Valheim is the latest survival game to ascend into Steam’s vaunted Top 10 – much like Rust before it – and I’m sure a healthy number of those people are playing solo. Valheim is a cooperative experience though, where groups of up to ten players can enter a world and play together. They can build impressive Viking settlements, explore the beautiful Lo-Fi-meets-Modern world, and tack on tough Forsaken enemies. Historically, survival games of this breed are pretty unwelcoming to solo players, but in this regard Valheim breaks away from the pack.
Valheim can be played solo, and it’s still an enjoyable experience on your lonesome.
Valheim may be best played with a friend or two at your side, but you are totally free to strike out into Vanheim on your own if you prefer to play solo. You can even play offline if you so choose: Valheim doesn’t require you to be connected to the internet. Whenever you create a World in Valheim it’s saved to your machine and the Steam Cloud, so if you go offline you simply lose out on cloud saves.
The cool thing about Valheims server structure is that it functions as an “Opt-in/Opt-out” toggle in the World Select menu, so you can play within your unique “seed”, and if you ever get the itch to play Valheim with friends you can toggle the “Server” option to take your World online. You can even input World-generating seeds manually, so if you find a great starter World you can replicate it for yourself (which you can how to do here)!
As for the actual gameplay, playing Valheim is perfectly fine as a solo experience. Hel, that’s how I’m predominately playing the game. Sure, having a few Viking friends along for the ride makes like a little easier since you’ll have more hands available for harvesting, building, and combat, but enemy health and damage scales on the number of players in a World, so only your harvesting and building will take longer. Honestly, the game feels decently balance even at this Early Access stage. It may take you longer to construct a giant settlement while playing Valheim solo, but it doesn’t feel too much like a slog.
So, yeah, you can totally play Valheim solo, to include offline. If you ever want to take your World online you can, and your character is persistent across servers (though it may be best to roll a new one if you decide to join someone else’s server to prevent losing whatever your main character is holding at the time). Don’t be afraid to jump into a different server by the way: PvP is disabled by default, and enabling player-damage has to be done manually by each player that wants to partake. I.E. enjoy your solo play, but you don’t need to fear strangers in Valheim.
