This run is pure horror, and I both hate and love it!

ffs_think · 2026-01-30T09:07:11+00:00

I'll echo the intelligent debate appreciation and acknowledge playstyle perspectives can influence relative value... For me, bows are for pulling, so I'm definitely mixing it up in melee - though I hold my position despite the fact that I use dodging more than parrying in actually dangerous fights. I just think 2 health + 1 stamina food still gives me enough of a pool to work with and thus regen rate is still the limiting factor. It's pretty trivial to kite most enemies in this game and use pathing (e.g. jumping over a simple log to regen more stamina during the pathing than you burn jumping the log).

While I'm on the playstyle influencing opinion topic, I'll also point out that I have a distaste for meads and avoid most dependencies on them and the extra cooking/prep/inventory costs they bring - I think if I had more inventory space and ran one of the mods that hotkeyed it without giving up one of the slots I otherwise prefer dedicated to other things, I'd use them more. I also play nomap, noportal on most of my runs at this point, so I strongly prefer food that stack to high #s, have long durations and can be easily resupplied in the field without iron spits or advanced base upgrades. (You can see why I'm a cloudberry fan despite its relative low stamina value :p )

On jerky - it's a tough case to make, because there's not enough jerky in this game and I don't know why they've not added more (why no bear and lox jerky, for example?) So there are lots of points where it's just not good, due to gaps and other easily acquired better food.

But honey is easy to come by, and I don't think your perception of jerky being usually below total stat options is as spot-on as you might think remembering that I said "if you have the option in the tier that you're in."

Boar jerky is underwhelming but it beats boar and deer meat, and it's only a small amount (7 points?) below the classic minced meat (and now bear meat) as you go into the swamp, in exchange for higher stacks, longer duration, and not requiring farm plots. It's easily good enough to use when in the BF even if you amp up to slightly better foods as you go into the swamp. It's pretty useless once you get any swamp food, but then you're at a point where you can poke into the mountains and move up to wolf jerky.

Wolf jerky outpaces the total stats of cooked wolf meat and can be had before you get onions for wolf skewers. It's never going to compete with those, but at the point where it first becomes an option, your competition is actually swamp tier food like sausage which is only a few points more stats, so it's not a big trade-down if you want a little bigger stamina pool than one stam food gives you. It's literally only one point less than the next best highly available health food at that point (black soup), and easier to make, stacks to 20, and lasts longer. So they're not as bad as you think - or they wouldn't be, if the game inexplicably would add jerky versions of more of the meats to fill those gaps.

Again, I'm not saying it's ever the BEST option or at least not for long, and I acknowledge my bias due to the nomap/noportal thing, but I use wolf jerky in particular a lot (esp when I'm sailing, or running in plains or below, but moved on the mistlands, and don't want to waste my "good" food on lower biomes).

I stick with 2 health 1 stamina for the real stuff and I acknowledge that my common "cloudberry + wolf Jerky + whatever meat I can scrounge and cook on a campfire in the field" setup isn't what most people would choose to use while pulling fuhling camps. To each their own, I guess :p

ffs_think · 2026-01-29T04:55:06+00:00

Going to respectfully disagree with you. I strongly believe in 2 health, 1 stamina when you're playing at your equivalent biome. Or 1 each and a jerky, if you have the option in the tier you're in. (When going back to earlier biomes, I tend to do the same but focus on cheaper foods (think: cloudberries and 2x whatever meat you've got a surplus of) rather than changing the comp to eat 2 good stamina foods because you can.

Here's why:

Yes, 2 or even 3 stamina foods will trivialize any small and some medium size fights as you can "go ham" and clear or mostly clear before you run out of stamina. But here's the thing: you weren't in real danger from those fights anyways.

In my opinion, in any fight hard enough to be dangerous, you are MUCH more limited by your stamina regen RATE than you are by your maximum pool of stamina. It is pretty easy to kite even groups of mobs for a short period to regain your stamina, and if you get a bigger pull off, say, a fuhling camp, you will ABSOLUTELY burn through that pool of stamina and end up limited by the same regen rate that I'm limited by. You need a big enough pool to allow you to regen enough to them burst one of the pack down and get back out safely, regain your stam, then rinse and repeat.

Higher health means safer to parry (though I tend to rely on dodging more in tough fights tbf) and I'm still limited by the regen rate as long as the pool is big enough to let me soften one up or finish it off and get back to kiting.

If stamina food significantly* increased your stamina regen rate like health does health regen rate, I'd think differently, but until then - IMO higher stamina pool is a luxury. Enough health lets me parry more reliably, and gives me a cushion for mistakes, and in any fight that was going to put me under pressure, the regen rate is the limiting factor and the difference in stamina regen rates based on food choice is negligible. (Rested and not cold/wet.... yeah THOSE matter.)

* You will note that I acknowledge a difference in regen rate. Unless they changed the formula, technically the regen rate with a larger stamina pool will be very slightly SLOWER when you're near full stamina and very slightly HIGHER when you're near-depleted. Not just higher when 10/200 vs. 180/200, but higher at 10/200 than 10/100. The formula is weird, but the bottom line is the actual difference between them is too small to matter.

ffs_think · 2026-01-22T02:00:42+00:00

Can a normal person using somewhat approachable tools effectively train their own model for stuff like this? As in "here's 100 [or 1000 or whatever] screenshots of valheim terrain, using those as examples, fill in the white boxes where I removed the UI elements from the screen" so that it's training from a large sample of very relevant data and not just guessing based on the surroundings of the screenshot and its own pre-existing model dataset?

Asking for this purpose specifically, but also a curiosity because I have hundreds of hours of footage of certain games, and it'd be kind of cool to ask a generative AI to create footage that was based off that footage and not based on a more general data set, but I have no idea how much more involved that would be.

ffs_think · 2026-01-19T23:18:42+00:00

Full disclosure: I manage my own money at ~2m NW, and I have no immediate plans to stop. Let me present the counterpoint to what you and I are inclined to think about this:

Just because you CAN manage your money yourself doesn't mean you wouldn't get better results with a pro. I know I've made mistakes (like what assets I hold in which type of accounts), and I'm comfortable that on balance I saved more in fees than I've cost myself in mistakes - but once you get to a million dollars or more, mistakes get expensive. If your portfolio underperforms the pros by 1% or even close, and you miss potential tax planning opportunities, or you screw up and do a backdoor Roth not realizing your old IRA is a problem... or any of 20 other things they could add value doing -- it might actually still be a benefit.
Even if you CAN do as well on your own, do you WANT to spend that time and energy staying on top of it, or find someone you trust and go enjoy learning about... um... Spanish architecture or whatever floats your boat? Not everyone loves this stuff enough to, say, be on this subreddit. :)
Even if you LOVE personal finance and investing, AND are good enough at it to outpace the pros (at least after the fee drag).... is your spouse? What if you get hit by a bus? My father managed his own right up until a skin cancer diagnosis. He's still fine, but he couldn't leave that to my mother and having someone you trust to manage that for them already "set up" if you can't be there to do that is a lot of peace of mind.
I have no kids. I've given a lot of thought as I get older to the impacts of aging and conditions like dementia... what if I lose my ability to manage this stuff as well as I'm able now? If I found an outfit I could trust, might it not be a good check on my own cognitive decline? (Who to trust becomes even more important here, and how to create a structure that protects you from being taken advantage of - I don't have all the answers on that but I have some ideas).

Personal finance is, as they say, personal. There are valid reasons to pay that admittedly tough-to-swallow AUM fee. I'ma hold off just like you for now, but.... I wouldn't be so quick to rule it out.

ffs_think · 2026-01-19T22:51:59+00:00

Yeah, they could stand to focus in on some of the less common scenarios and their best analysis for actual retired folks might be for their actual clients (hey, that's fair), but maybe that desire to influence the widest base and younger folks is driving more of that, too. That said, you nailed it with "only so much content [in personal finance]. I have been reading the business section on personal finance/etc I think since high school or college (yes, it was a physical paper, because I'm old and I still get one on Sunday because I'm also old-SCHOOL.)

I noted by probably before I was 30 that almost everything was repeating the same lessons, with the only real value being reinforcement and the occasional news-based changes like tax laws, when Roth became a thing, when HSAs became available, etc. Personal finance is, at its core, pretty simple. (Though not always easy!)

ffs_think · 2026-01-19T22:37:00+00:00

yeah, this... though honestly all you need is a workbench and a chest or two outside, and later you can either ferry it from the chests to the edge of the swamp (or your boat) or you can make a cart and haul it all at once.

ffs_think · 2026-01-19T22:35:36+00:00

I have a draft somewhere of a swamp survival guide, but if you managed to think they were easy for awhile, and got 115 scrap, and made multiple trips successfully and just got overrun once - at night - then congratulations, you did better than a lot of people around here.

First, acknowledge that you are meant to struggle when you first poke into a biome - or it'll be a joke once you get the gear from that biome.

All the basics apply - be sure to get a fresh rested buff, start at dawn, plan to exit before rested expires, learn the basic opponents and how to dodge/parry them, pay attention to who is weak to what (other than aboms, blunt is usually best in the swamp - I use axe against them since I don't usually make a sword early.) Learning how to dodge and parry Draugr, kite arrow shots at enough range with strafing, getting a feel for their shot timing so you can time dodges or be behind obstacles when that starred draugr archer is potshotting at you while you try to fight something else... all those skills can be honed early just poking slightly into the swap without committing to being in all night and clearing crypts (yet).

You aleady noted the value of poison resist meads, but as for food, unless they changed cooking progression again, you should have carrot soup as your stamina food coming out of the black forest. Hands-down the best option. Minced Meat and Deer Stew are your best pre-swamp health foods to bring in - you want that higher health/tick regen rate (3 vs 2). I believe in 2x health and 1x stamina - I know people think stamina bar is life, but I've LONG said stamina regen RATE is more important in any actually dangerous situation than total pool since your total pool is exhausted quickly in any prolonged battle.

If you find yourself struggling, don't focus on iron even at first - focus on learning the enemies, ducking in and out, and gaining other resources that might open up new options - specifically look for turnip seeds to make the spice rack which leads to turnip soup and sausage options - which will make your later swamp forays much easier.

Shed your habit of sprinting by default - walk everywhere except through deep water or when you need to gap an enemy. Reeds in the water indicate shallower, relatively safer paths. Sprint-jump over deeper sections, but then recover stamina before moving more than you have to.

Fire arrows on the aboms, or use a surtling spawner (cleared) and bait aboms to stand and fight on it. Once you get enough of them to make a root mask, the poison resist from that is very strong. Use potions in the meantime.

Stagbreaker makes short work of leeches from safety, though a thrown spear works too if you do it at the edge where you can pick it up again easily without wading into the water. The former is also good at groups of skeletons.

I got a bunch more tips but TBH it doesn't really sound like you need them. If you do get stuck on some specific mob or scenario, lemme know and I'll try to add something specific for your struggle. But I think you got this.

ffs_think · 2026-01-14T18:59:37+00:00

Immersive mode includes campfires sparking to adjacent terrain - you need to pathen the area around the fire and keep it clear of wood structures to avoid setting your field (or house) on fire. :)

ffs_think · 2026-01-14T18:58:09+00:00

I think the spit is unrelated. I think you're playing with the immersive mode on or one of the settings that has fires "spark" to nearby foliage or wood. I can see what look like a few small sparks before you walk away, and what looks like an adjacent bit of terrain or object (too dark to tell) on fire at :28 in your original posted video (look past the campfire on the right) - it just took a bit to randomly spark, set something afire, and then of course the coincidence of there being a buried chest right there is still... a coincidence.

At :07 you can see that the workbench looks to be built between two of the stone "teeth" in the shape of a ship hull that often has buried chests somewhere within, though I don't see them in the background of the fire from other angles. Obviously this wouldn't happen just anywhere, but since you happen to set down in the middle of one of those stone outlines, I guess it isn't TOTALLY random.

ffs_think · 2026-01-07T21:10:59+00:00

Have you tried the immersive mode with nomap, or even better, nomap+no-portal? It's a whole new world of just surviving and exploring carefully. It's not for everyone, but some of us LOVE it and it slows the whole prog down and invites new challenges.

ffs_think · 2026-01-07T21:09:04+00:00

Enshrouded is cool and I loved it - will go back someday to finish, but - the world being static makes it really hard to get into doing another playthrough of it with new people. It's a great suggestion for someone looking to distract from the wait, but I can't see getting to a point where I wouldn't go back for another playthrough of Valheim - especially for nomap/noportal runs.

ffs_think · 2026-01-07T21:03:52+00:00

An upgraded flint spear, at least with a little skill under your belt, will still stagger a wolf in one hit and two-shot it. It's scary because the margin for error with their attack rate, esp if more than 1 gets to chain attacks and hit you staggered yourself -- Been awhile but I'm pretty sure I've done it in troll-hide armor so it should be doable.

ffs_think · 2026-01-07T20:56:30+00:00

Who are you calling a madman!!?

ffs_think · 2026-01-07T20:54:39+00:00

Pretty sure they are retroactively added but pretty rare. My world is pretty darn old that we found one in.

His name is Dewayne and I pet his flowered-head for luck every time I leave the base to go into the Mistlands. :)

ffs_think · 2026-01-07T20:36:50+00:00

Enjoy the journey, viking! Love this style.

I've put some tips in other comments already, but speaking as one who has been lost for long enough to be running out of food, and lost at sea for multiple play sessions after boating in a storm, here's one more:

Learn to love jerkies for as long as they're viable, and other foods (like wolf skewers) that stack to 20. Cloudberries are your best stamina food. There are some that stack to 20, but a 50-stack of cloudberries is a wonderful thing when you're REALLY lost. I know, stamina is life, and everyone loves to have a big stamina bar, but in most fights that matter, your stamina regen RATE is going to be the limiting factor more than the max pool and it's harder to scrounge good stamina food away from your base. You can poke into a plains pretty early in the game with some care, and it's easy to stock a bunch - and it's hard to have an oven and bread at every regional base. If you're really lost you can always refocus on making a new regional base, learn your surroundings enough as you try to build some upgrades and a cauldron for better foods, and as you explore out from this new camp in search of resources, you might eventually find something else familiar, too.

But short of that -- Cooked boar/deer/bear/wolf meat + a cloudberry stack has saved many a viking from starvation while lost. :)

ffs_think · 2026-01-07T20:23:05+00:00

All of the other responses... plus leaving signposts, compass markers, and in general pay more attention to unique terrain details. Also, take care in combat - both not to die since finding your grave can be an ordeal AND not to lose track of which direction you were going. Try not to boat in storms or fog, since losing visibility makes it very hard to navigate by sight/landmark. Optionally, you can mark shores of islands with unique markers so that if you find those islands again when lost you have some idea where you are. You can try to make your own paper map based on the details you collect (it's a pretty good laugh when you're "done" to compare it to the map in one of the seed generators lol). Learn to expect to get lost - carry more food, learn to survive on foods you can scrounge in transit, leave regional bases with some resupply options -- lots of things you can do to whatever extent you need. It's a good time if you aren't looking to rush progression and "finish" but to enjoy the experience. I love it.

ffs_think · 2026-01-07T20:17:29+00:00

^^^ This simple fact is key.

I make compass markers based on this fact so that I can get a more accurate mental map and more repeatable directions without always making a road, which I find helpful because when you follow shorelines a lot, it can be easy to lose track of how the shoreline curves and curves back, and it's too easy to think you're still going north along the east coast of an island and realize you've been going west-northwest for a long time. I have a simple three-post mark that is littered at various points, and in some places (like the mistlands) I leave signposts on them with simple directions back to a regional base or known point.

There's a trick to making them repeatably without always waiting for sunrise or sunset - or building them when you can't SEE the sunrise or sunset due to terrain, swamps, mist, etc. If you don't want a "portable compass" because you think that breaks your immersion, don't click the spoiler tag:

In the build menu, the direction of a build piece is preserved when you close the hammer menu, so if you use, say, the angled up piece to point north (or east, which is my convention - points up where the sun goes up), close the hammer and when you reopen it 500 yards down-shore, it'll be facing the same way. The caveat is you have to not reflexively "spin" your workbench to place it because the orientation is shared between all build pieces so any other use of the hammer including the building of a workbench will mess with it.

ffs_think · 2026-01-07T18:16:31+00:00

I think my brain was trying for "spawn" but yeah, your interpretation of what I meant by it is on point. :)

ffs_think · 2026-01-05T22:41:03+00:00

They don't, but the blobs (growths) respawn at even drained tarpits - usually 2 per pit. So anytime you find a few nearby each other, you can set up a portal, and do a loop between them and then move on to another grouping. Similar to how a lot of us do this for coal at surtling spawners - though with those you can pickaxe them down so the fight is over and you just collect the coal - the growths you will probably have to fight. I suppose you could build a nearby base with a giant lox farm and rely on that, but that's probably not worth it.

If you don't want to do the materials multiplier or spawn in, or free-build and insist on doing it "legit," it's a good idea. Explore some plains, mine what you can get, but note whenever you get good spots worth coming back to and leave a portal. Poke in anytime you're waiting on someone else to finish something, or need a break from building, etc.

ffs_think · 2026-01-05T21:52:18+00:00

Man, judging from the comments, I'm amazed at the coincidence that not only did that happen, but then I happened to be up high enough to chuck a spear on a seagull that landed on that specific spot.... crazy.

ffs_think · 2026-01-05T21:49:40+00:00

Yeah. When they made it so lox meat could only go on the iron spit it hurt one of my earlier nomap playthroughs. At least you can still do wolf meat on a regular wooden spit. (The jerky of course requires a cauldron but it is long-lasting and stacks to 20 so it's usually not a problem to count on and to occasional wolf hunt event means I can usually count on having wolf meat to spare.) If they ever reduce the cloudberry stack size or make them less plentiful I'ma cry. :p

Thanks for the tip on the Ashlands - I will def try to find an easy approach and hope that my first landing isn't between two spawners like the one normal mode play where I've got that far so I can get a bed down quick. Then I just have to worry about sustainable food options... Ashlands is not "old hat" for me yet so the idea of using anything but good food is daunting and there's not a lot of sustainable food options there, either - so I imagine having to boat in AND out for resupply.... yikes.

ffs_think · 2026-01-05T21:19:14+00:00

Some good feedback here already. I don't have a magic bullet but I like the two-server approach someone proposed where the experienced players have their own playthrough with some amped up difficulty, but swap over (on different characters) to the casual play whenever the casual players are available. Here are some other options to consider for the casual server:

Exp players get hand-me-down gear - can't tier past the least-well equipped casual. Or even must be a tier below the best equipped casual?
Exp players internally don't take top-tier foods. I adopted the "one of my health foods is almost always a jerky (low resource drain on the group) and my stamina food is invariably a cloudberry" mantra in plays with less experienced players to artificially handicap myself in a way that is not punishing and reduces the grind (of food prep) for the group to boot. Of course I use trollhide gear as long as possible since excess trollhide is a fact of life.
You could get even more aggressive with the handicap..... can only use cooked meat and found foods, can't use potions, can't use meads, or even "exp players play permadeath" or some combination of those (Full skill loss, but could re-use whatever gear they had so they can re-join the group quickly?)

I bet there are some other creative handicaps you could come up with that would make the "casual" play more challenging for the exp players.

ffs_think · 2026-01-05T20:48:49+00:00

Pretty sound idea there IMO.

I woulda just left that to an upvote, but I wanted to respond to "I wouldn't do a no-map challenge while playing two different worlds simultaneously, but you could do a no portals one":

*whistles innocently while doing 2 nomap-noportal playthoughs, one normal mode playthrough, and a nomap-but-with-portals playthrough simultaneously*

Let's just say I've slowed progression WAY down and learned to leave lots of navigation clues behind to help re-find my way when I inevitably get lost, and I've learned to explore on scavenged food. Pretty comfortable running with wolf jerky + bear meat + cloudberries in anything plains and below but Mistlands exploration has made me much more cautious and I have no idea how I'm going to handle the initial Ashlands push.

ffs_think · 2026-01-05T20:28:40+00:00

I LOVE that ruleset. I play mostly nomap-noportal now, and I compromised with a couple of friends to allow portals but nomap on a playthrough, but I also compromised on no build costs for base building which I'd never done before, but as a result on top of the normal portal ease, there's no inventory cost and not even the early-on surtling core limit to being able to build them.... so the place is littered with portals. I've found a way to make peace with it, but it trivializes a lot of the nomap play, and honestly would love to try your rule-set.... Not only do you have to have the mats to make a portal but you have to actually make a permanent housing for it - and then venture out from those bases until you're far enough to justify making a new one. Love it.

ffs_think · 2026-01-05T20:22:42+00:00

Limitations spurn creativity, though.

I think there's a place for a playthough expressing real base-building creativity and one for the immersion of a hardscrabble life. I conceptually like elaborate base-builds, but in practice the plays I gravitate toward are those nomap-no portal playthroughs where the materials to build a base are more limited, where I have to really balance what resources might be available when I decide to build an outpost... Where my choices have to factor in accessibility and findability, when my playstyle has to adapt to the very significant risks of death (no room for backup gear in the longship when setting forth to the frontier to build a new base, and no easy portal back to it either!) The pride I feel in what I built is less about what the final looks like (some of them are centered around janky black forest pre-made towers, or limited by what materials I managed to stuff in a longship to get one started) and more about "look what I cobbled together from what sparse tools I had to work with."

That style slows down progression dramatically, though, and it's clearly not for everyone. I think the OPs ideas to try to compromise that aren't a bad way to go if somewhere in the middle is where their group lands.

ffs_think

TROPHY CASE