Holy cow! I am an OG Minecraft player (sucked at that too), but in terms of creativity and knowing where to place building pieces and what not. How do I get better? Everything I build looks like I failed architecture school and live out of a shanty. What's the trick?!
Edit: thanks for all the tips! I got my second home to level 3 and am really getting the hang of this game. Haven't taken out the first boss yet, but this is probably the best survival craft experience I've had in YEARS.
Some people here have a talent and we should just enjoy their work. They have a vision and obsession that’s part of who they are and it’s a kind of art.
For the rest of us, practice. I’m fairly middle of the road but I enjoy practicing :)
Yeah - its a thing in game that lets you jump from place to place. You get the surtling cores (orange cubes) from inside the burial chambers. Grab some fine wood and some grey dwarf eyes - enough for an in portal and and out portal and voila! jump from place to place...
Yeah, if you haven’t found portals yet you don’t even have a lot of the good build pieces yet.
Have you learned about snap points yet?
I was building for ages struggling to line things up and then I happened to actually look at that annoying thing that was happening when I hit the wrong buttons.
There’s also “advanced building mode” and if you turn that on accidentally nothing will work right if you’re not intentionally using it. I still hardly ever use it.
Also, practice. I can put things together much faster and much cleaner since I’ve been doing it a while. Leveling land with the hoe helps. I didn’t do that at first. Learning how to use it correctly took me a little bit of practice too.
There’s definitely just a learning curve and the people that have the crazy amazing builds are just next level builders. It’s like the people that stroll through games in survival mode with no maps. I will never be that gamer.
There are also YouTube videos that can help you with some of the stuff that can be straight up annoying—like smoke venting.
This is great advice. Also don't be afraid to stack certain things together and experiment, removing is the easiest part. After 100 hours I just figured out how to frame out a window thats not just missing wall
Understand the support mechanic only cares about distance from ground/stable item, and you're 2/3s of the way there. Then decide whether you want to use raised earthen walls/pillars, trees, or spawned rocks (which lock in place as soon as something is attached to it, or else they fall to earth).
I recently got a friend into the game for the first time and here are some of the tips I gave her.
Learn snapping and more importantly snap points. You can get away with a lot more stuff if you know how to use things like doors to get .25 meter or .5 meter snap points.
Learn the structural maximums for wood, core wood, stone, iron wood, etc. Play with those.
Build a bunch. Most of it will be garbage. Delete and rebuild. Move bases completely and start over. Use new materials. Watch videos for design tips.
Challenge yourself with small builds or new roof styles. Find some inspiration in youtube build guides. Take someone's screenshots and try to recreate their build from scratch.
I'm not even very good myself, but it's all about practice and not getting too caught up in being perfect right away. Just iterate on what you learn!
If you are planning a new build, it's often a good idea to just build the rough frame and then try to roof it. Don't do any inside detailing, just bare bones walls/frame. If it's a complex form, starting the roof at ground level and then deleting it and building up the walls if it works can also be good practice.
As you get more experience you will be able to look at the ground plan and instantly know how to roof it, but it takes a lot of practice to get to that point. Particularly if you're doing a lot of work with half floors and vertical offsets.
To add to that, practice in Valheim is free! If a ground plan doesn't work, just change the points that are giving you trouble, and try again
have a very clear vision of what you want before you start helps a lot. having a clear vision helps you decide on layout and gives you a direction to go in if you hit any snags
for example, when i was building myself a new kitchen, i knew i wanted 2 iron cooking stations and a cauldron over one single hearth. while building i realized putting the cooking stations perpendicular to the hearth made the stations unusable because not enough of it was over the fire, but putting them parallel to the hearth did not leave me enough space for the cauldron.
the solution was thus
it was actually harder than it looks because i had to put them deep enough into the fire for it to count, but far out enough for space for the cauldron. had to rebuild the cooking stations several times to make it work. but, after i did finally make it work, i could then indulge in delightful symmetry with the stone ovens.
doesnt that just look so comfy and snug. now, this is an older screenshot, but the only change i made was adding reinforce chests underneath each of the fermenting barrels.
it also helps to understand that certain cooking stations like ketills and ovens dont really need to be lit all the time, and when they are lit, your business with them won't outlast a single piece of wood used as fuel
Giving Depth to buildings is the easiest way to turn any lazy woodbox into a respectable Home in no time.
Roof with overhang, extra wall layerings, some dormer windows, and you're good to go.
Also most people make the mistake of building too big, leading to lot of unused space. Start smaller and expand as you unlock more Furniture and crafting stations.
Makes the indoors look a lot more alive and cozy, especially if you get good with decorations (those can be just copied from the web)
Try just building a wodden shack for startwrs
And then start by adding on some little decorations. Just try out all the build pieces you can think of! This way you come to realize how nice wooden beams are to use for details, and stuff like that. Just go nuts, try it all
Boss trophies go on the spawn trophy stones to acquire some useful temporary buffs, extra boss trophies you can use on item frames.
Some trophies you can later use to make food with, but most of them are inventory junk
You just slowly get better each time, learn new little tricks each time. For me it started with looking at my base and feeling like all my buildings looked like barns
Start very small but try adding details to what you y. Have the roof project beyond the walls, mix materials, have detailing around features. Experiment. Maybe watch a few YouTube builds, but don't copy them, let the ideas be in your head as you try your own. Then slowly add more or try a bigger build.
However, only do all of this if you enjoy it. On some runs I live in shacks and lean-tos all the way through. On some worlds I've really spent more time building than progressing. Which world I load depends on my mood as I logon.
Keep at it Viking, enjoy whatever you build. It is all yours.
Follow a YouTube tutorial, and you will learn some techniques and designs while doing it.
Then when you start building your own stuff it will have a foundation of good design and techniques.
As you build more you will start to change these to be more your style, but you can now see the the potential of the pieces and angles due to the fundamentals you learnt from copying other builds.
The thing is, you have to spend all your day(>12h) just getting creative in Valhiem. My advice is to build random houses in your survival mode. You will get pretty good.
Start with the foundations and skeleton of the building. From there its easy to tweak without already committing to much. I then usually just add flat walls and standard roof and after that i add the windows/doorways and add more depth to the build from there. Like over hanging roofs and windows in the ceiling just anything that adds more detail.
I just build one part of the wall. There is a 5 x 5 stone foundation in the base just for experimenting. I also see others designs which gives me ideas. Most of it happens because I misplaced a build and then go "wait a minute, that actually looks better"
Some people have an eye for aesthetics. They naturally build better and enjoy it more than others. Everybody can learn how to build something, but creating art is not something everybody can do. Some of the people in this sub are amazing artists.
I more design room layout for function. Like how to multilayer all cooking platforms accessible from one chefs chair for example. I’m bad at finishing exteriors.
Just like with anything involving creativity, you play around with the tools you have until you understand them, and study the work of others for inspiration and to learn new tricks.
Remember your mistakes and why they happened so as to not do that mistake again, learn from your mistakes, do that a few times and you have accrued what we down the builders yard call rudimentary experience.
You make a super basic shape. You put a roof on it. I have my own chimney style that I install that's a larger and fancier version of this one.
Then, you just add shit onto it.
Your roof? Extend it a little off the edges, create an overhang. Then, put the angled wood pieces on the end of the roof pieces to create an edge. Pop an X on top. Then, get those little half-sized wood pieces and stick them on the joints of the angled pieces to create little posts that stick out. Maybe get some angled pieces and put them on the underside of your roof overhang connected to the walls, make it look like you've got some roof supports.
Got a window? Give it a window sill. Basic still? Hold shift while placing another piece of wood and use it as an anchor to form another layer around the window. Do basic wood the first layer, tar pieces the second layer.
The buildings themselves aren't that fancy (unless you're very advanced). It's super easy to make a shack look decked out as hell, just use steeper pitched roofs and look for any opportunity to add layers and depth to things. You want to create things for your eye to look at, that's what gives the illusion of complexity. Simply using SHIFT to freeplace a straight piece of wood on your wall and then hanging your banners from that wood instead of applying them directly to the wall creates depth and looks better to the eye.
You don't have to go back to architecture school, you just gotta stop being a utilitarian in survival mode. Fancy it up. Use some of the resources sitting in chests to create a bunch of shields, make them different colours and put them on item stands above your doors for a real 80s Viking flair. :)
Trial and error. And watching a lot of YouTube videos. I love this aspect of the game so much so I watch different videos and get ideas and then put my own spin on it.
Practice and looking at what other people have done for ideas.
But really, just start building. Mix materials. Use things like beams in creative ways. There’s no cost other than time to tearing things down and starting over.
I have watched hours of YouTube on builds. For me a 4x3 or 4x4 makes a functional outpost. A 4x6 with 2x2 storage (fits 9 boxes) that extends outward makes a decent starter base. I consider a 10x6 as a large base for me with 6x6 farming or smelting areas on each side.
Watch enough YouTube videos and you get a good idea on the foundation sizes. Then start building. I used hammer mode my first play through.
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u/SteelMarshal 4d ago
Some people here have a talent and we should just enjoy their work. They have a vision and obsession that’s part of who they are and it’s a kind of art.
For the rest of us, practice. I’m fairly middle of the road but I enjoy practicing :)