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With over half a million simultaneous players at launch, Valheim is no game to take lightly. It’s drawing players from all over the globe to compete before a Norse mythological tapestry.
Like many RPGs, Valheim uses an experience-based approach to leveling up. Essentially, your skills are a representation of how well you perform certain actions. The more experience you gain when you carry out certain actions, the more you will see your skill level go up.
As your journey progresses, so does your skillset and you’ll be able to focus on leveling the skills you acquire. Many players find themselves on the game for extended periods of time as they work to unlock certain features and help their friends do the same. Any time you don’t feel like your local servers are cutting it, you can always consider hosting a server of your own with Hostari.
What is leveling up?
As you know, Valheim is an exploration and survival game, and your success depends on using and leveling your skills. Each time you level up, you make your action more effective, which increases damage, and decreases your loss of stamina.
Make sure you focus on leveling up the skills you need most for the game. You can keep leveling up until you reach 100, where the max skill level caps out.
Eat high-stamina foods
You need to spend stamina in order to level up. In other words, more stamina means more time to level up, as you’d have to wait for your stamina level to recover in order to train your skills. Put another way, figuring out ways to quickly recover your stamina will help you level up your skills faster. These include:
- Having rested and comfort buffs to boost stamina regeneration.
- Building a farm in the plains to produce barley flour, which helps you create bread, a high-stamina food.
- Building a house with a boulder in it, where you can train your weapon-based skills and recoup stamina more quickly.
- When picking which food to eat, make sure that you prioritize getting as much stamina as possible to maximize how much stamina you can gain.
Valheim leveling skills list
When it comes to leveling up your skills, you want to make sure you use your time wisely. Make sure you take a moment to look through your current skills and try to evaluate which ones would be best for you to level first. If club weapons aren’t proving to be of any use to you, that’s probably a skill you can save to work on another time.
Similarly, if you find that you haven’t been able to keep up with blocking in the way you should, there’s a place to start.
There are a total of 15 different skills you’ll be able to use in Valheim. They all serve their own unique purpose, and you should always try them out for untapped potential. Here’s an overview of how the different skills function as you gain experience and levels rise:
- Axes: not the same as the tree-cutting axe skill, users level this up by fighting with an axe.
- Blocking: The degree of damage a player can block with a shield. Leveling increases the value. This skill is unrelated to armor points from armor sets in the game.
- Bows: Leveling increases the degree of damage inflicted by each Valheim arrow in addition to draw speed on the bow.
- Clubs: Increase damage for blunt club-like weapons—including maces, hammers, and the Stagbreaker weapon.
- Jump: Increases the player’s jumping range.
- Knives: Increase knife-wielding damage.
- Pickaxes: The user requires less force to break ore deposits and rocks.
- Polearms: Increase polearm inflicted damage.
- Run: Higher running speeds in conjunction with better stamina maintained.
- Sneak: Becomes easier to sneak around without being seen or heard. Less stamina is used.
- Spears: Increase damage caused by spears.
- Swim: No change to swimming speed but maintain better stamina.
- Swords: Increase sword-induced damage.
- Unarmed: Increase damage done with fists.
- Wood Cutting: Fewer strokes to cut down trees as skill increases.
Depending on where you’re at in your own game and what role your character plays, you might have an entirely different leveling strategy than another player. What matters most is that you stay connected once you’re on the server. Hostari offers professionally managed servers and an array of support resources around the clock.
If you ever need to locate your skills, press ‘tab’ and select the symbol under your username next to the trophy symbol—it looks like three connected triangles. Here, you’ll be able to see your skill level for each activity and if you’ve maxed it out yet. Keep in mind that you’ll need to perform a skill quite often to reach that level.
Skill level decrease
Of course, with anything good comes a little bad to balance it all out. The game wouldn’t be as fun if it was easy to keep your skill level up high with ease. There has to be some kind of challenge to balance the ease of experience to gain skill dynamic. So in this case, it only makes sense to pair a loss of skill with a loss of life.
Unfortunately, your skill level decreases each time you die in Valheim. Players lose 5% of their total skill points with each occurrence. On the bright side, you’ll have five minutes to retrieve inventory from your tombstone before you can die again. This is referred to as the “no skill drain.” However, it isn’t all bad, as you can use these buffers to your advantage in some situations.
What’s a corpse run?
When you die you get that “no skill drain” buff—which disappears if you loot your body. When you die a second time you’ll lose more points, but you’ll also get a “corpse run.”
Experts recommend that when you get a corpse run buff you:
- Eat food immediately to regenerate as much health as possible.
- Run away if you have no food because you’ll have unlimited stamina.
Progression in Valheim
Before you can move up to the next level, you have to reach a certain threshold of experience (XP). The only real way to gain XP is to use the skill. The more you run, jump, swim, sneak, and use weapons, the more you’ll level each of these skills.
Above you’ll see the list of skills with varying levels. While the orange bar indicates your progress until the next level, the yellow bar indicates how close you are to maxing out at level 100.
If you prefer to play the game as intended, which is recommended, stick to gaining experience and using these skills consistently to reach your goals. If you would like to try a faster method to level your skills, there are a couple of techniques you can try. Some are pretty straightforward while others require some planning.
Spamming running & jumping skills
If you’re looking for a way to level your running and jumping skills faster in Valheim, you can try spamming your sprints and jumps. This is a common technique that players will use. However, after you beat Eikthyr, you’ll be able to activate a bonus skill that will help you level these skills faster.
This bonus skill is referred to as “Eikthyr” and you can thank it for helping your running and jumping stamina. As it improves it by 60% and you can spam it for longer than your normal running and jumping skills. This bonus depends on your timing though, so make sure you prepare for this 5-minute effect to have a 20-minute cooldown period. Make sure you have a stable and secure connection when trying to complete spam tasks like this, if you still need to set up your own server you can try one for free.
Boosting combat skills through PVP
In order to level your combat skills, you’ll need another player on the server—the more players the better, as leveling will be quicker this way. With PVP damage turned off, make sure everyone is loaded up with whatever they want to level up and have at it! You’ll be able to gain experience with your weapons without doing any damage to each other.
Another helpful tip if you’re trying to level your shield or blocking skill—turn your PVP damage on but make sure your teammates are turned off. This allows for you to get the credit for blocking without them being able to do any damage. Clever, huh? Keep in mind that this is something developers might eventually catch onto and mitigate somehow.
The quality of your server also has a direct impact on your progression in Valheim, so make sure your setup is one that’s prepared for some real leveling. Trying a server for free has never been easier with Hostari.
Using cheatcodes
Finally, you can also level up using cheatcodes. In the launch options, type in -console to enable the console. You can also do this during the game by pressing F5 and entering devcommands.
With cheatcodes allowed, place the command raiseskill [skill] [level] to level up any skill that you want. Here are the cheatcodes of the skill you may want to level up. Make sure to accurately type in the code, as the editor is case-sensitive.
skill = code
Axes = axes
Blocking = blocking
Bows = bows
Clubs = clubs
Jump = jump
Knives = knives
Pickaxes = pickaxes
Polearms = polearms
Run = run
Sneak = sneak
Spears = spears
Swim = swim
Swords = swords
Unarmed = unarmed
Wood Cutting = woodcutting
Want your skill levels back to 0? Type in resetskill [skill].
Level Up
In Valheim, your skill levels are based on your ability to perform certain activities associated with that skill. As you gain more experience, you’ll gradually level up your skill. But if you want to do well, you need to get a strategy in place. If you have certain abilities that you know you need to be better at, that’s probably the best place to start. Remember, the name of the game is survival—so what do you need to survive?
Valheim is one of the largest games on Steam right now, and getting a great quality game running can be tough when you’re only depending on local servers. You can start out with a free trial from Valheim Server Hosting so you can get a sense of what a difference having your own dedicated server can make.
