Valheim hotfixes fix 1.0 armour and achievements
Iron Gate has shipped two hotfixes for Valheim’s 1.0 launch, restoring repair on Deep North heavy armour and giving players blocked by devcommands a route back to achievements.
Valheim left early access on 9 September, and Iron Gate Studio has spent the days since patching the tenth world into shape. Two hotfixes have now landed: 1.0.10 for every platform, and 1.0.12 for Steam first, with the remaining platforms to follow.
What the hotfixes repair
The broadest fix in 1.0.10 concerns armour. Heavy armour found in the new Deep North can now be repaired, which matters in a biome built around the Jotun invasion and the cold that comes with it. Greydwarf Shamans in the north now deal the damage and healing they were always meant to, snow behaves itself — punching a drift no longer deletes it, and landing on snow on the way down now clears it properly — and several creatures and the snow itself have picked up new sound effects.
Steam gets the deeper fixes first
Patch 1.0.12 is the Steam build, and it clears up several launch-week problems. The Forge of Potential no longer unlocks recipes it should not; items left on armour stands and item stands keep their durability and upgrade level as long as the world has not been loaded since the 1.0 update, a fault Iron Gate is still working on; and a crash triggered by walking into a zone that had not yet loaded is fixed. Banlists and whitelists now accept older Steam_ style player IDs alongside the newer V_ format. Iron Gate says the changes are crossplay compatible and will reach consoles in a further hotfix, and it has apologised for the delay to the Switch 2 patch now that crossplay works across every platform again.
Achievements switch back on after devcommands
The change drawing the most attention is a new function that lets players opt back into achievements. Valheim has long withheld them from anyone who used devcommands, and the hotfix adds a way to switch them back on. Iron Gate’s tone is characteristically hands-off: the studio leaves the decision to the player and notes that “Oden will surely know if you use it dishonourably”.
Our opinion
Iron Gate’s habit of finishing its game in public has served it well, and this round of fixes is the unglamorous half of a 1.0 launch: repair costs that work, item stands that survive, a crash that no longer costs you a corpse run. The achievement opt-in is the interesting part, because it treats anti-cheating as a matter of honour rather than enforcement. That fits a co-op game where the only person a cheat really hurts is whoever is hosting, and it makes the studio’s own joke the entire penalty. Anyone who wants the trophies back has to admit, in effect, that they took the shortcut.