Originally posted by TXI:

1. Grind
The grind is terrible. I'm sick of it. They refuse to improve it. The Seeds make it unbearable and confusing. The first example is moving from the plains to the black forest. Within day 1 you are highly pushed into making a base ASAP and making it as defendable as possible, after putting all that time into a base you don't want to abandon it, however usually this base will not be in reach of either the black forest or the swamp. This leaves 2 options: A) Run around the map in hopes the regions are close to your base. B) Set up multiple bases harboring goods that you'll need, never having a clear base. I chose to do A, the black forest is 7 minutes away meaning I have to walk there and back, costing me 14 minutes of my time. The base inventory allows you to hold basically nothing, so by the time you come back, you can make one upgrade to your bench. 30+ minutes for one upgrade. The teleporter rule is still in place showing the devs do not care about how the COMMUNITY feel. The most downloaded mod on nexus is the one disabling the ore restriction on teleporters, nobody likes it, why is it still in? So the devs can milk play time. On top of that greydwarf spawns are still abysmal, not that they're hard to fight or too strong, but they get attracted from miles away and swarm you, causing early playtime delays and unfun deaths if you can't escape (or run out of torches). This is also an issue in the swamp with Draugrs. We have Troll Hide armor and the sneak ability but Greydwarves, skeletons and draugrs seem to find you anyway. making the sneak ability useless for most cases. All these anti-fun properties make Valheim a boring grind with more risk than reward..

Seeds are exactly that. Random. Re-roll or overcome the map challanges.

Most people set up a main base within meadows. This is usually close to black forest. Farm cores and set up portals to minor bases. eg swamp plains.

As defensible as possible? there are no attacks until you defeat the first boss or after nine days pass. I played without wall for 30 days. Even so i only added them for aesthetics.

Teleporting ores? i agree it's annoying but just because the community wants it doesn't mean its the best for the game. BOATS AND CARTS EXIST FOR A REASON. so is paving roads and setting up docks. this isn't arbitrary grind like runescape. there is a gameplay reason for it.