Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

Cut scenes, high res textures, and audio tracks are the main things that take disk space for games. Valheim doesn't have any of those except audio tracks, and it has very few of those. So it's no surprise.

Audio tracks actually don't take much space, unless the game is very dialog heavy, with variations and etc. Textures is what takes the biggest chunk of the game's size. Keep in mind, that many textures have bumpmapping, specular, diffuse, alpha and displacement/parallax effects. Some even have surface subscattering textures and etc. So just one surface is actually 3, 5 or even 9 different images stuck together.
And then there are particles that are made of at least 3 textures - illumination texture, alpha texture and diffuse texture. Any game will easily gain up to 3, 10 or even 20 times its size if you apply a high-res texture patch to it.

Originally posted by SiEgE:

Audio tracks actually don't take much space, unless the game is very dialog heavy, with variations and etc. Textures is what takes the biggest chunk of the game's size.

It really depends. Support for additional languages also contributes a lot if there's lots of spoken audio. I think FF13 had about 40 GB of videos and audio and you could slash that in half by deleting the japanese or english versions. The rest of the game was like 8-10 GB lol.

I do, every time there is an update.

Originally posted by SiEgE:

... unless the game is very dialog heavy,

Which was my point, Valheim doesn't have that, at all. Other games do, in spades (such as the example @Rhapsody brings up).

Audio in SOME games takes up far more space than anything else, including textures. Textures can (and often do) as well. It depends on the game and what they focused on, but there ARE games which are dialogue heavy, but light on the textures, so I'm not sure what you were getting at with your reply to me.

My point though was that Valheim doesn't have EITHER of those things.

It is awesome, graphics are excellent (not going to realistic, but that is ok!!), game plays well, never crashes for me, so rarely a bug....and if I run into a bug, it's always minor. Such a great game....

Overall it seems my game performance in general is up, but I'm not sure if I can attribute that to the game or the fact that I doubled my system memory lol. Maybe both. But yeah, it's pretty refreshing to have a video game with plenty depth and room for creativity that doesn't occupy hundreds of gigabytes of disk space.

Yep, its nice. Deep Rock Galactic is small too for example - 2.8GB

Originally posted by SiEgE:

Audio tracks actually don't take much space, unless the game is very dialog heavy, with variations and etc. Textures is what takes the biggest chunk of the game's size. Keep in mind, that many textures have bumpmapping, specular, diffuse, alpha and displacement/parallax effects. Some even have surface subscattering textures and etc. So just one surface is actually 3, 5 or even 9 different images stuck together.

And then multiply many levels for LOD for streaming from various positions, and yeah textures can be bloated up massively in modern AAA games... Disks are fast and they dont care tidying it up.

But sound does take a lot too. Not in those 50+ GB games, but here i bet its like 15-25% of the game size. Say 7 biomes, ~3 tracks each, 10-20mb per file. Thats 200-400mb already.

Cut scenes, high res textures, and audio tracks are the main things that take disk space for games. Valheim doesn't have any of those except audio tracks, and it has very few of those. So it's no surprise.