In the survival game Valheim, building houses is a major part of the gameplay. Especially at the beginning, you don’t have many options. With these tips, you can start building large houses early on.
That’s why building houses is complicated: In Valheim, not only the suitable components determine how your house looks. Stability is also an important factor. This makes it difficult to construct large buildings at the start, as better materials like stones or core wood are not available until later.
Regular wood is only stable up to a certain size, and support beams do not necessarily fulfill the function you might expect. What matters more is how far your parts are from the foundations.
However, players are discovering more and more useful tricks to build larger houses early on. MeinMMO shows you some of them and how you can achieve this as well.
Build large houses early – here’s how
How does it work? To build a stable house, you need to pay attention to certain factors in Valheim. Important are, for example, the distance to the ground, connection to foundations, and horizontal supports.
So that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for each section of your house, you can simply build one section and reuse the same pattern over and over. Basically, it’s a kind of construction kit.
Use “templates”
The Reddit user unionrodent has presented some examples of what this can look like. These are 20-meter wide longhouse designs that can be easily repeated until you have a large longhouse.
Here’s what the designs look like:
- You need a foundation
- Load-bearing outer walls
- 45° parts for the roof
- A central beam with a Y-construction or parallel beams to support the roof on both sides
This involves materials that you can collect easily at the start. Basically, you only need wood for the walls and the roof. No stones, core wood, or metals are required. Additionally, some parts provide a vent so that you don’t suffer from smoke poisoning from fire sources inside the house.
If you use such structures and assemble them, you still need to pay attention to stability. The larger your house gets, the more important this becomes. Inside the longhouse, wooden beams should always be built at a distance of four meters. Pay attention to the color in which the objects are displayed while building.
These are the important colors when building:
- Blue: Foundation, directly connected to the ground or a foundation component like stone
- Green: Object is on foundation and is stable
- Yellow and Orange: becomes unstable but still holds
- Red: The next piece you attach will collapse
In total, stability is the most important factor when building houses. In our guide, you will find all the info on this: How to build better and more stable houses in Valheim
The foundation doesn’t have to be made of stone or wood
While the foundations shown above are made of stone, which can only be mined with a pickaxe or must be collected awkwardly. Additionally, you need a stonecutter’s workbench to build it, which you only get later. However, you can also simply level the ground with a hoe and build on the earth. The user only used stone because it was easier for demonstration, as he says.
Build yourself a scaffold or a staircase
To reach the upper parts, you can simply build a staircase that reaches up to the roof. This doesn’t even need a point to connect to. It is also possible to simply walk up the already placed roof walls.
Alternatively, you can also just temporarily build a second floor to work on the roof. Once you finish the construction work, you can easily remove the scaffold used.
Are you looking for ideas for larger building projects? Here are 3 cool bases in Valheim that you can use as inspiration for your own
