My latest structure, located in the Mistlands, is titled ‘Safety Cave’.
The cave has no decorations, no personality, and was carved out in an act of pure survival.
Progression in the freshly-released Mistlands biome, however, felt like running into a brick wall.
As the sixth biome in Valheim’s progression system, the Mistlands was always supposed to be challenging.
To everyone’s collective surprise, the reality turned out to be rather different.
It’s an environment designed to entice players in: an other-worldly wonderland of magic.
But in combination with other systems in the Mistlands, the combat became somewhat unmanageable.
Rather than providing a fair challenge, the combat became a matter of luck.
The (still significant) problems with the Mistlands' near-vertical terrain didn’t exactly help matters.
The Mistlands' sheer rock faces require constant jumping, which drains your stamina pretty quickly.
A single crafting bench needs five: in our first two dungeons, we found a total of one.
I suspect that in trying to spread progression across the biome, they overdid it a bit.
In terms of exploration, the fog and enemy numbers made walking a slow-going and painful process.
The Mistlands expected you to keep throwing yourself at it until you unlocked all its gear.
But the biome feels a lot emptier than before, and the feeling of threat is almost totally gone.