Listing down Valheim’s full map as simply huge, is an understatement. You may start in a small deserted area near a forest and a beach, but as time goes by you slowly start uncovering bits and bits of the covered map, realizing how big it actually is. Taking that in consideration, its extremely easy to lose your sense of direction, even if we do have a quite solid minimap.
The more you reveal of the map, the more the distances you will need to travel are. After a while, you will even start having establishments to different areas than where your main house is located, so traversing back and forth can be complex. Without some sort of tracker to help you with this, it is essential to keep opening the map tab, to reset your orientation. It is unknown if the developers will provide some quality of life changes to this, but as of now, there is only one means to counter this and help ourselves a little with pathfinding.
How to ping the map.
Lacking some environmental indications as to where you are right now and where you are heading to, the only way of actually placing an indirect marker for your destination, would be your good’ol Pinging. By placing a ping in the map, a bright blue ring with your name on it will appear, showing to everyone within the map which point you clicked on. In order to ping, you need to open the full map with ‘M’, and then click anywhere with your middle mouse button.
The specific ping indicator will stay active for a couple of seconds, even if you close the tab of the full map. A brief text/icon will remain in your screen, showing the direction towards the place you pinged, which in result will let you easily find again the way to where you’ve been heading.
A small touch like a ping, can literally make a difference for traveling smoothly from one area to another, but it goes without saying that everyone would like some helpful changes on that part.
Valheim is now in Early Access, through Steam.
