Valheim Graphic and PC Enhancements

Taken from r/valheim•Posted byu/Unusual-Albatross [Developer] and several pages in PC Gamer and other Game magazines.

Valheim Save Game Location

You can manually backup the Valheim save game files to make sure nothing disappears. Go to the below location and copy the saved game files. Next time when you are playing Valheim and find the missing structure just restore these files and you will get your game progress back.

1. Go to ...\Users\”user-name”\AppData\LocalLow or /home/user/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/worlds

2. Select IronGate > Valheim.

3. Copy Characters and World folder from here.

Backup these folder to some other location, later if you are not able to find all the structures in Valheim restore these back to the default location. Do not forget to exit the game first. Using the above method you can restore missing characters or world in Valheim.

There is more you can do to protect your structure in Valheim. The game is all about hard-core survival, structures can be easily destroyed by harsh weather and go missing. You can protect the Valheim structure from Rain, and do not forget to keep these important points in your mind while progressing in Valheim.

Graphic Enhancement for Play

Poor performance is often noticed even on the best gaming PCs because those systems normally run games exceedingly well. If your computer is running Valheim poorly, don't fret, as the game is still in very early access and is not yet optimized. That hasn't stopped some folks on Reddit from finding a few tricks to optimize performance though, so follow along with those hints if you're experiencing very poor performance.

How To Get More FPS In Valheim

The major issues in Vaheim regarded more FPS ranges from the graphic settings that you have on your PC. You will need to lower the details of things that aren’t that pivotal to the gaming experience so that you get a smoother and better gameplay. To get more FPS in Valheim, here are few things that you should do.

• Draw Distance/Level of Detail

• SSAO

• Vegetation Quality

• Particle Lights

• Resolution

The level of detail does not matter as much in Valheim, things aren’t as refined as you would get from a AAA title but that does not rob you out of enjoying the game as you should. It is okay to sacrifice some of the details in the game to earn a bit more FPS.

Vegetation quality isn’t artistic nor is it something that will take your breath away, so why waste your GFX card and CPU’s output on it. You should dial down the vegetation quality and it will certainly help to get more FPS.

Particle Lights is another field that does not need much focus, turn it down so that your CPU can focus on delivering your better performance with more FPS in Valheim.

Resolution is only to be tweaked when you’ve exhausted every other option. While you should not have any problems getting 60 FPS on 1080 resolution, going anything above that will while not having a beast of a PC will result in you not getting the frames that you wish.

The game looks surprisingly great at 60 frames on 1080 resolution and there’s not much that you gain by pushing more. This is all there is to know about how to get more FPS in Valheim.

GPU Settings

Optimize NVIDIA Settings

If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, you can do some things to tweak your settings. These tweaks require that you go into your NVIDIA 3D settings, from the NVIDIA Control Panel. Tip: Remember to keep your graphics card driver updated! Especially never graphics card will get a lot of performance boosts from just updating the drivers.

Open NVIDIA Control Panel and head over to the Manage 3D Settings tab on the left. If you want to apply these settings to all games, select global settings. However, if you want to apply these to only Valheim, select the Program List and look for the game. If you cannot find the game within the list, hit the browse button, navigate to the game’s installation directory, and select the .exe file for it. Once you’ve selected the game or global settings, change the power management mode to performance mode. This will ensure that your GPU is working at its maximum pace. Turn off Image Sharpening mode. This will turn off the sharpness post-processing that can hog up your resources. Disable Low-Latency Mode. Set the Max Pre-Rendered Frames value to 1. This will ensure that your GPU is working on the immediate next frame rather than trying to process what’s ahead. Enable Threaded Optimization and G-Sync if your monitor supports it. Set the Display Mode to Single Display Performance Mode. This can help massively if you have a multi-monitor setup as this tunnels the resources into a single display. For Texture Filtering Quality, select the Performance Mode option.

AMD Graphics Card Settings

If you have an AMD Graphics Card, you can change its settings using AMD’s Radeon Control Panel utility. Just follow these steps:

If you have an AMD Graphics Card, you can change its settings using AMD’s Radeon Control Panel utility. Just follow these steps: Right-click an empty desktop space and open up the AMD Radeon Settings Control Panel. Now, choose the Global Graphics option to change graphics card settings for your games. Once you’re in, turn off all the proprietary post-processing options that AMD has enabled by default. These include Radeon Anti-Lag, Radeon Chill, and Radeon Boost. Also, turn off wait for Vertical Refresh (which will boost performance but can cause screen tearing). Disable Image Sharpening, Anisotropic Filtering, Maximum Tessellation Level, Frame Rate Target Control, and OpenGL Triple Buffering. Now, turn on Surface Format Optimization. For the GPU Workload setting, select Graphics Mode for the best performance. Select Performance Mode under the Texture Filtering Quality option. Finally, set both Tessellation and Shader Cache to AMD Optimized mode for the most optimal experience while playing Valheim.

Launch Parameters

-windowed -lowmemory -high -screen-width 1800 -screen-height 1050

You should set your pc to -window-mode exclusive -screen-fullscreen vs my setting for windowed mode. Most games run better in fullscreen. The same for setting your Screen width and Height to tailor it to your pc enviroment.

Valheim Keybinds: Most like ARK or ATlas:

Common issues and possible solutions

Valheim developer Iron Gate runs an official bug page where you can report issues you have, as well as upvote existing issues and let them know which ones are the bugs to squish first.

We highly recommend doing a back up of your files, they are saved here: AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim

Can’t find my server in the server list

Method 1

Here are a few simple steps to fix Valheim Dedicated Server not showing up:

• Make sure the ‘Community Server’ option is ON.

• Type the name of the server correctly.

• The host of the server must be online and playing the game on the dedicated server.

• If you are still having the same issue then restart the game and repeat the same steps.

Method 2

• Launch Steam client.

• Go to the View menu and select the Servers option.

• This will bring a Steam server browser. You will need to select the favorites tab.

• Click on the add a server button

• Enter the IP address of the dedicated server.

• This will bring the list of your server. Select it and click on Connect and enter the password.

• This will open Valheim.

Camera- and controls out of control

Disable game pad.

Connection issue icon

Closing apps that are Optimizing Your Network might help.

Crashing

We don’t have a solution for this right now but we are working on it. Some players report that turning down in-game settings and have NVIDIA prioritize performance helps. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about this one except to report it on the official bug page and hope there's a fix soon.

Sync issues on multiplayer servers

Maybe you're trying to chop down trees or attack enemies only to find that zero damage is being done? Multiplayer sessions, at times, get out of sync and cause weird issues like this to happen. If it's affecting everyone, restarting the server is probably the best option. If it's just affecting one player, that player should restart their client. Don't let this go on for too long as desynced player actions will actually take place once they've disconnected, which could result in quite a bit of havoc.

A player has reported that the Killer Network software (often found on MSI computers) causes sync issues. Uninstall the software (not the network drivers). To fully rid yourself of the sync issues, you may need to go to killernetworking.com and get their uninstaller.

Valheim running CPU/GPU hot

Even though Valheim has lower polygon graphics, it uses raycasting, physical calculations, point light shadows, post processing, particle effects and many other things that other modern games also use. All of these combine into what may make you experience low FPS in a game like Valheim. In the game settings, there is a setting for Vsync. Enabling this limits the FPS to your monitors’ Hertz; this is something we would recommend high-end computers to use so the game doesn't try to produce the maximum number of FPS it can produce just for the sake of a lot of FPS, which in the end just makes your hardware run very warm when it doesn’t really need to.

Flipped boats and mysterious damage

Something funny can happen when a player uses a portal; the path their character takes can leave a wake of destruction. In Valheim, portals physically move your character across the map during the teleporting process and can sometimes destroy objects and flip boats. To prevent this, make sure there aren't loose player-built objects or boats between portals. Basically, draw a straight line between your portals on the map and keep things clear of that line. This doesn't apply to buildings or other anchored objects like furniture.

Select world- load error

World file corrupted, no solution for this right now.

Sometimes, this can happen when you exit the game forcibly by pressing Alt+F4 or using Task Manager in Windows to close the game. Instead of doing that, use the Quit option to leave the game, instead. Other times, players are finding that they'll log into their multiplayer worlds — both locally hosted and dedicated servers — only to find a world with an explored map but no trace of human settlements to be found. Even still, some updates have corrupted worlds during the update process.

No matter how this bug happens, players can save themselves a significant amount of anxiety and panic by backing up their local files on a regular basis. On a Windows 10 machine, you'll find these files located in "C:\Users\YourWindowsUsername\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\". Each world you create has its own folder in this location and can be simply copied to another folder on your computer and used as a backup. If your live world gets corrupted, replace that folder with a backup version you've stored.

How to Retrieve Corrupted Characters and Worlds

Do you want to back up your save? Maybe your character or world (or maybe both) got corrupted from a crash? Don’t worry, there’s still hope! As we all know the game is still in EA and can have some major game breaking bugs. After losing a character and world 50 hours in, I found out the game makes an extra backup save of both your worlds and characters. Here’s what to do if your save gets corrupted:

The character and world file location is in:

• AppData/LocalLow/IronGate/Valheim

(Press windows key and type %appdata% to get to AppData)

If you look in Valheim/Characters, you will see CharacterName.fch and CharacterName.fch.old

If your character file gets corrupted, CharacterName.fch will be the corrupted file, however CharacterName.fch.old has a slightly older version of your character. What you want to do in this case is BACK THESE FILES UP FIRST. Then delete CharacterName.fch and rename CharacterName.fch.old to CharacterName.fch . You got your character back!

Now for worlds, go to Valheim/worlds. You will see 4 files for each world:

• WorldName

• WorldName.db.old

• WorldName.fwl

• WorldName.fwl.old

You will follow the same process here. Back up these files first, then delete WorldName and WorldName.fwl

Rename WorldName.db.old to WorldName (you’re just removing db.old) and rename WorldName.fwl.old to WorldName.fwl

Keep your saves backed up at all times, the game is still buggy and you could lose all progress from a simple crash.

Tombstone gone

When players die in Valheim, everything their character has equipped, as well as everything in a player's inventory, get placed in a gravestone that marks their death site. That, of course, is how it's supposed to work but some players are returning to their point of death only to find no grave marker and no items to retrieve. Sometimes, it occurs when a player jumps and dies in the air. Other times, this happens at the entrance to a crypt — trapping the gravestone between the points where a player is forced to warp in or out of a crypt, making the items irretrievable. Right now, there is no workaround for this issue.

These bugs fall within that annoying category and generally won't do much harm, although they could be problematic if you don't avoid them in the first place.

Seats and Tables

Players can outfit their lodgings with various pieces of furniture to increase its comfort level, keeping that resting buff around for longer periods of time. One bug is preventing some players from reaching maximum comfort level, and it's caused by stools and benches. These places to sit seem to override the comfort advantages of chairs, lowering your home's overall comfort level by one point. Adding a table to the mix fixes this and even adds an additional comfort level beyond what a chair alone will.

Smelted Deer?

Ever heard a funny sound coming from your smelter? Take a look inside and you might find something wholly disturbing; a deer stuck in the blazing furnace, unable to escape. While it seems horrifying at first, these deer appear to take no damage from the furnace and can even be easily killed to deliver easy deer hides to the player. Chalk this one up to a bug that turned into a bonus.

The Flying Karve of legend.

Some players have seen ships flying to and fro in the skies of Valheim, only to realize that it was the very ship they just worked hard to build! Turns out, a bug is causing some of the seabirds to land in a ship and accidentally take control, forcing the boats to take to the skies and move in wholly unnatural ways. There is no fix for this bug at this time and no real way to avoid it.

This Little Piggy.

Raising boars in Valheim? Be careful not to leave the gate open, as some boars can escape and make a beeline back to their spawn point. The escaped boars run at maximum speed for as long as it takes to get back to their point of origin in the world — a behavior that's quite abnormal in the game — and cannot be tamed again.

3 Fish + 3 Fish = -5 Fish? Where are my FISH?

When you break most items in Valheim, particularly pieces like walls and other homely goods, they are supposed to break into the raw materials it costs to craft them. At times, an item broken returns nothing but sadness and loss instead of said raw materials. This doesn't appear to be an intended consequence, thus is, instead, a bug.

Wards are an INDOOR Pet!

Wards can be crafted to make a player's home their sanctuary. These decorative statues create a magical barrier that makes it impossible for other players to break any items inside that barrier; that is until this ugly bug reared its head. Wards, apparently, have no magical power over themselves and can be destroyed, thus, rendering their entire purpose pointless in the game. Until this bug is fixed, make sure to place your Ward inside your Buildings for protection from Griefers. Our server is password protected and whitelisted for our protection.

Hotfoot!

Valheim players will find that just hovering the blueprint of a hearth or a firepit underneath themselves can sometimes feel so real that it actually begins burning the player. Now that's one realistic vision. Until this bug gets fixed, make sure you're placing firepits or hearths at least a few feet away from yourself. If you catch fire, DONT stop drop and roll! Run right out and Jump in the nearest body of water.

Very long loading time on worlds? The first time you launch an old world in Hearth & Home, the client will do a “generate locations” command automatically and it will generate all those new locations we have put into the game for you players to discover. This can however have the issue of moving already spawned boss locations so the boss-marker on the map can be wrong. This is solved by removing the marker and interacting with a Vegvisir stone again. Fire related equipment! The smelter, blast furnace, oven, and charcoal kiln now produce smoke that needs to be ventilated out, just like the brand new bathtub! If it cannot go anywhere, the equipment will stop working in periods or looks like it is flickering. Auto-pickup items! We have added the option to toggle auto-pickup so your inventory doesn’t get clogged when you run from point A to B, or while mining and you don’t want to pick up everything while you're pickaxing. The default key for this toggle is “V”, but you can go to keybindings in the settings menu to change this to whatever you like. Grills! If you previously had meat on a grill, and then you updated to hearth & home, things can get stuck on the grill. You will need to deconstruct the grill and rebuild it, because we have updated how the timing functionality works with grills. Previously you could put things into a smelter and it would smelt things fast during the night, but the items on a grill would remain as if time stood still. This has now been reworked so grills also get affected by the same timer functionality (so using the skiptime devcommand will now turn your meat into coal). Cartography table pins The last person that updates the table will have their markers on the map. This is so the table doesn’t save every single marker people have placed.

• Updated map

• You will now see every position where you have died, instead of the old one where it only showed the latest death. You can remove them by right-clicking with the mouse on them.

• When you have some copied pins on your map, they will appear dark-gray. But left-click with the mouse on the, they will turn white and they will then be added to your markers.

• You can now toggle which type of markers you will see on the map. Right-click on them on the right side of the map GUI and you can toggle the groups on/off.