To celebrate 5 years in early access, Valheim gets a new hat, better Steam Deck performance, and—wait for it—frosted sweetbread

It's been five years since Valheim revitalized the survival craft genre. At the time I remember thinking "why would anyone want to play a new game in this style when there's already Minecraft, Ark and Rust?". With the benefit of hindsight I know that two things worked in Valheim's favour. One was its clever finetuning of survival and building systems that still felt really clunky in competing games, and which many have since adopted. The other thing was Vikings. Valheim ruled so much that it was our favourite game of 2021, and that was largely thanks to Vikings.

Five years later Valheim is still in early access, but its updates come thick and fast and its community seems, by and large, pretty happy with how things are going. To celebrate the milestone, Iron Gate has issued a special anniversary update, or "Patch 0.221.10" in more prosaic terms. It features a bunch of nice things, like "a celebratory hat", a new weapon in the form of early axes (they're basically ancient dual-wieldable axes), and frosted sweetbread, which is a new consumable.

There's a new radial menu for emotes, from which you can trigger new happy emotes like "vibe" or "love you" (do not perform the despair emote on Valheim's fifth birthday!). Pretty much everything is nice in this update, except for the axes, which of course can be used to kill things.

There's a bunch of performance optimizations too: the one that caught my eye was an improvement to the Steam Deck's Performance mode preset, which "now reaches 60 fps". The game will draw less battery power and launch at the Steam Deck's native resolution.

Full update notes are over here, but I'll post the abridged notes, straight from Iron Gate, below. Valheim is currently 50% off on Steam, in case you're yet to dive in.

• A celebratory hat!
• Early Axes
• Frosted Sweetbread
• Added a radial menu for emotes
• New emotes
• New hairstyles
• 2 new buildable garlands
• Engine Upgrade
• Multiple bug fixes and improvements