Editor’s Note: Don’t intentionally crash servers, especially those on which others are playing. It should go without saying, but we’ve all probably seen it before, so we’re saying it. Just don’t do it.
With the release of Valheim on Xbox (still in early access, so it’s not really a release, but yeah, it’s available), a new group of Vikings have been introduced to our world of purgatory, bloodshed, and grog. With crossplay enabled, not everything always runs flawlessly, but our group is having a blast in the game. The biggest frustration is that there are intermittent connection issues on our official private server (as well as people playing with friends, regardless of whether it’s private server, or on their own Xboxes).
By default, the game saves every thirty minutes, but you can force a save if you’re playing single player, or admin/host of a server. Even that sometimes causes connection issues, although most of the time it resolves itself. As all of us have likely experience in our years of gameplay, it’s frustrating when a game or a server crashes, and you lose time and effort, as progress rolls back to a previous save. While we always try to prevent problems from happening, you can’t always prevent everything, so why not make the best of a bad situation?
You see, as veterans of many online games, we’ve learned a few things that come in handy here. Short version is that if you’re going to lose progress, you might as well gain some progress my duplicating your hard-to-craft items and materials. As is the case with many games, there are character saves as well as server saves, or, as with No Man’s Sky, different levels of inventory saves. More specifically here, when you get the poor connection notification in the top left of your screen, there’s a good chance the game is going to crash, so maybe run to a specific chest of valuables, and grab everything out of it. Then save your character, which saves your inventory. In the event the server crashes, now you’ll have a chest full of goodies, as well as an inventory full of loot.
Generally speaking, we’re not fans of abusing glitches and exploits, but with semi-frequent server crashes and rollbacks, it feels like an acceptable way to mitigate the severity of the losses. Sure, it won’t get you progress back on building your sweet Viking longhouse, but it’ll save you some time gathering materials, and maybe dying a few times to those awful deathsquitos. And man, those bugs are not your friends.
So yes, in summary, we’re bending our rule of neither explaining nor promoting intentionally using bugs or exploits, but under the given circumstances, it doesn’t seem so horrible. Especially given that you can really just spawn items in on your single-player world, and load them into a server. Please don’t send us hate mail, but if you do, please include bacon, or chocolate, or chocolate covered bacon.
