It’s been a while since we’ve explored Valheim, but with a new patch coming just around the corner, Syn and I decided to pick up where we left off in our adventures. Last time, we were just learning our way around the plains, figuring out what we could and couldn’t handle when it came to battling the creatures out there.

As our garden in the plains became more fruitful, this time around, we were able to finish upgrading all of our gear except for the shields (we need more chains). Syn made herself a spiffy spiked Porcupine while I just opted to upgrade my black metal sword as far as I could.

Armed and geared, we decided to move towards exploring around the location the game marked as Yagluth. I marked all the Fuling camps as I went because we are still lacking on totems we need to actually summon the boss.

We overshot the altar since there was a camp right next to it and found a fairly safe location along the ocean to build a tiny outpost that could house a portal nearer to Yagluth. This was nothing fancy or large, but we did go with stone buildings just to make sure it was strong enough to withstand an attack if we needed to retreat to it.

We also experimented with making new kinds of food beyond fish wraps, and this helped by boosting the overall health cap quite a bit when it came to raiding the camps. The one star (and sometimes two star) Fulings still do a lot of damage, but with a bigger health pool, I was able to survive a few fights I couldn’t have before.

I know that food is going to change in the next patch, so I’m a little worried they’ll take away the higher health cap effects. Guess we’ll have to see!

That’s not to say we didn’t die a few times, but death was easier to recover from with an outpost located where we built it. I’m still learning how much I can survive with this new gear and how much damage I can do with the upgraded blade. Despite having what I think is the better stuff in the game, Fulings are still a big challenge and quite tough when they gang up on you.

Deathsquitos are thankfully not so much of a danger anymore, and in fact have become coveted as we need the needles to make new stacks of arrows – we go through quite a bit.

Not every camp we raid has a totem, which is making things slow going. We actually have more black metal than we know what to do with due to our efforts. Where we left off, we have four of five totems we need to summon Yagluth, and a couple more camps we’ve scouted in our explorations of the area.

So my hope is we can down him the first try (though I haven’t read up on any of the strats) and not have to go out hunting more totems if we should fail. I’m honestly not sure if that’s how it works if everyone dies at a boss seeing we’ve never had it happen, and I hope it won’t this time around.

I’m not sure that we’ll get this fight done before the Hearth and Home patch drops, but it would be nice to be able to focus on whatever the new content is going to be in the patch. I’m happy to see new stuff coming for Valheim!

Also, Valheim has become my second most played game in Steam, only second to 7D2D (which has an insane number of hours and probably won’t be unseated in first place anytime soon).