Watch out - Valheim's new enemies are destroying 100-hour player bases
Ant and decked.
How safe do you feel in your Valheim base? Walls secure, trenches dug out, windows sealed? Even with all these precautions in place, you may still not be safe from Valheim's new enemies. With the introduction of the Mistlands update comes a new type of raid - and this one is wreaking havoc on established player bases. Rather devastatingly, some players are losing homes that took them hundreds of hours to make.
The new event, called "they sought you out", unleashes hordes of insects on your player base - and worse still, they can fly. Seekers and seeker soldiers are capable of hopping over ditches, then mulching stone walls like they're made of papier maché. The event can occur at any time after you've defeated the Plains boss Yagluth, so anyone who has completed Valheim's biomes is vulnerable to these attacks. And sure enough, it's taking a lot of players by surprise.
"When we got raided we got caught off-guard and lost our three-story base which took us hundreds of hours," said one Reddit user. "It was protected with walls, trenches, and most upgraded gates - it didn't slow the seekers down at all... We all rage quit after surviving the raid, but after looking around at the aftermath, we realised any amount of rebuilding wouldn't matter because we lost seasonal item buffs for comfort level and we could not survive another raid like that."
The buildings aren't the only victims here, too, as players are losing beloved pets to the swarm. "They killed all three of my beached pet sea serpents, jumping over walls. Big sad," said one player on Steam. "I had a very disappointing experience facing this event: my stone house was destroyed, all boars killed and I was naked, full with stamina food," said another Reddit user. "I wasn't prepared at all."
To test out the new raid for myself, I created a fake stone and iron base, then used console commands to trigger the event. As you can see from the video below, the results are fairly devastating. If you don't head outside to deal with the seekers immediately (a challenge in itself), you can expect some serious damage to your base. And if your house is made of wood... good luck.
While some players will relish this new base defence challenge, it seems extremely harsh on those who want a quieter lifestyle. Part of Valheim's appeal is that you can choose to venture into dangerous territory, then return to relative safety to build a home. It's one thing to build in the Mistlands where you can expect to deal with tough enemies on a daily basis, but it's another to have them turn up at your wooden shack in the Meadows.
The other major problem is, of course, that many players will have no idea that they need to prepare for this raid. Many will have completed the Plains biome and not yet ventured into the Mistlands, unaware that killer ants are about to pay them a home visit. Plenty of players will have already constructed homes in easier biomes that simply cannot deal with this amount of damage.
The extreme difficulty of this raid also prioritises base defence over other ways of playing Valheim, as those who want to build decoratively or roleplay will find their options limited. "What's the point of having a cosy mountain cabin, a camp outside of plains, maybe a mining hut in the black forest if every single one of them needs a moat and walls to be 'viable'," said Reddit user Joshy_Moshy. "Building is my favourite thing about this game," said user Moriartis. "If I have no choice but to have a giant earth wall around my base or a giant moat otherwise the whole base gets totaled because of how much damage the new mobs do, that's really sh***y and really degrades what I like about the game."
"It feels like advancing through the bosses is more of a punishment than a reward," said another user.
If you're worried about the safety of your base, there are a few options available to you. One is to cover the surrounding area in workbenches so that no enemies can spawn near your home. You'll need to be careful not to miss any patches, however, and it does look a little ugly. Another option is to dig some seriously large trenches and dirt walls, something that will unfortunately ruin the surrounding landscape. You can also progress through the Mistlands to find some base defence items, but this is a slow process. As a matter of last resort, some players are disabling raids entirely using dev commands. Perhaps the best advice is to back up your save file, should things go horribly wrong.
Personally speaking, I know that my group's base would have been devastated by this event. Our moats would not have been enough to stop the ants, and they would have ripped through our lovingly-crafted wooden village. While we could upgrade our base with further walls and trenches to deal with this new threat, doing so would ruin our home's quaint and cosy vibe. To avoid having our 150-hour base wrecked in an instant, we have chosen to avoid the event entirely by defeating Yagluth on another server, bringing any required items across to our own. Hopefully Iron Gate will reconsider how the raids work - or at least reduce the damage seekers can do to buildings. Has anyone got the number for pest control?