Just adding to what's already said: Playing this game with randomers is a terrible idea since there's little in the way of griefing protection, and each world becomes quite a time investment.

It's more of a solo game, it's fun solo. Random joins can highly damage the progression, but maybe minigame servers and such will come out when the game is fully released, this is like 3D terraria. Best to think of it that way, with no rules, random joins can grief ect. It's not pvp balanced.

As far as i can tell the password is required if you have the option called Crossplatform selected. Otherwise you can just start your server with the password field empty

its pretty pointless to play this game with others unless they are friends or people you know

Originally posted by Tachyon:

They're player-hosted servers and 99% of people don't want randoms causing hassles. As such, they play with RL family and friends on password-protected servers.

The password is required, as far as I can tell. If i recall correctly, the "Start" button simply wouldn't light up until after I had typed in a password... is there a way to not have a password? I'd love to just leave my server open to my Steam friends.

Safer to give your Steam friends the password.

Originally posted by Tachyon:

Safer to give your Steam friends the password.

Can't argue with that; security is nearly always a good thing... but if I can choose between "the world" and "my Steam friends" as to who can even see the server, why am I forced to create a password on the server that only my friends can even see, let alone join?

Yes. And since the game is not designed to be a massive multiplayer experience, I will only ever give mine to actual friends. To me, this isnt the type of game I would want to play with a bunch of randos.

The game is solo or co-op with password only, limit of 10 players and not hosted by Valheim nor are there any official servers that I know of. There are some rando servers open to folks but you can also ck the official discord Valheim threads. I would be very careful. There is not really any way to protect yourself from creeps and rl trolls which is why locking is good. Learning the game solo is also not a bad idea.

There is a looking for group sub-forum over there ------------------>

Its pot luck though. You won't just find trolls in the Black forest there.

This game is not an MMO. It is meant to be played solo or coop, in small groups, and best played with the group all starting at same time because there is a "world progression" on each map...

As the player (or group) progresses through the game, certain RAID events get added to a pool of possible events where groups of game mobs attack your base. and the game "rolls" for that possibility roughly every 50ish minutes.

What this means is, as an example, a group has progressed and killed the first 3-4 bosses on the world and has had those subsequent "raids" added to the increasing- pool of possible "hourly" raids.... New random guy suddenly enters that world and wants to settle in and try to play and survive, however, because the world has already progressed, that new player is also subject to the same "raid pool", in which that player has ZERO chance of surviving... because the ONLY way to end a raid is to either kill everything that comes to attack, or simply stay within the "raid arena" outline for 2 minutes... If the player leaves the circle, the raid pauses until the player returns to the circle and completes the full 2 minutes.

The exact OPPOSITE can also be true and equally as bad... say there is a small group and they are playing nice and slow, and then say some random shows up and starts defeating bosses on that map... it ends up ruining the progression for the original group and also puts them all at risk for the "impossible" raids because someone unlocked things way beyond everyone else's ability.