Valheim Is The 3D Terraria Clone I’ve Been Waiting For
There were four of us on that little karve sailboat, snaking our way upstream into uncharted territory. A stone tablet guarded by skeletons had marked on each of our maps the location of the second boss in Valheim, The Elder, and it was taking all of our fledgling navigation skills to find him. We rode the coastline as far as it would take us, lurched ourselves out of the ship, and began our final trek to The Edler’s altar. It’s around this point where it hit me just how vaguely familiar this whole process was, and I said to my friends, “hey, this is just like Terraria” without much thought.
As I continued to play the game, however, I found that passing thought to be more and more true. Whereas many survival crafting games seemingly take their cues from Minecraft, Valheim breaks from this tradition, prioritizing combat and cooperative play in many of the same ways as Terraria.
When Terraria first came out back in 2011, Minecraft was still in the midst of becoming the cultural juggernaut it is today, and any game that could be labeled as a Minecraft clone was. For Terraria, that meant being dubbed the 2D Minecraft clone. But as time went on, it became clear that there was very little shared between the two games outside their use of pixel art. Terraria set itself apart by not only having large, procedurally generated worlds to explore, but by giving players something to do in them.
Like other crafting games, mining the next-best ore in Terraria requires a pickaxe made from the last-best ore. But unlike other games, those ores may not always be readily available as deposits in the ground. Some transitional ores, like demonite, are only obtainable through boss drops and others, like Spectre Bars, see the player combining enemy drops with mined ores. The result is that the player is not only required to beat bosses, but actively encouraged to do so with tangible benefits.
Valheim takes this approach to the extreme. Instead of cobbling a pickaxe together with whatever stones are lying around, the player has to slay the first boss, Eikthyr, to earn their mineral rights. Defeating the electricity-wielding stag nets the player a hard antler, which can be used to craft their first pickaxe. With the first boss unlocking mining in general, every subsequent boss effectively unlocks the mining of the next ore, each with their own twist to the mining process. Anytime there’s a lull where the game begins feeling stale, you’re only a boss fight away from being on the bottom of the food chain and having to claw your way back up all over again.
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