I don’t find the game too grindy, but it depends on the task. Let’s look at mining as an example.

Farming iron is pretty enjoyable. The biome alone provides risks and can be treacherous. The crypts provide a combination of mining, exploration and fighting so things don’t get stale. The excitement of opening a chest to a half stack feels good as well and the combat in such close quarters provides a nice change to the open terrain outside. While nodes don’t provide too much iron in and of themselves, they don’t take many hits to break each section and you can hit multiple sections simultaneously.

Tin can be enjoyable too. It’s rewarding to use your first Karve to ferry the load along the coast. Each node might only provide the yield once, but it’s 3-4 ore per with no trash drops and they’re pretty common. You also have the multitasking of harvesting the gulls and other bits in the area and you can keep moving constantly.

Silver can be rewarding as hell to find prior to having the Wishbone. The nodes have an interesting shape and digging under them isn’t too much effort and the massive lag spike followed up with the entirety dropping at once feels great. The yield isn’t too bad and the stone helps with your stockpiling for building stone structures. Mining manually allows hitting many sections at once as well amd sections break quickly.

Then there’s copper…. Massive nodes that require breaking a lot of terrain to get to. Each node takes quite a few hits and sections are large and spaced out making it hard to hit multiple at a time. The drop rate for ore includes 0, meaning multiple full bars of stamina might lead to no ore at all or just a single one. There’s not much to break up the monotony either as the only combat you’ll find is Greydwarf packs that are more annoying than threatening, especially as they pathfind away from you to throw rocks. They drop a lot of trash items meaning you’re constantly managing crap in your inventory and the stone, while nice to stockpile for later, isn’t immediately useful and weighs you down fast, especially since you’re not too likely to have the strength belt yet.

Copper… is a grind. It’s the one ore type I think should be looked at to improve player experience. I rush Iron just to avoid it, it’s that bad.

The only thing that's usually tedious for me is bronze, so i usually just get enough to make weapons and tools and then skip the armour as troll is much better, otherwise a lot of other things are relaxing and quite satisfying.

Iron however CAN become tedious if your world has little/bad crypt rng, at that point, sailing around the world trying to find a swamp, to then hope you find a crypt, to then hope that there's iron in the chests can be very inconsistent and as a result, frustrating. (This may apply to other ores too, but usually it's iron)

Though the other metals are fine, silver is usually abundant in it's veins and it only takes one or two to make everything you need, and black ore is easy and fun to loot off the fulings and their villages.

Originally posted by i have 2023 vision fear me:

The only thing that's usually tedious for me is bronze, so i usually just get enough to make weapons and tools and then skip the armour as troll is much better, otherwise a lot of other things are relaxing and quite satisfying.

Iron however CAN become tedious if your world has little/bad crypt rng, at that point, sailing around the world trying to find a swamp, to then hope you find a crypt, to then hope that there's iron in the chests can be very inconsistent and as a result, frustrating. (This may apply to other ores too, but usually it's iron)

Though the other metals are fine, silver is usually abundant in it's veins and it only takes one or two to make everything you need, and black ore is easy and fun to loot off the fulings and their villages.

I find it odd that so many think that mining copper/bronze is tedious, when you just need to mine a few rocks in a relatively pleasant, safe environment. It also give you rock, which is great to have when you to into the swamp and are able to build with it.

For me, iron is by far the worst. For all the reasons that you mention, and because you need so much of it. Fortunately, in my current world I found a river going through a swamp that has at least 10 crypts that are either right on the water, or just off the water. Very convenient!

Stopped by one last night for "just a bit" of iron, and loaded the ship with around 150 scrap iron!

I don't know what you build with silver, but I'm on my 5th or 6th vein now, and probably have 2-3 to go before I finish my silver gear. That said, it is pretty abundant and not too hard to find/mine.

Black metal does come in abundance once you hit the plains. I have chests full of it in my main world, and I'm hoping that they give us some more uses for it. Maybe black metal reinforced beams, or other black metal building parts?

It becomes grindy when there's nothing to think about. That's when it stops being interesting and becomes and exercise in patience. Exploring the swamp for crypts and forage is interesting. Pulling iron scrap out of your fifth or sixth cleared crypt is grindy.

Eventually I may even decide to break the game and world hop to bring resources home faster. I supposed the game has already failed if that's the position it's led me to. I just don't care anymore at that point. Forsaken are decent enough as boss fights go, but they're just not worth the trouble if I'm not really in the mood to mine.

Originally posted by Faceplant8:

Originally posted by i have 2023 vision fear me:

The only thing that's usually tedious for me is bronze, so i usually just get enough to make weapons and tools and then skip the armour as troll is much better, otherwise a lot of other things are relaxing and quite satisfying.

Iron however CAN become tedious if your world has little/bad crypt rng, at that point, sailing around the world trying to find a swamp, to then hope you find a crypt, to then hope that there's iron in the chests can be very inconsistent and as a result, frustrating. (This may apply to other ores too, but usually it's iron)

Though the other metals are fine, silver is usually abundant in it's veins and it only takes one or two to make everything you need, and black ore is easy and fun to loot off the fulings and their villages.

I find it odd that so many think that mining copper/bronze is tedious, when you just need to mine a few rocks in a relatively pleasant, safe environment. It also give you rock, which is great to have when you to into the swamp and are able to build with it.

For me, iron is by far the worst. For all the reasons that you mention, and because you need so much of it. Fortunately, in my current world I found a river going through a swamp that has at least 10 crypts that are either right on the water, or just off the water. Very convenient!

Stopped by one last night for "just a bit" of iron, and loaded the ship with around 150 scrap iron!

I don't know what you build with silver, but I'm on my 5th or 6th vein now, and probably have 2-3 to go before I finish my silver gear. That said, it is pretty abundant and not too hard to find/mine.

Black metal does come in abundance once you hit the plains. I have chests full of it in my main world, and I'm hoping that they give us some more uses for it. Maybe black metal reinforced beams, or other black metal building parts?

I do honestly over-exaggerate mining bronze looking back, it's not awful, but at the stage of the game it's at, and the quality of armour it gives, it's arguably the worst metal, as troll armour easily rivals it, and the weapons understandably aren't that special, it is the starting metal after all, so i don't expect much but i just don't find it worth it to mine it for more than tools and a weapon or two.

Bronze atgeir is really a worthy weapon even for endgame (when leveled to 4). I was really surprised how good it handles even plains mobs. This with my "no bosses - no portals" character.

Grind is part of balance, which is something which will never get agreement of everyone.

It's as much dependant on the person as it is the game.

Valheim really succeeds in the environments, despite being relatively old school graphics, for what they are they are stunning. Lighting is brilliant, the combination of all this makes it a very pleasant world to simply be in.

For some people, just having a task (such as chopping trees) and being able to build their own dwelling is a winner. Add having a goal and the odd danger makes it better.

It makes an excellent chillout game, with the option to get bosses.

And this is why the PvP arguments keep popping up. It's really, really not meant for Pvp, it's just there because it's easy to pop on.

Originally posted by electricdawn:

Bronze atgeir is really a worthy weapon even for endgame (when leveled to 4). I was really surprised how good it handles even plains mobs. This with my "no bosses - no portals" character.

Atgeirs are by far my favourite weapon and the only bronze weapon i make most of the time, it has great area damage with a great stun, long range, and good damage which just makes it a must for me when picking a bronze weapon. Speaking of atgeirs, i hope they give them a some y-axis freedom for attacks, as even a slight incline or ground level difference can make you unable to hit an enemy.

You can make many valheim friends on Grindr.

I say grind is a task done to get a reward. Those rewards are then continually collected in order to level or obtain something that unlocks more gameplay.

Valheim has a task that immediately nets you the things you need in order to unlock the next part of gameplay. It's somewhat of a grind but it's not effortless unlike cerebral ongoing mundane tasks like an mmo

For me it depends on whether or not the activity is getting in the way of what I would rather be doing at that time. So yes, for me the same activity can be grindy or relaxing.

In a survival game, even in a pretty forgiving one like Valheim, there's a core loop of activities that you have to do before you are allowed to spend the "free time" you earned with that loop. Console commands aside, raids or your empty food locker don't care if you'd rather be building. If you want to frolick in the pretty plains, you have to devote time to either mastering combat or upgrading your armor. If you don't want to do that, tough luck.

Just from my personal stash of anecdotes: I'm just playing Spiritfarer, and while it's a vastly different game, it also has exploring / gathering / upgrading / crafting and a gated biome progression. But the game gives you almost total freedom to do what you want at any time you want to do it. And there are several ways to acquire the same resource, in case one of them doesn't suit you. As soon as something starts to feel grindy, I'll just switch to another task.

I guess that's what it is: If something feels boring, do something else. If THAT feels also boring... and the NEXT thing, and the thing AFTER that... then, well maybe this game isn't for you, which is totally legitimate.

So far, I've always found some thing in Valheim that is fun for me. If I don't, I stop playing and do something else.

At one time in WoW during Burning Crusade, I was grinding a lot of reputation and some particles for a certain mage armor.

THIS was grinding of the most obnoxious sort and I really NEVER want to get back to it. Valheim, in contrast, always allows me to do something else, that is more fun. So I still enjoy it.

Will that last "forever"? Probably not, but for now, it's fun, and that is all I can ask.

Originally posted by Ryzilynt:

One mans grind is another mans pleasure.

*EDIT : for perspective. I always max bronze before I leave the BF (excursions to get things like turnip seeds and/or silver/onion are permissible)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4sJRkj9DP9Y

For me it depends on the play through. If I'm going for a slow burn hobo viking play through the grind is a big part of it feeling real. If I'm doing a more fast paced, build a lot, kill a lot super viking play through I turn up the drop rates so I don't get burnt out on grinding. I tend to do that with any game I play really. Be it Skyrim, Valheim, RDR2, ARK, etc I just change settings/mod to make the game play how I feel like it playing.

My goal in playing a game is to spend (aka 'waste') time enjoying myself. I can enjoy cutting wood and back handing greylings across the forest - as long as I mix it up with various other things that are also called grinding.. same goes for just about any activity in the game with the possible exception of spending the night on a boat at sea waiting for dawn so I can get back to exploring.

[edit] New hobby, Atgeir golf with greylings as the golf balls.

One mans grind is another mans pleasure.

*EDIT : for perspective. I always max bronze before I leave the BF (excursions to get things like turnip seeds and/or silver/onion are permissible)

This game is only a grind if you're in a hurry and you feel compelled to make and
fully upgrade everything. It also helps when you realize you can skip different things;
like the discussion about bronze armor. Looks good but not really necessary unless
you let yourself get hit a lot...
Eventually you can make everything and display stuff in your base(s) but you
don't need to stress about it.