Valheim Building Tips

Building a base is at the center of the Valheim experience. You’ll use it as a safe space, a place to rest, hoard your treasures, improve weapons and armor, cultivate food and hang out with your viking buddies after a long day of trudging through the swamps, running away from skeletons and chopping down trees. The building system is pretty robust – there are dozens of prefabs, and with a little creativity, you can build pretty nifty hideouts. However, the game isn’t all that big on giving instructions. Turning even the simples ideas into reality can be difficult, which is why we’ve written this guided, to offer you some Valheim building tips.

Building tips & tricks

Here’s some stuff you should keep in mind while working on your base, in no particular order:

• Use a hoe to level the ground before building, it’ll make your life easier. The hoe always tries to match the level of the ground you’re standing on, so try to keep that in mind. If you just want to iron out the irregularities without changing the height, press Shift before you click.
• The colors you see while pointing at a prefab with a hammer represent structural integrity. Blue is perfect – touching the ground or the stone foundations, green is good, yellow is not ideal, orange is worrying, and red is… well, it’s a miracle it hasn’t collapsed yet. Use poles and beams to provide more support to your structures.
• New tiles will snap onto existing ones. If you make a mistake, click the middle mouse button with the hammer to destroy the tile you put down, and you’ll get the resources back.
• If you don’t have the patience or the resources to build a proper chimney, a single roof tile sloping in the opposite direction can stop rain from coming in and allow smoke to leave the house.
• You can stack chests by building shelves from the 1×1 wood floors.
• When building a raised platform, it can be hard to make tiles snap the way you want them. Use horizontal beams to make a temporary extrusion which you can snap new tiles onto, then destroy it.
• If you want to open up a window on your cabin, but are afraid of leaving it open, you can put a fence across the hole.
• Campfires and hearths don’t have to be built on the ground – you can use stone blocks as the foundation, then destroy them and replace them with wood floors. The fire won’t disappear.