel like you should experience it yourself first. After that go nuts, but do what you want either way.

that is what i would recommend too.

Just think of it as you already knew the land, then we’re left there. I personally don’t look, because is somewhat mills the exploration.

Procedurally generated maps can become tedious to fully explore as most of them are just a repetition of the same pattern. This means that you will walk a lot through the same landscape until you find something really interesting. I don't see any problem with viewing the map on some helpfull site and figuring out in advance where the interesting things. This is my humble opinion

I'm sure you'll find people in both categories.

The better question is.... how do you feel about it?

I think someone will think it is, but why should you care what a random someone thinks about how you have fun?
Do what you want and what gives you the most pleasure out of it. The life is shorter then you think and in the end no one of these will make your life better just mi mi mi to lower you and set themslef above you.

I've used the map site to look for seeds with features I find interesting, like meadows completely surrounded by mountains most recently. It would take ages to explore seeds in game looking for a rare feature like that. If you look up boss locations, or even boss stones, trader, crypts, etc. then yeah I would think that's "cheating", although really it's just spoiling the adventure for yourself. Finding the bosses and finding the resources are a pretty large part of the game. I personally find this game gets boring fast if you remove the sense of venturing into the unknown to look for something.

Originally posted by benai:

I think someone will think it is, but why should you care what a random someone thinks about how you have fun?
Do what you want and what gives you the most pleasure out of it. The life is shorter then you think and in the end no one of these will make your life better just mi mi mi to lower you and set themslef above you.

Agree with this, whilst I don't generally use external mapping tools myself, in games like this where it has literally zero effect on me what tools or mods someone else wants to use on their world/server then I have no reason to care.
The point is for everyone to have fun with the game, if that means playing with godmode on, extra difficulty mods, or just revealing the map, do whatever works for you