I've done both, large and small, and each with devcommands or vanilla.

In play throughs I will start by finding an abandoned farm / wooden village near a swamp / meadows / black forest convergence. Then I convert it into a large colonial style wood fort surrounded by a moat, making each house into a specialty; forge, workshop, kitchen, and bed.

From there I clear content through mountain biomes utilizing portals and roads. Once Moder is done, I find a border between meadows and plains. Here, I will build a large defended structure of stone and iron with all the advanced crafting stations to finish out the content.

Other times, I use the Valheim World Generator to look for some cool seeds, go explore them, and if the place looks nice I will then spend a few hundred hours on some mega build that nobody sees. Often times villages are part of my builds, incorporated inside and outside of city walls, sprawling fishing villages along a rural country road outside of the gates, mage/watch towers on top of nearby small mountains, mega bridges spanning between islands.. yea. Then I look at it and think, wouldn't it be cool if it wasn't just me, here? So I spawn in a Haldor somewhere. That's usually when I run out of creativity and back to another fresh playthrough.