Valheim – Building Your First Shack

How to Build Your First Shack

At the very start of the game, Huginn (the birb) will talk to you, telling you to pick up rocks and branches and make yourself a stone axe to chop trees and a hammer (with hammer, right click for building menu, middle click for dismantling) to make a workbench, but wait! To use the workbench you need a roof, so you need to build a house around it, enter your first shack!

Part of the fun in this game is designing your own buildings, releasing your inner architect, sooner or later the thirst for crafting a beautiful huge longhouse will strike…

But I recommend putting those plans on hold and keeping it simple at the start. Just remember, just because you need to keep it simple doesn’t mean you can’t make it beautiful.

Before building the shack I suggest finding a good location to build it, there are quite a lot of options but these are my recommendations, in order of how highly I recommend them.

  1. Right next to the sacrificial stones/spawn area, literally as close to them as the game allows you to; This is good because later when you start building portals, you will not need to build 1 portal for your starting base and another for the sacrificial stones area, you can just use the same one, it’s a matter of convenience and efficiency later on in the game.
  2. Surrounded by other biomes. Your starting biome is meadows, run around a bit and you’re bound to find a black forest, run around a bit more you might find a mountain, you’re unlikely to find plains or swamps and you definitely don’t want to enter them yet, but if you do find a swamp then close to that is almost definitely good for example); my recommendation is building in the meadows, next to the sea, close to the black forest, and optionally also close to a mountain; it won’t get much more ideal than this.
  3. Wherever you want to. (After all, if you find a cool place and think “HERE! I WANT TO BUILD HERE!” then just go for it man!)

Note: If the ground isn’t flat enough to build on it, you can always fix that with a hoe (to even out and raise the ground level) and later a pickaxe (to lower the ground level/dig)

Next I plan to toss at you my recommended starter house, if not for you to imitate, then at least to get your creative juices flowing. Don’t be too hasty to start chopping half the forest down with your stone axe though.

The first order of business is to get a working workbench setup so you can make yourself a hoe, a better axe, and then upgrade that axe. Make this your priority for now.

Once you have a working (with a roof over it) workbench, you should find the ocean or a river and run along the beach to look for flint (little white stones), pick all of it up, get like an entire stack of it if you can.

With this you can build a flint axe. You can also build a Chopping Block which is quite important since it will upgrade your workbench to level 2, allowing you to upgrade your flint axe to level 2, making it even better!

Next order of business is chopping down half the forest to gather wood for building your house, but make sure to kill every boar you see until you manage to collect 8 leather, at that point make a bow, and some arrows, but don’t stop killing all the boars, keep doing that and start killing all the deer too!

Originally posted by Rabcor

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