By the time he stepped down as head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2025, Mike Tomlin—then the NFL's longest-tenured coach—had led the team through a 19-year run without a losing season, securing 13 playoff appearances, eight division titles, and a victory at Super Bowl XLIII.

Since 2014, however, Tomlin has been answering a higher calling: He's been building. In a YouTube video on Wednesday, he unveiled his true masterwork: A sprawling Minecraft metropolis that he's been meticulously hand-sculpting for the last 12 years. And it's magnificent.

As the video starts, Tomlin—PlayStation controller in hand—explains that he was introduced to Minecraft by his children, who were obsessed with the game during their middle school years. While he didn't have much history with videogames, he was "mesmerized by what could occupy their attention," and as he's "always had an interest in architecture," he naturally gravitated to Minecraft's creative mode.

Eventually, his kids moved on to other interests—but Tomlin remained transfixed by the "therapeutic" act of crafting buildings, communities, and neighborhoods.

"It allowed me to detach from the realities and pressures of life," Tomlin says. "Let's take you through it."

The video then transitions to Tomlin's first-person view as he surveyed his works from on high, revealing the purest product of a grown man's hyperfixation I've ever seen: a waterfront district, with a bay surrounded by skyrises, hotels, and apartment blocks—each with its own color schemes, exterior detailing, balconies, courtyards, balustrades, awnings, and plazas.

"I started small," he says.

The former NFL coach then takes us on a tour of his city's first completed building, a "boutique hotel" built from cut red sandstone with marble and birchwood walkways, featuring—as Tomlin casually explains—a multi-floor executive spa with therapy rooms, a glass-ceilinged multi-purpose conference room, an indoor-outdoor restaurant with balcony seating, and "appropriate amenities" like public restrooms with sinks and stalls recreated from cleverly repurposed Minecraft fixtures.

It also has a basement speakeasy with a glowstone-illuminated window looking out into the hotel pool. With an adjacent employee area. And kitchen.

The tour continues through themed residential high rises-slash-aquariums with detailed bedroom interiors, past recreated CVS pharmacies, baseball fields, and soccer stadiums, and over rooftop penthouses. Throughout, Tomlin reiterates how he tried to consider both function and aesthetics by keeping conscious of interior lighting and what types of views building occupants would enjoy.

It's delightful—but it may not have been entirely delightful for the Steelers. Since he presented his city on Wednesday, many have noted that the years in which he would've been building his Minecraft magnum opus overlapped with the team's declining playoff performance.

From his first season as head coach in 2007 to 2013, the Steelers had a postseason win rate of 62.5%. Between Tomlin breaking ground on his Minecraft city in 2014 and stepping down as head coach in 2025, however, the team's postseason win rate was a mere 25%. During those years, the Steelers won only three playoff games, and suffered nine consecutive years without a playoff win.

It was also apparently a trying time for Tomlin's son Mayce, who had to endure his dad bogarting the PlayStation.

Now, we can only speculate whether Minecraft actually played a role in the Steelers' playoff record—but even if it did, I think we can all agree the price was worth paying. Have you seen how many aquariums this town has? Coach, if you're reading: I'm ready to move in.

The initial showing of Tomlin's Minecraft city was only the first episode: He and his son Dino—who's been handling the video production of his dad's build showcase—evidently have more tour videos planned. It's unclear when we can expect the next, but you'll be able to find it on Tomlin's YouTube channel.

Rust's October Update

On the heels of Facepunch Studios adding necks to s&box it has now also added milk to Rust. *️⃣

October's Rust update is here and it's bringing livestock—cows and sheep—and their various secretions, offal, and dander for all your crafting needs. The new animals produce the following:

Animal stuff

• Dung
• Meat
• Bones
• Leather
• Milk (cows only)
• Wool (sheep only)
• Companionship?

There's an economy built around these new herbivores, so in addition to murdering them for resources you can also take your animals to a new Stable vendor and haggle over the price of sale. The same vendor will also buy the wool you harvest from sheep.

New fencing has been added so you can build a pen for your pals. Here's a rundown of some of the other new livestock features:

Animal stuff, cont'd

• Facepunch doesn't explain how to capture livestock, but says it "should all be pretty intuitive"
• Like plants, you can breed animals in search of "a god clone"
• If you anger the NPC vendor by haggling too much, you'll have to wait 15 minutes before selling them something else
• You can drink milk
• You can refrigerate milk for four hours, and then "skim" it
• Skimming milk gives you skimmed milk
• Skimming milk also gives you cream

• "Cream is a more powerful consumable."

• Milk and cream can be added to tea to buff its effects
• Raw and spoiled meat can be used in a biofuel generator
• Squirrels, rabbits, frogs, turtles, and other critters have also been added

Good to finally have confirmation that cream is more powerful than milk. There's plenty of other stuff in Rust's October update but I think I covered the best of the stuff, plus it's a really long blog and I don't feel like reading the rest. Help yourself!

Footnotes

*️⃣"On the heels of Facepunch Studios adding necks to s&box it has now also added milk to Rust" is a really weird sentence. Is it the first time that sentence has ever been said?

Oddly enough, no!

After searching for a few hours through various newspaper archives, it seem the same sentence was spoken on July 12, 1967 by Idaho governor Don Samuelson while giving a speech at the dedication of Farragut State Park. He keeled over a moment later and would remain unconscious for three days, apparently the victim of an unexplained and, quite honestly, fairly useless transmission from the future.

As he lay there on the ground twitching and mumbling, the Idaho Falls Post-Register reported, he received some "light boos" from the crowd. ⬆️

"Core Values is the first paid DLC for Satisfactory and a major expansion," developer Coffee Stain studios announced on Tuesday, with the trailer above revealing that the construction sim is taking building deep underground for the first time, introducing "new resources, flora, fauna and more."

Here's how this news finds me: I should be Matt Berry in Toast of London convincingly shouting "Yes!" But instead, I'm Matt Berry in Toast of London saying "Yes! Yes!! Yes!? Yes!?!? Yesssss??? Yesssssss?????" over and over again, somehow increasingly unsure how to prounce a single syllable or what the word, in fact, actually means.

Compared to some of the dizzying hour counts some of my friends and colleagues have in life-consuming games like WoW and Dota 2 and Final Fantasy 14, my ~400 hours in Satisfactory across a few years is relatively mundane. I love the game, as I expressed in our 2024 Best Sandbox award. A small part of me is excited by the idea of going back to it. My building partner in crime and I left a monolith unfinished in our last world, with grand ambitions to route trains from across the entire map into one enormous central tower that would be visible from miles away. I do kind of want to finish it one day.

But another, bigger part of me knows that dipping back into Satisfactory for even a day will reignite the hunger. It'll be all I think about, all I want to play as soon as I log off work. No new games, no movies, just endless ways to optimize my construction chain for five more encased steel beams per minute.

I can never have enough encased steel beams. You understand that, right?

Perhaps there's a small amount of lingering Covid trauma tied up in this seed of dread, because I spent a good chunk of my lockdown months playing Satisfactory nearly every single day. But I still enjoyed playing a bunch of it in 2025, too. It's just that rare game that puts my brain in a vice grip as soon as I start thinking about it. One minute I'm having fun laying down some train tracks, the next I'm literally dreaming about how much we have left to build before we're "done."

Perhaps that's what's so scary about the announcement of a Satisfactory expansion: the blunt acknowledgement that it—and I—may never be done. Not when we're six feet under, or 600.

Core Values is coming "later," though it has a Steam page right now.

I was one of the weirdos who gave Battlefield 2042 a positive review at the same time as it was being called the worst Battlefield of all time.

Its detractors weren't wrong, we were just coming at it from different perspectives. BF 2042's giant 128-player maps did have desolate stretches where you could wind up stranded, hoofing it without cover, but I liked that. It created eerie, lonely moments that brought me back to playing Battlefield 1942, as did the glitchy hovercrafts (Battlefield games are supposed to have wonky physics!) and the goofy custom game modes you could make with the Portal scripting tool.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that I wasn't singing in the same key as the rest of the chorus, and EA launched an extended 'we're listening to your feedback' campaign, overhauling the maps and refocusing on 64-player modes to 'fix' the game. They weren't wrong to do it, but I didn't go back much.

I had a similar experience with No Man's Sky: What an odd game that was at launch, when it was engulfed in an inferno of criticism and accusations. Expectations for the endless space exploration game had gotten out of hand—thanks in part to some fuzzy marketing verbiage from developer Hello Games—but I remember liking the eerie solitude. (Maybe a pattern in my tastes is emerging here.)

No Man's Sky is now one of gaming's great redemption stories. Hello Games weathered that cosmic-scale scorn and remade it into a game that, for many, is much more like the game they'd wanted and expected back in 2016, with 32-player multiplayer and base building.

It's a great story, and Hello Games has earned a lot of respect for it, which funnily has us all smiling and clapping for the upcoming Light No Fire, another game inspiring enormous, probably too-high expectations.

But that original, 2016 version of No Man's Sky still sticks in my mind as a singular experience. Hello Games founder Sean Murray also remains fond of it.

"I've gone back to the original, played the game without any updates," Murray told us recently. "And I've got a real soft spot for it, to be honest. It's a more esoteric experience. It's a little bit weirder, but it's got its charm."

The post-launch work on both of these games obviously improved them for a lot of people, and in the case of No Man's Sky has resulted in a decade of happy spacefaring (fans even paid for a billboard ad to show their appreciation).

But I do lightly object to the common use of the word 'fixed' in the context of these overhauls, as if realigning a game's design is equivalent to solving a driver issue.

Murray got himself in trouble playing coy about the multiplayer features No Man's Sky didn't have in 2016, but it was still a cool game back then, and nothing has been quite like it since—not even No Man's Sky.

And now enjoy this clip of seasonal changes with the unholy sound of Valheim's deer bleating at 2x speed.

Valheim mod list update: Seasons

Valheim's 1.0 update isn't even a month old yet, but the modding scene is already filled with tons of impressive fan-made creations for custom worlds. My immediate favorites were quality-of-life mods fixing some of vanilla Valheim's most grating nuisances, but I've slowly tinkered with the more expansive stuff, like the aptly named Seasons mod by Shudnal.

Seasons does exactly what the name implies, adding four distinct and dynamic times of the year to all of Valheim's typically static biomes. Take the Meadows, for instance. Spring is lush green (as usual) before the summer heat slowly turns some patches of grass yellow. Then there's fall, which brings more orangey hues to the zone and darker evenings before transitioning into winter—snow-covered treetops and all.

And man, for someone who hates snow so much in real life, I love winter in a survival game. It feels like building a scene for a Christmas card, especially in a game as pretty as Valheim, but it's just not possible in vanilla until you're in the mid or endgame. Even then, I don't like building in the rocky terrain of the Mountains, and the Deep North is pretty, but hazardous. The Gammeltrolls don't give a damn about how hard I worked on my cabin. They're shotgun-blasting it with trees, and probably hitting me again with what remains.

Check out my dude in Runescape: Dragonwilds. Click on the bed and he doesn't slowly lie down, or sit first and then transition into the reclining position. He is just out. Done. Horizontal. Lights out, good night, honk shoe. I like that. I can relate to a character who, like me, is always a mere millisecond from a nap.

Survival game UnReal World is getting an update this October: Here's why that's rad:

• The game launched in 1992 and it's still getting patches
• The 34-year-old game is considered the first open world survival game—it even has a Guinness World Record for it
• Its creator, Sami Maaranen, has no plans to stop updating it: "When I accomplish one feature, I always have two more waiting"
• The update will bring "fundamental new clothcrafting features" to UnReal World
• This isn't just some simple outfits being added: "the most complex garments [take] days and days to craft"

That last bullet is important. Materials for garments are expensive: one of the screenshots in the patch notes shows a woman, Heta, bartering for nine feet of linen cloth with another characher. She is offering up a hunting bow, 5 arrows, and a handaxe, and the seller still isn't willing to close the deal.

"Heta is haggling over the price of 9 feet of linen cloth. That's just the length required for making an undershirt," the developer says. "Oh how light, soft and cosy undershirt it would make, but there is really a price to pay for that."

Yeah, this isn't a survival game where you quickly grab some plant fiber or animal skins and sprint to a crafting bench to instantly bang yourself out new set of pantaloons. It's gonna cost a lot and take quite a bit of time to make your clothing.

"I've already become quite fond of having the characters spend their evenings or short winter days crafting a whole new set of things, developing their clothcrafting skills, and enjoying the satisfaction of making good-quality garments for themselves," the dev says.

This is my favorite quote from the patch notes:

Several evenings. Just making socks! And after a few more nights of hard work she'll be able to actually put them on. Now that's a survival game.

Here's UnReal World on Steam and the full announcement about "The Survivor's New Clothes" update. One more link: why not check out our 2025 feature about the two developers behind UnReal World, Sam Maaranen and Erkka Lehmus of Enormous Elk.

Since its release in 2011, Minecraft has received countless new biomes, but its number of dimensions has remained consistent over the last fifteen years. But that's all about to change. As of next year, a fourth dimension will soon join the Overworld, the Nether, and the End. It's called the Sift, it is riotously pink, and features bunny-like creatures that walk rather than hop.

The Sift was revealed at the end of Saturday's Minecraft Live. In a brief clip showing the perambulating rabbit strolling through tufts of pink grass beneath a turquoise sky. Mojang didn't reveal much else about the Sift, but being a whole new dimension, players can naturally expect to encounter new mobs, blocks, biomes and so forth.

While the Sift is coming to both Bedrock and Java versions of Minecraft in 2027, players will be able to explore a variant of the dimension before that. This is because the Sift will also appear in Minecraft Dungeons 2 when it releases next week, and we do know a little more about what form the realm will take in Mojang's ARPG sequel.

According to Xbox Wire, The Sift is subject to "shifting tides" that can affect player characters, as well as hazardous new block types and new mobs of both friendly and hostile varieties. The article also names two of the biomes featured in the Sift. One is named Singer's Meadow—a verdant area where all manner of flora grow out of red sculk. The other is called Carapace, which is a desert area dotted with strange blue walls and giant, hollow fossils.

It's worth reiterating that this all relates to Minecraft Dungeons 2's version of the Sift, which may differ considerably from the version being added to Minecraft next year. Indeed, Xbox Wire says that Mojang is keeping tight-lipped about both how players will access the Sift and how it will differ from Dungeons 2's "expression" of it.

It's a canny marketing ploy for Minecraft Dungeons 2, though I don't know whether it actually needed it—Minecraft Dungeons seemed to do pretty well for itself. The Sift wasn't the only new Minecraft location announced during the event. The game's also getting a new biome called the ice caves.

This is a subterranean biome that will appear sporadically beneath colder surface biomes of the Overworld, and brings with it an interesting new light-based mechanic. The ceilings of ice caves are frocked by icicles that will detach from the ceiling if you place a torch beneath them. Hence, you need to be more careful about where you place your light sources while exploring these chilly underground warrens.

Alongside icicles, ice-caves will also feature light-emitting crystals, a new resource called calcite, and a new zombie variant called the frozen zombie. Mojang hasn’t specified a release date for the ice caves yet, but the biome is apparently coming to testing soon. As for The Sift, I imagine we'll find out more about Minecraft's interpretation of the dimension once everyone's had their fill of exploring it in Minecraft Dungeons 2.

It wasn't a long wait for some of my favorite Valheim mods to start working again after the 1.0 launch, and just as I expected, there were plenty of new fan-made features to tinker with. I'm still digging through the sea of new creations, but here's a list of some of the best Valheim mods I've found so far—along with advice on your mod manager options.

Valheim mod managers and required mods

Best gameplay mods

Best building and furniture mods

Best quality-of-life mods

Best visual tools and texture mods

How many of you have started a Minecraft world, made your first house, explored the Nether, and found an End Portal only to stop just short of defeating the Ender Dragon? I've done it more times than I'd care to admit, constantly juggling realms and getting bored of projects. Well, it turns out that we never had to do anything, because given enough time Minecraft may just defeat itself.

It may sound ridiculous but given the exact right seed and circumstances it can happen, Minecraft YouTuber RedLogic proved it.

RedLogic started off by making a simulation which can sort through various Minecraft seeds to find the one which had all the right and very specific requirements such as a completed end portal which was close enough to the surface to be discovered by mobs, and pumpkins, lots and lots of pumpkins. The next step was using a monte carlo simulation to compress billions of ordinary ticks (time passing in Minecraft) into "statistically sampled waiting times".

It then came to running the simulation in Minecraft world seed -535646876083114041:

• Year 33,477 (7x the length of recorded human history): The first bit of progress was made when a pumpkin was picked up by an Enderman.
• Year 33,479: That pumpkin was then made into a snow golem which can fire projectiles at mobs.
• Year 35,510: The snow golem provoked a creeper and blew open a section of the route to the completed End Portal.
• Year 35,512: Another snow golem rocked up, fought two creepers which completely opened up a path to the completed End Portal. Surface mobs can now enter the End.
• Year 1,300,000: Endermen began entering the End and placing blocks all around the Ender Dragon's lair, gradually making paths up to all the End Crystals.
• Year 3,000,000: The first snow golem entered the End and accidentally destroyed an End Crystal.
• Year 122,415,210: 8/10 End Crystals had been destroyed.
• Year 181,000,000: A snow golem entered the End and destroyed the ninth End Crystal.
• Year 199,000,000: After wandering the End for 18 million years it destroyed the last End Crystal.
• Year 227,000,000: The first creeper explosion connected and dealt 4 damage to the Ender Dragon.

After a billion years the Ender Dragon's health was whittled down by snow golem attacks and creeper explosions but it wasn't until 1.975 billion years that the last hit connected with the Ender Dragon and killed it. Felling the beast and defeating Minecraft.

After all of this RedLogic shows us what the End and overworld looked like and it's surreal. Blocks are stacked everywhere, creeper explosions have marred the land, and there's no signs of life to be seen. But it was all worth it because the game was finally complete.

Real buildings that look like something I'd build on my first night in a survival game, part 1. Defunct restroom in my local park. I count 8 wall pieces, 4 standard roof pieces, 2 triangle roof pieces, 1 door. I could definitely fit a bed in there.

If you've ever wanted to play a cozy life sim where you craft, farm, build, cook, and complete quests for villagers, and also make products from human corpses, Graveyard Keeper 2 is out today.

I'm only about 13 hours into it and it's got that same immediately engrossing crafting loop as the original. Gotta chop wood, gotta mine ores, gotta cook food, gotta level up skills and earn points and unlock new tech. There's so many different crafting benches to manage and so many different disciplines to master that it's compelling as hell, though it does at times feel extremely grindy.

Most interesting to me is how quickly, once again, I compromised my principles as a nice human being and slid into a dark, steaming lake of moral ambiguity. In the first game it didn't take long for me to start using a counterfeit royal stamp so I could sell the meat I'd harvested from corpses to the local tavern for its meals. It was a great way to efficiently profit off the growing pile of bodies in my graveyard, and it only meant turning the entire town into unknowing cannibals.

In Graveyard Keeper 2, I've been vigilant for that sort of behavior, planning to play as the fine upstanding citizen everyone assumes I am. How long did it take before I was pulling handfuls of fat from human corpses and using it to craft candles so I could raise the decoration score of the local church? No time. It took me no time. I unlocked the ability to make human fat candles and I immediately started making human fat candles.

But hey, no one is complaining, especially not the corpses who are now contributing to the warm, comforting glow in my lovely little church. So, what's the harm? Let us pray.

Graveyard Keeper 2 will cost you $25 (and maybe a bit of your soul) on Steam.

A lot of games are basically escort missions dressed up in a fancy way. But in Hello Sunshine, that dynamic is flipped on its head, and you become the little sidekick that needs protecting. We just unveiled a new trailer during the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct that expands on the relationship between the Nomad and the giant robot who provides them with shelter.

In the survival game, you take on the role of the Nomad, the final employee of the Sunshine Corporation that left the world a scorched ruin. In this new trailer, we hear them admit responsibility for what has happened, which is how you know you're playing a videogame, because in real life, no corpo ever admits fault.

I've loved the whole vibe of this game since I first saw it in the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted last year, and the more I learn, the more I look forward to it. By day, the Nomad follows the robot towards a colossal tower and scavenge for resources and clues as to how exactly the world ended. Venturing too far away causes the sun to damage you, but as you progress, you'll be able to go on longer voyages away from the bot.

At night, the temperature plummets, and the machine stops to recharge. You can upgrade your gear and make repairs to your companion, and you'll now need to stay near it for warmth.

It's clear the relationship between these two characters is central to the game. "Without you, I'd be dead," the Nomad says in the new trailer. I wonder if it'll ever speak back.

We've got to wait a while before we find out, as Hello Sunshine isn't out until next year, 2027. If you want to stay up to date with it, wishlist the game on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

Dune Awakening was lauded for its survivalist take on Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic when it was released last year, but there's one element of Funcom's sci-fi adventure that's proved consistently controversial, and that's its MMO-adjacent elements. Players seemingly love constructing bases and braving the many dangers lurking in Arrakis' deserts, but are less keen on sharing that experience with other players, especially when the game becomes more competitive in its PvP focussed Deep Desert.

Now though, in a move that would please Harkonnens galaxy-wide, Funcom has made it so you can keep Arrakis all to yourself. Dune Awakening's long-sought after single-player mode has arrived. Update 1.5 introduces a tweaked version of Awakening suitable for solo play, while also adjusting Arrakis in a bunch of other ways to make it generally more accessible and less punishing.

Funcom has changed several core mechanics to make solo mode work, chiefly retooling multiplayer-reliant systems so they can work independently. The player-driven market known as the Exchange now functions as a sci-fi supermarket offering a wide-array of items for players to pick up as they please. Meanwhile, its Landsraad political system simulates rival guilds automatically, ensuring it "progresses even without player participation". Finally, while not player-driven, Coriolis storms have been softened so that players can maintain progress in the Deep Desert, though Function cautions that these storms remain "very dangerous."

Perhaps the most interesting addition, though, is difficulty settings. Awakening now features three difficulty presets for both single-player and self-hosted servers, alongside a fourth, customisable difficulty mode that lets players tweak parameters like sandstorms, security zones, item durability, base decay and even XP multipliers.

Alongside adding solo play to Awakening, Funcom has also made its multiplayer less confrontational. Multiplayer can now be played wholly PvE. The Deep Desert's PvP is no longer mandatory, while the starting area of Hagga Basin is now exclusively PvE (although you can make it a "full PvP zone" if you run your own server).

This friendlier approach isn't limited to player interactions either. The game itself has been made less punishing in a variety of ways. Bases can be reconstructed wholesale thanks to a new snapshot system that acts as a blueprint for your entire base. Destroyed vehicles can be recovered for up to 30 days after being lost. Base upkeep taxation has been removed entirely, and the durability penalty upon death has been lowered from 5% to 2%.

Funcom summarises the changes with the line "You don't have to lose things anymore," which, while I understand the sentiment, is a little strange given that Arrakis is supposed to be brutally harsh by its very nature. But Dune Awakening is far from the only game currently trending away from friction. Bungie is adding a permanent PvE mode to Marathon, after its uncompromising extraction shooter failed to maintain a large audience. Even in the realm of single-player, The Blood of Dawnwalker's developer has said it may not include a time-limit system in the sequel (which the studio is already working on) after it proved the most controversial element of the otherwise lauded RPG.

I don't know whether this trend toward smoother, more siloed gaming experiences is a positive one, but given the 2010s were dominated by fiercely challenging soulslikes and hyper-competitive battle-royale games, it is interesting. In any case, If the addition of single-player has ignited your interest in Dune Awakening, Funcom's sci-fi survival sim is half-price until October 1.

Much to my embarrassment, while I was mid-complaint about my new wall of Valheim storage chests, a fellow Viking hit me with, "You know you can color code those signs, right?" Duh, of course I know that. Well, I swear I did, but totally forgot about the handy feature that doesn't require a single mod. In case you forgot too, I'm here to remind you—or teach you a quick tip for organizing Valheim storage with colorful text codes for signs.

Codes for sign colors

You can change a sign's text color in Valheim through markup codes. For those even vaguely familiar with traditional HTML, you won't need to close these style commands, but keep in mind you still have limited text space on a sign, so keep them short.

You can use any 6-digit hex value, so check out the color code calculator on W3 Docs to find more, or reference the table I used from Unity. It's a fairly straightforward process, but I'll leave you with a few extra color-changing tips:

• Some of the color names listed above work in place of their hex code
• If using a color name, remove '#' and replace it with 'color='
  • Example: Red becomes Red sign

Codes for sign text size and style

Other markup attributes from the Unity guide also work in Valheim. You can use a few at a time for text styles like bigger italics, colorful bolds, or extra spacing and alignment.

Unicode characters for signs

You can take your Valheim signs even further by adding Unicode characters. I find the W3 Schools chart to be the most helpful, but they don't all work, so I've included a few below for reference.

Example Valheim signs

You don't have to stop at just one code when customizing your text, so I've made a few examples you can use to test things out. Change the variables as needed, and remember to heed the 50-character limit—lest your signs wind up with awkwardly cut-off words or floating text.

When battling tree-swinging trolls, ice-spitting dragons, and fire-breathing skeletal demigods, it's hard to think of a skill more important than dodging. A shield or a weapon held up defensively can help, sure, but escaping deadly attacks in Valheim is often down to how quickly you can tuck and roll.

Which makes it a bit curious that over the past five years of early access, you couldn't redbind the dodge skill to a single key or button press. If you want to dodge on keyboard, you have to hold the block button (mouse 2) and press jump (space bar) and pick a direction (WASD). On controller, it's a stick + button combo. No single tap for a deeply important maneuver has been available for the past five years.

Until today! Those busy Valhiem devs finally took a peek at player feedback and noticed the request people have been making constantly for the past five years, seven months, 15 days, 17 hours, and 22 minutes: You have now been granted the ability to remap your dodge key to an alternate—no doubt single-tap—configuration.

Better late than never?

That's not the only key rebinding option that's been added. You can rebind items on the radial wheel and hotbar, too. A much newer request, to disable the intro cinematic (which only appeared with Valheim 1.0 last week), has also been granted. There are also some bug fixes, notably more tinkering with the Valheim cheat-flagging feature that was mislabeling some players and resources as cheats.

Have a look at the full patch notes below, and good luck trying to unlearn the muscle memory you've developed for dodging with three different keys over the past five years or so. One note: the patch, devs say, "will require a few days to get uploaded to all platforms." I've checked and it's live on PC now, however.

Quality of Life:

• Added several new keybinding options to the keyboard (Alternate dodge key, hotbar rebinding (on top of 1-8), support for rebinding radial wheel, support for removing keybinds)
• Added accessibility setting to be able to toggle blocking
• Add toggle to Gameplay settings to skip the intro cinematic on startup
• When attacking, the player’s rotation now also snaps towards the intended attack direction when the “attack towards look direction” option is enabled, not just when it’s disabled.
• Swapped Motion Sensor and Sheath keybinds on gamepad, returning Sheath to its original keybind. Motion Sensor can now be activated with the alt-key + Sheath button instead.

Optimizations:

• Improved GPU performance when tessellation is disabled by eliminating unnecessary GPU overhead in this case.
• Heightmap shadows are now calculated more accurately and at a lower performance cost.
• Optimized particle systems in the main menu to reduce overdraw.
• Multiple GPU performance improvements on Switch 2.

Bugs & Issues:

• PlayerBase effect on some build pieces has been increased to block enemies more
• Fixed inaccuracies in stick input pre-processing that made it heavily weighted towards axis-aligned movement and 30% too slow diagonally.
• Jotun puffs and Magecaps no longer respawn.
• Fix for player characters sometimes mistakenly being marked as temporary cheaters, leading to items dropped by monsters they kill being incorrectly marked as having a cheated origin.
• Cheated stackable items no longer stack with regular items, preventing uncheated stacks from being “corrupted” into a cheated state.
• Persistent Events devcommand (“pevents”) is now actually behind the devcommands toggle and not available in the console by default.
• Fixed errors when using the grappling hook’s secondary attack on creatures.
• Fixed various issues with Ashlands water (VFX, water damage not stopping)
• Fixed a bug where characters didn’t save correctly when manually pressing Save while playing on a server hosted by someone else.
• Disabled biomedata caching, fixing a bug where the cache could end up in an invalid state, making it impossible to join remote servers.
• Fixed Deep North battleaxes tool tier, can now cut all the trees.
• Made placeable boulders persist, only placeable on the ground, break if the ground they’re standing on goes away, and give ground-level support.
• Updated Ballista to make it accept all new trophies (All Deep North enemies + Bjorn + Vile)
• Timberwood build pieces no longer incorrectly show up in earlier biome locations
• Fixed various crashes/errors that could happen in rare circumstances
• Fixed a bug where Helmet of the Protector was craftable directly via the Black Forge
• Fixed a bug where terrain modifications by players or monsters could lead to performance and portal issues in multiplayer, such as performance and portaling issues, terrain seams, and terrain modifications becoming undone
• Updated Deep North and Winding Tunnels music for better balance and to remove some clicks when looping.
• Now plays the correct music in Mörkhalla.
• Better mixing of location music in the Deep North.
• Tweaked Seal and Baby Seal colliders to better match their bodies.
• Fixed an issue where the “No time for snoozing” achievement could sometimes not be unlocked in multiplayer
• Fixed an issue where The Homesteader and The Architect achievements could unlock repeatedly.
• Nintendo Switch 2: The TV output no longer switches from 120 Hz to 60 Hz while the virtual keyboard is open or while in the home menu when using the balanced graphics preset and playing online multiplayer, which caused a black screen while entering and leaving these menus.
• PlayStation®5: The TV output no longer switches from 120 Hz to 60 Hz while in the home menu when using the balanced graphics preset, which caused a black screen when entering and leaving this menu.
• PlayStation®5: The “Stronger Together” achievement is now achievable.
• Steam: Fixed a bug where Steam Cloud could get stuck in an invalid state if the game crashed while saving.

Wondering how to fish in Valheim? When you're not slaying Odin's enemies in the Norse underworld, it makes perfect sense to kick back with a relaxing bit of fishing. And if you've spent time on a raft or ship, or even just wandered close to a body of water, you've probably already seen a few fish swimming around. But how do you catch them? Don't worry, it's not hard, but you'll need a little bit of gear and a lot of stamina.

Valheim fishing rod: How to get it

It's a bit unfortunate that in a world where you craft all your own gear, you can't craft a fishing rod. But at least there's Haldor, the vendor you'll (eventually) find in the black forest.

Haldor sells fishing rods for 350 coins, and sells 20 pieces of basic bait for 10 coins.

If you haven't found Haldor already, you can check our guide on how to increase your Valheim inventory size for a few tips on locating Valheim's NPC vendor.

If you're a real gambler, you can attempt to find a fishing rod out in the world. They are very rarely found as loot in frost caves in the mountains biome. I'd probably stick with buying one from Haldor, though: I've got over 150 hours in Valheim and I've never found a fishing rod in a frost cave.

How to fish in Valheim

Fishing is stamina based: you'll need to spend stamina to reel your fish in, so prepare yourself as you would going into battle: by eating enough food to give you a full stamina bar and by bringing some stamina meads with you.

With the rod equipped and the bait selected in your inventory (by right-clicking it), press mouse 1 (or your attack button) to cast your line into the water. When a fish swims near and nibbles—your bobbin will be tugged—click mouse 2 (or your block button). That will instantly hook your fish.

To reel in your fish, hold down mouse 2: that will drain your stamina while reeling in the fish. If you run out of stamina before you finish reeling it in, the fish will escape.

When the fish is close to you, you'll be able to target it with your crosshairs and press E (or your use button) to pick it up.

Fishing tips

• Fish are physical entities that spawn into the world, so if you don't see any fish in the water nearby, you're not going to catch anything.
• To find fish, run along the edge of the water and try to spot them swimming around, then aim your cast there.
• You can also take a boat out into the water to look for groups of fish. Just watch out for sea serpents, which are a little too big to land with a fishing rod.
• You can craft bait from fish you catch using the food preparation table. The food preparation table can be made with 5 iron, 15 leather scraps, and 20 finewood.
• Make sure you have spare room in your inventory for your catches!
• You can also catch fish by hand if you're fast enough. They sometimes wash up on beaches, too.
• There's a fishing hat you'll learn to craft by catching at least one of every different fish in Valheim. It gives you a +20 to your fishing skill.

I'm back on my bullshit, and by bullshit I mean sinking another delightful 100 hours into Valheim—the Viking-themed survival crafting game that sits among my top five most-played games on Steam. With the launch of 1.0 and its new biome, the Deep North, now is the best time to round up your friends and return to ye olde old sea fortresses and swampy castles. A lot has changed in Odin's purgatory.

Or even better, forget your old worlds and start anew. The Deep North's endgame is its biggest draw, sure, but from start to finish, Valheim is a much better experience with boss reworks, small UI tweaks, and a few new cutscenes for a lovely pinch of world-building. You don't get a good look at the big picture by booting up old saves, and after diving into Valheim 1.0 with nothing but a wooden club and tattered leather loincloth, I can confidently say I don't regret it one bit.

Perhaps some of that is thanks to skipping last year's Call to Arms update—the patch where Iron Gate dramatically reworked the buffs received from slaying Valheim's giant gods—but now I'm glad I waited. As my total Valheim playtime rapidly approaches the 500-hour mark, I can't help but be impressed by how good a handful of small changes and new items make progression to the endgame feel.

Some of those changes stood out as soon as I entered the cozy Meadows of Valheim's starting zone, and I guarantee any survival-crafting, base-building menace like myself will be just as thrilled as I was to see Iron Gate's reworked building UI. Instead of endlessly scrolling through a sea of furniture, walls, and decor, I can finally search for and favorite individual pieces as a shortcut or create entire categories dedicated to my go-to tools. It's the first time in years I've enjoyed Valheim without a slew of QoL building mods.

I've already made biome-specific building collections for every zone too, and even have pared-down versions for quick access in emergencies. We're all guilty of picking fights with Fulings that we can't handle, but I like to pull the ol' Fortnite on 'em. That's code for building a box around myself and crying for help, by the way. Is that not how Fortnite works?

First-time Vikings or lapsed players like myself will also appreciate Valheim's smooth transition from the early-game Meadows to the fiery end-times hellscape of the Ashlands. With all of its pieces in alignment, you don't need your nose in a wiki or a posse of seasoned friends to figure out the next steps of the adventure.

There's a clearer big-picture path to Valheim we just didn't have before, and I'm finally comfortable recommending it as a version-complete build without all of the early access caveats.

The boss reworks from last year pair especially well with the breadcrumb directions added in 1.0's cutscenes, too. I won't spoil the whole thing for you, but historically, Valheim didn't do the best job of teaching its Vikings how to play. And I mean, it still doesn't deliver its secrets on a silver platter, but that's more fun when you've got a vague hint about where to go next and a series of boss buffs that all feel viable. Back in my day, we had seven boss buffs, and only one (or maybe two) of them felt viable.

Iron Gate also heard us loud and clear on the stingy storage space and how miserable navigating the foggy marble cliffs of the Mistlands felt. The Deep North update comes with upgradeable pocket space and a nifty grappling hook for safely traversing one of Valheim's most hostile zones—or so I'm told. You may be surprised to learn I've mostly used these upgrades for holding more decorations and slingshotting my Viking between taller building projects. What goes on in the Mistlands is none of my business.

This is all before you get to the Deep North, mind you. There are still plenty of secrets hidden in Valheim's last chapter, but it would be a shame to remember the journey to that point only by its early access builds. So whether you're playing for the first time or a seasoned Viking, I vote you all start the same way: naked in the Meadows, wielding a stick.

You can check out Valheim 1.0—out now on Steam.

After five years in early access, Valheim 1.0 finally launched this week with its final biome, a new boss, lots of extra weapons, armor, and monsters, and more than 50 achievements—though those cheevos were locked up tight if you used the command console to activate cheats.

That just changed, at least for Steam users. Twin patches were released for Valheim today containing a handful of bug fixes and tweaks, and one big change to achievements.

"The fixes include a function to let you opt into using achievements even though you have been blocked from doing so because of previous usage of devcommands," developer Iron Gate says. "We will leave it to your own judgement whether or not to activate this function–Oden will surely know if you use it dishonourably."

This new command is just for players on Steam, and it rolls right off the tongue:

"Achievements can now be opted into even if you have used devcommands or mods by the new devcommand 'yesiuseddevcommandsbutiwantmyachievementsanyway'."

If you're new to using cheats in Valheim, by the way, we've got you covered with our Valheim console commands guide, which we updated for 1.0 so you can spawn new Deep North materials, weapons, foods, and items. And now you can use them while still earning achievements, even if it means Oden will be disappointed in you. Nice!

Also in the patch, you can now repair your Deep North armor, which is good news, and you can no longer punch snow to remove it, which is bad news, because punching things should always solve problems in survival games (now you'll need to craft a shovel instead).

Amusingly, players discovered a couple of days ago that Valheim's new timberwood drawbridges were too narrow to fit a cart across—kind of an important feature for a bridge—but the devs promised a quick fix, and that's included in today's patch as well.

Here's the dual patch notes:

Patch 1.0.10 – All Platforms

• The heavy armour in Deep North can now be repaired
• Greydwarf Shamans in Deep North now deal appropriate amounts of damage and healing
• Punching no longer removes snow
• Landing on snow without directly walking now removes the snow
• Various sound effects updated for several creatures and the snow in Deep North

Patch 1.0.12 – Steam Only

• The following fixes are fully crossplay compatible and will be extended to all platforms in an upcoming hotfix, which we're pushing out as soon as possible.
• Using the Forge of Potential no longer unlocks recipes that should not be unlocked
• Items on armour stands and item stands no longer lose their durability & upgrade level IF the world has not yet been loaded in the 1.0 update (We are however looking into a better fix for this so do not remove high level items (fish, weapons, armour, etc) from your item stands without using backups if you have been playing 1.0!)
• Fixed a crash that could trigger when players tried to access a zone that wasn’t loaded
• Fixed a problem with banlist and whitelist that made them only compatible with new IDs (e.g. V_123456789) even though they should work with old IDs too (e.g. Steam_123456789)
• There is now a popup message to make it more clear when you can receive achievements again after them being temporarily disabled
• Achievements can be now be opted into even if you have used devcommands or mods by the new devcommand 'yesiuseddevcommandsbutiwantmyachievementsanyway'
• It’s now easier to fit the Cart through the Timberwood Drawbridge
• Jotun Puffs and Magecaps no longer look pickable when they have been picked

Whether you're a Valheim veteran or playing for the first time, at some point you're going to stop and ask "Is there any way to increase the size of my inventory? And finally, as of Valheim 1.0, the answer is yes, you can!

Inventory size in Valheim is famously small, with just eight hotbar slots and 24 inventory slots. Especially since worn armor takes up slots, your inventory is going to be full quickly and constantly, making it tough to haul back all the loot and resources you find in the world. At long last, there's something you can do about it.

How to increase your inventory in Valheim

1. Defeat bosses. This is important: before you can increase your inventory you'll need to defeat a couple of key Valheim bosses.

The first inventory upgrade becomes available once you've defeated Moder in the Mountains biome. The second inventory upgrade becomes available once you've defeated the Queen in the Mistlands.

2. Visit Haldor. The NPC merchant in the Black Forest now sells two inventory upgrades in exchange for coins, with each upgrade giving you an extra row in your inventory, meaning you can add a total of 16 extra slots.

Here are the inventory expansions Haldor sells:

• Wider pockets (+8 slots): 1000 coins
• Deeper pockets (+8 slots): 2000 coins

How to find Haldor

If you're new to Valheim, you may not have run into Haldor yet, and he can be hard to find. The vendor will only appear in the Black Forest biome, and there's not many ways to find him besides just going out into the world and looking.

To find Haldor in a Black Forest biome, you'll need to be at least 1,500 meters away from the center of the map. (There's a console command, "pos", that shows your coordinates and distance from the map's center—to learn how to use it, please visit our page on how to use Valheim console commands.)

You can also try putting your Valheim world seed into a third-party utility like the Valheim World Generator, though it may not show Haldor's location reliably until it's been updated to support Valheim 1.0.

When you get within a couple hundred meters of Haldor's camp, a white bag icon will appear on your minimap.

As for the coins you can spend at Haldor's camp, you can find them in chests, dungeons, and by killing monsters like trolls and fulings. You can also sell items like rubies, amber, and silver necklaces to Haldor in exchange for coins.

If you've started a new character or world in Valheim 1.0 from the beginning (or are playing it for the first time ever), you may be wondering about the Battle Idols and Protection Idols you've found. While opening chests in Valhiem's various biomes, you will occasionally come across an item called a Battle Idol or Protection Idol made of wood, bronze, iron, or other materials.

These Idols don't seem to serve an immediate purpose, but hang onto any you find because you'll eventually be able to use them to upgrade your weapons and armor.

Valheim Idols: Where to find them

Idols can randomly be found as loot in chests, and chests can spawn in various places in the world: abandoned houses, burial chambers, ruined towers, shipwrecks, Viking graveyards, and other points of interest.

Which type of Idol you find will depend on what biome you're in:

• Wooden Idol: Meadows biome
• Bronze Idol: Black Forest biome
• Iron Idol: Swamp Biome
• Silver Idol: Mountains biome
• Black Metal Idol: Plains biome
• Black Marble Idol: Mistlands biome
• Flametal Idol: Ashlands biome
• Bloodgold Idol: Deep North biome

The Idols will allow you to upgrade your weapons and armor: the Battle Idols are used to improve your weapons, and the Protection Idols are used to improve your armor. You can only use Idols at one place: the Forge of Potential.

How to find the Forge of Potential

To find Valheim's Forge of Potential, you'll need to search the Mountains biome. Since it's so cold there, be sure to have items that keep you warm, like frost resistance mead, or a wolf fur cape or wolf fur armor chestpiece to avoid freezing.

Once you're close to the Forge of Potential, an icon that looks like an Idol will appear on your map:

In both worlds I've found it in, the Forge of Potential has been very close to boss Moder's summoning altar, but I don't know if that's a rule for where it appears or if that was just luck. Both times it has been near the top of a tall peak, however.

How to use the Forge of Potential

The forge is a workbench you can use to upgrade your gear if you have an Idol and suitable gear in your inventory. Each Idol will work with gear made of the same material: if you have a Bronze Protection Idol, for example, you can upgrade a piece of armor made of Bronze. An Iron Battle Idol will let you upgrade an iron weapon.

Interacting with the Forge will let you select the gear you want to upgrade if you have an Idol in your inventory. Press the "Attempt Refinement" button to activate it.

Important: The Forge has a chance of failure. If your refinement fails, the gear you're attempting to upgrade will be destroyed, though you'll recover the crafting materials needed to remake it. You won't be able to use the Forge of Potential to recraft it, however: it can only be used for upgrades.

You'll also take damage if your upgrade fails, so be sure you're at full health!

Forge of Potential upgrade results

Is upgrading worth it? Here's a look at one example of a bronze sword I upgraded at the Forge of Potential:

You can see that the durability increased by 50 points, slash damage went from 41 (11-24) up to 47 (13-27), and block force went from 25 to 30, but all other stats remained the same.

Have you met Valheim 1.0's mountainous menace, the Gammeltroll? If you've made your way to Valheim's final biome, the Deep North, you've probably seen and fought it already: the Gammeltroll is a 30-foot tall rock monster who pelts you with tree trunks from range and stomps you into paste if you get too close.

Most interestingly, when you defeat the Gammeltroll, it doesn't fall down. Instead, it turns into a statue called a "Petrified Gammeltroll." You can chip away at its legs all you want, but even the toughest pickaxe in the game won't make a dent. And as you might have guessed, inside the Gammeltroll awaits a critical new resource you'll need to conquer the frozen biome. So, how do you mine it?

Valheim: How to mine the petrified Gammeltroll

The key to destroying the petrified Gammeltroll lies in the previous biome, the Ashlands, plus a new resource found in the Deep North.

Once you have ember charges, equip them and throw them at the petrified Gammeltroll. I find it best to throw them at its ankles from point blank range, then run away before they explode. With this method, it only takes two ember charges, one for each ankle, to destroy the statue.

(I wouldn't advise using ember charges as weapons against a living Gammeltroll. It'll damage the troll, but not enough to be worth it.)

When the troll collapses into a pile of rubble, collect your new resource, Petrified Tissue! Be warned, it's very heavy so you can't carry much, and it won't pass through wooden portals, only stone ones. Back at your base, throw it into your blast furnace and see what you get!

Somehow, it's been 10 years since No Man's Sky launched on Steam, an infamously inauspicious occasion that over the space of that decade evolved from a cautionary tale about the excesses of hype to one of the best and most enduring exploration adventures you can play. And it's not done yet: Hello Games has now released No Man's Sky's 7.0 update, Cosmos , and it's another big one.

Cosmos, as the name implies, is all about space. You might think that'd already be pretty well covered in a game like No Man's Sky, but Hello Games aims to make that great big void "feel truly alive" with this update, and "more like home."

The headline addition in Cosmos is probably the ability to own a space station, which the studio said has been the most-requested feature since No Man's Sky launched in 2016. With Cosmos, players will be able to stake their claim to their own deep space digs, build and decorate it both internally and externally, and even invite their interstellar pals over for a visit. Given the popularity of player housing in MMOs, I reckon this will be a big hit—especially since players can also now formalize those cosmic friendships through alliances with other players.

There's quite a bit more than just that, though. A new Star Map will reveal new points of interest leading to new missions and exploration opportunities, massive new "space hulks" can be salvaged and stripped for resources using the handy new gravity gun that was added earlier this year, new outposts will provide opportunities for trade, conversation, and potential danger due to biological hazards, you'll be able to build free-floating orbital bases literally anywhere amongst the stars, and speaking of stars you'll finally be able to embark upon "a perilous journey" to reach the great glowing orb at the center of your star system.

"It's real endgame stuff, but it feels important," Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray said of the Cosmos update.

"All of this is tech we get to test now, refine, and hopefully players will also experience it on our other game, Light No Fire."

The Cosmos update is live today, alongside a new expedition called "Our Journey Continues," which recaps each of the 40 major updates to No Man's Sky since its release. "It is like a museum of each update, unlocking the features of each update as we added them, along with a spacelog of interesting facts and developers commentary for each update," Hello Games explained. "It’s been a real joy to revisit some of those moments for us."

The full patch notes for No Man's Sky's Cosmos update are posted at nomanssky.com.

Valheim 1.0 changed a ton about viking survival, but some things remain the same—like my tendency to repeatedly die to fall damage in the Mistlands. A new item helps traverse all those foggy marble mountains and steep drop-offs, but I didn't find it until I was ready to leave the biome. I'll save you from a similar fate with a quick explainer on how to get the Grappling Hook in Valheim.

Where to find Hooks in Valheim

Find Hooks to unlock the Grappling Hook blueprint

You can find Hooks in the Infested Mines, the Mistlands' bug-riddled dungeons that are just as difficult to navigate as the rest of the biome. I cleared out several dungeons before stumbling upon one with a hidden stone door that I almost skipped, but realized those glowing blue glyphs must mean something.

The Hooks were inside a Dvergr Treasure Chest sitting beside other valuables, like Black Cores. I scoured a few more dungeons later and found a couple stacks of three Hooks, but you'll only need one per craft to make the Grappling Hook.

How to make the Grappling Hook in Valheim

Viking survival crafting has changed quite a bit since the days of early access, and though Valheim's biome order remains mostly the same in 1.0, there's plenty of new details to keep track of for lapsed players. If you want to make it to the new biome as soon as possible, I've got a handy progression guide to hold your hand all the way from the Meadows to the Deep North.

Meadows

The shrine you spawn at is always located in Valheim's most peaceful biome, the Meadows. Since it's relatively chill compared to other zones filled with creatures desperate to kill you, I lump it in with the Black Forest as Valheim's beginner zone. Your main goal here is to set up a small base, gather leather for armor, and get a Deer Trophy to summon Eikthyr.

Feel free to tiptoe along the edge of the Black Forest for extra goodies and upgrades, but don't stray too far. Bears and Trolls make quick snacks of low-level Vikings.

Black Forest

You'll spend a lot of time running back and forth from your Meadows base to the Black Forest for new materials, so bring Eikthyr's head back to the spawn shrine to receive the deer god's buff. Use the Hard Antlers from Eikthyr to make the Antler Pickaxe and mine as much Tin and Copper as possible—you'll need a ton of ore to smelt into ingots. I always prioritize making a Bronze Pickaxe as my first upgrade so the process goes faster.

Be careful about picking fights with Trolls or Bears, and start hoarding materials from dungeons to build portals. When you're done here, we'll make a boat and set sail for muddier waters.

Black Forest dungeons

Swamps

Trudging through Valheim's Swamps can be a real pain in the ass, so pace yourself and brew plenty of poison resist potions. I tend to blow through Surtling Cores when I reach the hostile waters here, making portals for easy travel and extra bases to process Iron Ore.

Above all else, try to be patient. It's easy to get caught in a cycle of repetitive deaths, and if you aren't careful, your viking will rack up serious skill level losses.

Swamp dungeons

Mountains

The Mountains are your first encounter with Valheim's frigid cold and you'll take damage if you visit without protection, so make yourself a Wolf Fur Cape or stock up on Frost Resistance potions. Think of it as training for the Deep North. Everything here is a bit more cumbersome, including the hunt for new ore. You'll need to carry the Wishbone from Bonemass to find Silver Ore deposits, then start digging when it whirs to signal a hit.

The terrain is often your biggest challenge. Running from enemies occasionally means sprinting off a cliff or running out of stamina before a fight, while nightfall brings increasingly aggressive wolf packs and a new vicious enemy, Fenrings.

Mountains dungeons

Plains

The Plains may be easier to jog across, but everything here hits hard. Deathsquitos live up to their name with just one hit, while the cackling Fulings are good at ragebaiting me into fights I can't handle—don't fall for their taunting. You'll also find another nighttime enemy in the Plains, the Viles. They're powerful undead versions of the Black Forest's bears, but a high-risk, high-reward enemy to farm if you're keen on making the Vilebone bow armor from their remains.

When you're feeling brave and well-prepared, try raiding a few Fuling villages. They're great sources of Barley and Flax, the latter of which you'll need a ton of for crafting Linen Thread required by gear upgrades.

Mistlands

Ashlands

Deep North

Deep North dungeons

As a mighty Viking warrior you've fought your way to the Deep North in Valheim 1.0—but now you're facing an enormous door that requires an Intricate Key to unlock. But what is an Intricate Key in Valheim, and how can you get one? Truth is, you'll eventually need more than one Intricate Key to triumph in the Deep North, so here's a quick guide that'll walk you through the steps to find them.

How to craft an Intricate Key in Valheim 1.0

As you explore the Deep North, keep an eye out for small, snow-covered villages. Look for the largest building in the village, a multi-story dwelling, seen in the image above, then head inside.

Now for the trickier bit: you'll need bloodgold to craft a cast of the Intricate Key, and bloodgold comes from defeating and destroying Gammeltrolls.

If you haven't already met a Gammeltroll, just go exploring and one will eventually find you. You'll know one when you see one: they're huge. But first, prepare an item you'll need at your base:

Whew! That's a lot of work, but now you've got everything you need to craft an Intricate Key.

Valheim 1.0 is here, so that sound you hear in the distance is scores of eager Vikings stringing their bows, sharpening their axes, and piling onto their longboats to explore the open world survival game's final biome: the Deep North.

But before you set sail for some chilly thrills in the frosty new biome, you might be wondering if you should create a new character and generate a new world for Valheim 1.0, or just keep playing with your current Viking and world. Veteran Valheimers will know that updates can conflict with existing worlds: any areas you've already explored, for example, won't be overwritten with new terrain and features, which can sometimes cause problems.

So, should you start fresh or continue from where you left off?

Let's begin with what the devs advise:

"As usual, your world will receive new content even if it was created before the update, although biome generation will only work properly on areas that have not yet been explored," says developer Iron Gate in its Valheim 1.0 FAQ. "However, we always recommend that you start the game over from scratch to get the best possible experience."

In other words, if you've already explored the areas to the far north of your world, those areas won't generate updated terrain and features of the Deep North. That's why starting a new world is in your best interest if you've already taken a few trips to the upper edge of the map.

There are other things to take in consideration for 1.0, says Iron Gate:

"The achievement system will begin to track statistics from the moment you download the 1.0 version. This means that an achievement connected to killing Eikthyr, for example, will require you to kill Eikthyr again, even if you’ve already killed him 500 times previously."

Starting from the beginning has an additional benefit that's a bit of surprise, story-wise:

"To establish the world of Valheim and welcome seasoned and new Vikings alike, Iron Gate have worked together with Brikk Animation to create a brand-new cinematic that will usher players into the world of Valheim," says Iron Gate. "Additional cinematics will also play once players have slain key bosses throughout the game."

I've seen these anime sequences and while I wouldn't say they're essential to the experience, they are pretty cool and if you don't play through the whole world again for 1.0, you won't get the chance to see all of them for yourself (except on YouTube, probably).

As for PC Gamer's advice, having played Valheim 1.0, we also recommend you start a new character and world, both for the reasons cited by Iron Gate but also because that's what several of us did. I started from the beginning again for the review, even though I'd already played for a hundred or so hours in early access, and I'm glad I did. It was a great way to rediscover the magic of the game and see just how much it has changed and improved since 2021.

That's our recommendation! Look at it this way: you've already waited this long for the Deep North, and delaying your journey to the final biome just a little bit longer to replay from the start will be worth the extra time.

After a day-long battle with one of Valheim's big bosses, I return to my modest cabin in the woods to recover. I'm exhausted, my weapons and armor are mostly broken, and I've burned through my meager supply of food and arrows. I don't even have a spare torch left to light my way home. Even though I was victorious, the cold and rainy night doesn't put me in the mood for a celebration.

Then I spot a shadowy figure in the gloom, leaning on a walking stick, one blue eye gleaming from beneath its hood. Odin. It's frickin' Odin himself, y'know, Thor's dad? He's visiting the exiled tenth world of Valheim to peep me in person. Suddenly my mood lifts and I feel like a complete badass. Odin knows who I am.

This isn't my first visitation from the ancient god: I've been playing Valheim since its early access release in 2021, and I've seen Odin a few times before. But darn it, it's still a thrill whenever he appears to silently approve of my valor. And after a long wait, I can finally prove myself worthy: Valheim 1.0 is here, and even though I've been playing this game for five years, it's still got plenty of magic.

Ragna rocks

I'm a fallen norse warrior, delivered via Valkyrie into a cursed world to vanquish Odin's enemies. But this is no RPG, it's a survival game, and those always start with a lot of backbreaking work: chopping down trees, shattering boulders, hunting deer, and constructing a base where I can sleep and do some crafting. There's no rest for the dead.

The procedurally generated world of Valheim is a massive disc, separated into biomes and split by oceans, and the deeper you explore from your starting point at the disc's center, the more dangerous the world becomes. Originally with six biomes (including the ocean), more were added over the past several years, culminating in the deep north: the frozen final realm where you finish your work for Odin. And yes, rare as this is for a survival game, there is an actual ending, though you can continue playing in your world once you've seen it.

For such a massive world, there are no quests in Valheim, not really: early on you'll stumble across an altar that will summon the first of several boss monsters, each which drop an item you'll need to survive and thrive in the next biome. But other than an occasional marker on your map, Valheim is a self-guided tour that leaves progression to your discretion and motivation.

In that, it succeeds wonderfully: I've spent nearly 150 hours in the game and I've never felt a need for NPCs to fill my ears with exposition nor wanted a quest log to give me direction. Valheim 1.0 does add animated dream sequences after each vanquished boss, and while they're pretty cool, the game was perfectly fine without them. The world is beautiful and mysterious and the urge to explore it comes simply from wanting to discover what's across the sea or on the other side of a mountain range.

Hearth and home

Most survival games have a cozy element to them, but I find Valheim the coziest of all. I've never been much of a builder, but I still love my creaky, crude little bases: one in the meadow, one in the forest, and even a small stone hut I built in one of the more dangerous biomes just so I could grow a particular crop. The horrors of the world, from the icky monsters of the swamps to the almost comically hellish swarms of furious skeletons in the ashlands makes for a nice contrast with how relaxing it is to be at home after a long, brutal adventure.

There's a real joy to puttering around my base, tweaking and decorating the structures I've built, doing some farming and animal breeding and putting off the next dangerous expedition until I'm good and ready for it. I especially love cooking: searing enormous lox drumsticks over the roaring hearth, baking bread in my huge stone oven, and brewing mead in my distillery—which takes multiple in-game days. Hey, fine. I'm in no rush to leave my comfy little homestead.

The food system of Valheim is still one of my favorites in any game (and has inspired similar systems in other survival games that have launched since 2021), where your stomach functions like a three-slot inventory: stuff a mushroom, a blueberry, and some cooked meat down there and your health and stamina bars will be fuelled until you digest them. Simple, at first.

I still remember the first time I ate a proper meal in Valheim. I'd left my starter island on a tiny raft, sailing across the sea to unknown lands in the middle of the night, to eventually find a rotting town full of undead Vikings. After barely escaping with my life and a handful of entrails dropped from the few draugr I'd managed to kill, I sailed cautiously back home. In my kitchen I stuffed the entrails with boar meat and thistle and cooked my first sausages in my cauldron, then chowed down—watching wide-eyed as my heath bar abruptly grew twice as tall as it had ever been. I had no idea I could be that strong. From then on, downing draugr was a snap and I never left home without a pocketful of sausages.

In Valheim, eating meals made from your enemies gives you the freedom to boldly tread in extremely dangerous places, and every new recipe unlocked is a chance to take on tougher challenges. Food is as important, if not more, than your armor, making your kitchen the mightiest crafting station in the game. In any forum post where a player complains that they keep getting their asses kicked, the first question Valheim veterans ask is always the same: "What are you eating?"

Where Valheim gives you a break in some aspects of survival—as important as food is, for example, you can never starve to death—it restricts you in other ways. Even when you build fast-travel portals around the world, letting you teleport to different biomes in an instant, you can't pass through them carrying precious metals like silver or iron (at least not until much later in the game).

I'm grateful for that restriction because it's led to so many great adventures. In co-op, we spent hours sailing our longboat across the ocean while battling sea serpents (their meat makes for a fantastic stew, btw), enduring blizzards as we fended off werewolves and ice-spitting drakes on a mountainside, all to mine silver from one of the biome's frozen peaks.

Then we loaded up as much ore as we could into a cart, had a chaotic time trying to safely steer it down the nearly-sheer side of the mountain while still intermittently battling monsters, transferred it all to our ship's hold and had a tense trip back across the stormy sea to our little island base. It's so much damn work, so much time and effort, just to gather a bit of silver, yet so incredibly satisfying to succeed. Enduring hardships is what survival games are all about, and even on a little resupply mission, Valheim always makes you feel like you've been through a major trial.

Norse north

And so five years after my journey in the Norse afterlife began, I finally sailed to Valheim's final biome, the deep north. My ship slowly smashed its way through ice floes as I noted the wreckage of dozens of similar Viking vessels, until I stepped onto the new continent, crossing slippery ice to stand waist deep in blinding white snow.

Truthfully, I found the deep north a bit disappointing at first, especially because there's a quite a bit there that feels like recycled material: more greydwarfs, those squat little dummies we've been mindlessly massacring since our starter biome, more narrow underground tunnel networks to fight through, and yet another iteration of the blob-type monsters that always felt like a placeholder for something better.

But there's also a rather surprising overland enemy that's genuinely exciting to see every time you fight it, some new underground structures that are shocking in their size and scope, and a new type of crafting bench that operates differently than the ones we're used to.

And I love (but won't spoil) the method of gaining access to Valheim's final boss. Talk about hardships to overcome: if I can cross mythologies for a moment, it's a Herculean task, as if Odin wants to be sure you've really mastered the world of Valheim before you do your final round of ass-kicking. I didn't particularly care for the final boss battle itself, but the journey to reach it was a real adventure.

Odinson

There are things I don't love about Valheim, like the swamp biome, where mining its precious iron requires spending ages in dank and cramped underground corridors smashing a pickaxe into a bland heap of metal, a task with zero enjoyment. I don't like the mistlands, either, one of the biomes added in early access, which combines the ickiness of the swamp with fog so thick that just walking around is a frustrating endeavor.

I'd also hoped certain elements of Valheim would have evolved alongside the survival genre it's been so inspiring to. Somehow, there's still no way to craft directly from storage chests, despite it being a pretty common feature in most survival games these days. And despite fans begging for years for armor to have dedicated equipment slots so it doesn't take up precious inventory space, that's still not a feature—though in 1.0 there is finally a way to increase the size of your inventory by a couple of rows, at least.

But my few complaints don't stack up to much. I love this game, and it's going to be one I return to again and again. Whether it's looking up during a terrible thunderstorm and spotting Thor speeding across the sky in his chariot, or seeing my health bar double because I've eaten a powerful new meal for the first time, or catching a glimpse of Odin's glowing eye watching me on a cold and gloomy night, these are moments that never lose their thrill. As familiar as the world of Valheim has gotten over the past five years, it's still filled with the same magic that enchanted me the first time I played it.

Like a lot of survival games, Stalker 2 had a long journey from janky larva to playable, easily recommended butterfly. It's tempting to say that these games ought to just stay under wraps until they're done and relatively bug-free—but at Gamescom 2026, GSC Game World CEO and head of game direction Ievgen Grygorovych told PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens that deciding when to release is a more complex consideration than you might think.

As for why the studio didn't just wait to release the game until it was in the state it is now, Grygorovych cited both creative and financial reasons. "To make something better, you need to receive feedback, and this feedback should be fresh. From a business perspective, it's also impossible, because it's very expensive to do two years of additional work … in most cases, it's unrealistic."

GSC Game World has more legitimate reasons than most to release an unfinished game. The Ukrainian studio was working on Stalker 2 when development was interrupted by Russia's invasion, forcing the team to move out of Kyiv, and its progress was later hamstrung by a devastating office fire and numerous leaks. And notably, the game's buggy release did arrive after delays—but regardless of all the unique trouble GSC Game World encountered, Grygorovych pointed to woeful market conditions across the board as another consideration.

"You have to always find the trade-offs that allow you to bring the best experience you can with what you have," he said. "It's always a balance because every developer would like to have an infinite amount of time, but the market around is awful: lots of layoffs, studios are closing. So actually, the market state is not very promising. We're just trying to find the best configuration we can."

Survival game The Long Dark was supposed to be over when its final story episode was released earlier this year. Developer Hinterland announced its sequel, Blackfrost, two years ago and planned to go the early access route with it just like the first game.

According to a new update from the studio, however, those plans have changed a little bit. While it continues to work on Blackfrost in the background, a small team of developers have been moved back onto The Long Dark to make new DLC for its survival mode. Hinterland hopes going back to the 9-year-old game will help it endure an "uncertain" industry.

"When we first announced Blackfrost, the sequel to The Long Dark, the game industry was in a very different place," it said. "In the short time since, entire business models have been thrown into chaos, the geopolitical situation has become extremely complicated, the picture of what the next generation of console hardware will be has become a lot less clear, and the amount of time and money players spend on new games has declined as everyone turns to the comfort and security of games they already know."

Over the next two years, the studio plans to continue updating the survival sandbox mode in the game with bug fixes, quality-of-life improvements, new features, and new regions from the final story episode. It's also going to release new DLC, one of which will come out piecemeal like its previous Tales From The Far Territory expansion pass. The second DLC "will be… different from that," it said, withholding info because it's still early in development.

Hinterland assured everyone Blackfrost is still in the works but said that its early access launch has been pushed to next year. The studio remains independent despite having publishers reach out to help with the sequel. "We've not yet encountered a partner who we feel is truly motivated by what's best for Hinterland or for our players, so we'll continue to self-fund and self-publish the game."

Hinterland said it's considering raising the price of the standalone Survival Mode as well as the new DLCs to help offset the loss from people buying them on sale. "We’re also mindful that the economic reality faced by a ton of folks today is that prices are increasing everywhere and you probably can’t really afford for games to get more expensive as well," it said. "We’re really trying to find a good balance here."

Given the flood of layoffs across the games industry in the last few years and the cost of hardware skyrocketing, I can see why an indie studio like Hinterland would go back to what works as people are forced to be more picky than ever about what they spend money on. It's already hard enough making a splash on the crowded pages of Steam when you release a new game. I just hope it works out and it can continue to make the sort of things it wants to without feeling anchored to its breakout release.

I've always wondered how I'd fare in a survival situation. Lost in the woods, with no food or water, how long would I last? Would I make good choices? Could I find my way back to safety?

The answers to those questions are almost certainly "Not long, no, and definitely not," and hopefully I'll never have to actually find out. In the meantime, I try to live out my survival fantasies through films and games, and Wordless Forest, which launched on Steam today, is sorta both.

Wordless Forest is an FMV survival game solo developer Dogus Cagrici shot while hiking in the "dense forests and wilderness of four different cities across Turkey for 40 days." It's completely dialogue-free (hence the title) as the character Cagrici plays finds himself alone in the wilds, trying to find his way to safety and put his scrambled memories back together after a head injury.

As the survivor attempts to make his way to a distant firewatch tower, you'll have to make choices for him. There's some food at an abandoned campsite that may be unsafe to eat: should you risk it? A dark cave might present some shelter but also be hiding danger: should you check it out? And maybe most importantly, your dog is missing: should you follow its footprints deeper into the wilderness, or focus on getting yourself to safety? The choices are presented on-screen as an either/or option, and clicking one will advance the story in that direction.

I see the early reviews on Steam are mixed, and I'm not that surprised. I played through Wordless Forest this morning, and it's not the most interactive adventure, really: over about 45 minutes of my runthrough there weren't a huge amount of choices to make, and I can imagine some players might find more of a short interactive movie than a game.

But despite the short running time and lean interactivity, I still found it pretty compelling. It's well-filmed, especially considering Cagrici did seemingly everything himself, including clambering up cliffs, crawling into caves, and even eating raw fish. You think a lot of survival game devs would subject themselves to that?

Most of all, I appreciate stories that can be told with minimal dialogue, especially survival stories. All Is Lost, the Robert Redford film about a man trying to survive at sea after his boat is damaged, is done with nearly no dialogue, and the best parts of Cast Away are done in near-silence, too.

I like that approach to storytelling. It's the extreme of the "show, don't tell" rule, and Wordless Forest does a good job pulling it off. You'll find it here on Steam, where it's 10% off for the next two weeks.

Last week, Pocketpair head of publishing and communications John "Bucky" Buckley addressed a bubbling conversation about the developer's Palworld collaboration strategy, informing players that they "simply do not realize the sheer number of collabs we’ve rejected or scrapped" over a perceived mismatch.

That exchange with the Palworld fanbase seems to have gotten the attention of No Man's Sky developer Hello Games, intensifying a flirtatious game of crossover footsie that's been ongoing between the two studios' public figureheads for months.

After noticing the discourse, Hello Games founder Sean Murray quoted a post discussing the issue to tag the Pocketpair comms head with an emphatic "Bro @Bucky_cm bro @Bucky_cm brooooooooooo ❤️."

It's the most Murray has acknowledged a will-they-won't-they romance arc that's gone on for over a year. While the two had previously been friendly on the platform, Buckley has repeatedly indicated Pocketpair's interest in a No Man's Sky collaboration on X after Murray professed adoration for the announcement of Palworld's Terraria crossover content in June 2025. In response to Murray's heart-eyes emoji, Buckley posted an all-caps "SEAN!"—which I think we can all agree was, at the very least, emotionally charged.

The tension simmered until April 2026, when the flirtation became more explicit. After Murray offered cryptic hints that No Man's Sky's was joining Palworld in the ranks of Pokémon-likes with its then-upcoming creature battling update, Buckley replied to urge the Hello Games head to "email me, my man," as "it seems there could be a FUN COLLAB IDEA."

As far as the X-going public can tell, that overture went unacknowledged. When Murray posted the full reveal for No Man's Sky's Xeno Arena update later that morning, Buckley put on a brave face. By which I mean he deployed another all-caps "S E A N" and posted a picture of that one silly prehistoric fish that looks so surprised.

While Hello Games would continue to celebrate Palworld's 1.0 release date announcement in June and its successful launch in July, Pocketpair's collab advances would remain unrequited—until the "bro's" Murray deployed earlier this week.

Since then, things have—impossibly—gotten cornier.

Replying to that long-awaited acknowledgment, Buckley quoted lyrics from Eminem's Stan, a song about an adoring fan who becomes progressively more unhinged, to say, "Dear @NoMansSky, I wrote you, but you still ain't callin'... I left my cell, my pager, and my home phone at the bottom… I sent two letters back in autumn, you must not've got 'em."

Murray continued in kind, quoting the song's closing lyrics: "Come to think about it, his name was… it was you," he posted. "Damn…"

Even if it's easy to imagine a fitting collaboration between the two games—a few Palworld-themed cosmetics or decorations in No Man's Sky, some No Man's Sky creatures in a collab-themed Palworld dungeon—I think I speak for all of us when I say: Get a room. Just let us know when you finally pull the trigger.

I'm not sure there's been a better invention for multiplayer games than proximity chat. Whether it be friends screaming vengeance down the side of a mountain after you abandon them in Peak, or the wails of one of your fellow workers fall suspiciously silent in Lethal Company. Proximity chat offers up fertile ground for hilariously wacky and memorable multiplayer moments, so you can imagine my excitement when I found out it's coming to Subnautica 2.

"This is going to let you have an in-game voice chat option that you can do with your friends," Anthony Gallegos, creative director, says in a dev diary. "You'll be able to talk locally with each other and then as you get further away you'll hear a switch to sort of a radio-sounding voice, and you'll progressively break up as you get further away, up until a certain point where you can almost not hear me at all."

Now, you can use your friends as a canary, sending them down into dark caves and listening to see if anything's amiss. At the very least, Gallegos believes it will "definitely add to the tension of" exploring the formidable alien ocean.

But that's not all being added to Subnautica 2 in its next update. The whole patch seems friend-focused. There's player emotes that will "let you roll through a bunch of different emotions, so you can cheer on your friends, clap at them to tell them that you're happy with them, or maybe that you're a little annoyed with them, and you can also show that you're frustrated.

"The thing that I think is the most exciting about these is actually the ways that people will use them out of context that I think will make for some really fun moments."

Players can also look forward to better inventory sharing, which means you won't have to go searching for discarded loot that your friends leave behind. Instead, all you have to do now is go up behind your pal and access their stash from their backpack—quick and efficient. Although, thieves-be-warned, "the person whose inventory is being accessed will get a little notification" so pickpocketing is out of the question, unless you have an especially unobservant friend.

The last major feature coming with 1.2 will be player revives. Now, if you're playing with a group and get lost, or get too hungry and pass out, your friends will have a short amount of time to swim over to you, share their oxygen, and revive you back to the world of the living. It's such a helpful feature that I'm honestly pretty surprised Subnautica 2 didn't have it before.

All in all, update 1.2 seems like a helpful pitstop on the way to more significant changes: "Alongside all of this we're continuing work on the Early Access 2 update that's going to add the new region with the new story, and the new progression, and the new vehicles, all those things."

Chromite isn't actually rare in Palworld, but you've got to have a specific tool (or pal) to mine it, which is different from most other resources. To save you from the guesswork, I'll show you how to use a metal detector to get Chromite initially and also a passive farming solution for bigger hauls so you're set up to make your first batch of Hexolite when you're ready.

Palworld Chromite location

The Metal Detector is easy to use and automatically scans the soil around you as you explore. If you use Smokie's partner skill you've got to spam it by pressing the E key while you walk around instead. When either method detects Chromite, a rocky node (highlighted by a blue beacon) sprouts from the ground. Harvest it with a pickaxe, just like you would any other ore.

Easy Chromite farm

Palworld went into full release in July after more than two years of early access, and it's going pretty well: A massive surge in concurrent players on Steam is slowly settling back down to Earth, but more than a month after that 1.0 launch it's still putting up numbers that haven't been seen since the early days of that early access rollout.

Work on the game continues and there's more to come, but Pocketpair's publishing and communications head John "Bucky" Buckley recently warned that players should maybe temper their expectations about what's next.

Buckley apparently set the bar higher than intended yesterday when he celebrated Palworld's "incredible" 1.0 launch by retweeting an image of a "Palworld v1.1 brainstorming session," adding, "time to get back to the grind!"

He also invited suggestions, and received more than 2,000 responses, some of them—like more storage slots—manageable, and others, like cross-server PvP or being able to play as pals, less so. Eventually, he was forced to pump the brakes on the whole thing.

"Shot myself in the foot here, 1.7k comments later, but things like 'add a new continent', 'add 20 more levels' and similarly massive undertakings are not really what we want to do with v1.1," Buckley wrote in a more recent message. "Open to ideas but, we’re not planning to spend a year making a massive update for 1.1."

Naturally, that didn't stop people from continuing to make unwieldy suggestions. Buckley made a trooper's effort to answer a lot of them: In response to a request for a "variant system" for pals, he said it wouldn't be difficult, "just exceptionally time consuming. A variant of 200+ pals would take a considerably long time to do. Realistically, a year or more unless we hyper focus it. Unless you don’t do it by hand and automate it somehow but…"

Replying to another user who asked why the process would be so time-consuming, Buckley wrote, "Because we would want to do it ourselves by hand rather than just automating it." (Pocketpair has been quite outspoken in its opposition to the use of generative AI in game development.)

Eventually, though—as it always does—it came to this:

Deeply relatable. There's no word on when Palworld 1.1 will be out at this point, or what will be in it, but Buckley also recently suggested that more collaborations are on the way, so at least you've got that to look forward to.

The crowning achievement of a game is no longer player count or Metacritic score, it's actually the number of collabs it can squeeze into its lifecycle—soon every game will collab with each other to make one giant game. I can see it coming.

Although that may not be the case for Palworld, even with its current collabs it won't just let any old IP work with the critters-with-guns survival game.

"If it really doesn’t make sense then obviously we would never go ahead with it," the head of publishing and communications, John 'Bucky' Buckley, recently revealed in a social media post (via GamesRadar). "You guys simply do not realize the sheer number of collabs we've rejected or scrapped for that reason."

All I can say to that is good—collabs for the sake of collabs suck. I'd much rather see games perfect and polish their own artistic vision than fill in the gaps with someone else's ideas. But even if there are going to be collabs the very least a game can do is take this same approach that Palworld seemingly stands by, with it being far more restrictive with what it lets in. Not everyone can be a Fortnite.

Some of the best collaborations Palworld has are those that slot into place almost seamlessly. Terraria is a good example of such with its creatures and items, like the legendary Meowmere, already looking like they could be found on the Palpagos Islands.

"I think the Terraria collab in Palworld was pretty great," Bucky adds. "Completely understand some people would prefer a more lore-first approach but we've been very open about our fun-first approach since day one!"

Even Palworld's UltraKill collab manages to make sense thanks to all the weapons which are already in the game. Armaments like the Marksman Revolver don't seem so unseemly when players have already had access to the makeshift shotgun or laser rifle in the game. So clearly whatever Pocketpair has on its checklist for collabs is working so far.

Terraria has a passionate and wide-spread modding community—and the jewel in its crown for many years was Calamity, a mod that was on a scope of an expansion pack, adding new bosses, weapons, and so on to the survival crafter. It's existed for 10 years, but it'll now be shutting down due to some heavy allegations levelled at the mod's currently absentee owner.

In an announcement currently posted to the mod's Discord server, the development team writes: "Hey, everybody. We've been having a lot of internal discussion, and after much debate, we've come to announce a very difficult decision: We will unfortunately be ceasing all development of Calamity."

The announcement goes on to state: "We’re sure most of you are aware of the troubled past of Calamity's development. At this point, many of us have felt personally betrayed time and time again after being promised something better that never ended up coming. We’re just tired at this point, and almost all passion we had for the mod has been soured, with many of us having chosen to leave as a consequence.

"Most of us want to simply move on and would be far happier working on our own projects that aren’t and won’t be tied to something with what we feel is an irrecoverably tainted reputation."

The tainted reputation in question includes allegations that Ozzatron, who was leading development over the mod, was heavily involved with—and permissive of—a NSFW server that knowingly included minors. Ozzatron took over the mod's development after Fabisol, its prior leader, was accused of similar grooming behaviour in 2022.

I won't go into every sordid detail (and this is certainly not the first controversy that has spawned from this development team), however, you can see a collection of evidence here, which lays out a grim pattern of misconduct—notably, when the server's existence leaked around 2020, those involved are accused of instating an 18+ rule without removing the underaged users who were already present within, even allegedly reinviting those minors who had left in a panic.

As a result, many who produced assets for the mod have requested their contributions be removed: "the lack of anybody to work on the mod, combined with the staggering amount of these we’ve received since, makes removing and replacing every single one functionally impossible. Ceasing development is frankly the closest thing we can do to fulfilling everybody’s requests."

Ozzatron themselves appears to be completely AWOL, as a follow-up message from yesterday reads: "Ozz has been totally uncommunicative for more than a day now about owed bounties for labor and what he intends to do with the several thousand in saved Patreon money.

"We have not been compensated for our labor, and due to this, we have strong reason to believe Ozzatron is currently combative with us and has no intention of compensating us for our work."

It's been close to three years since we saw the announcement teaser for Light No Fire, the next game from No Man's Sky developer Hello Games. Studio founder Sean Murray spoke to PC Gamer last week in conjunction with No Man's Sky's 10th anniversary, and I naturally had to ask if we might see more of Light No Fire before the end of the year.

Turns out, we almost got to see more of Light No Fire a couple of years ago at Summer Game Fest 2024, but the circumstances surrounding that first brief teaser changed Murray's mind.

"I did have a plan, and I thought, we'll tease it with 90 seconds, and then we'll show it again at [SGF], probably, and I had a much bigger thing that I wanted to show about the game to really explain what the game was," Murray said. "Because I don't think we necessarily have shown the vision or the ambition of the game, but I thought this will be a cool tease, and then we'll show some more."

The reason we didn't get more, somewhat ironically, is that everyone liked what they saw. Liked it a little too much, maybe.

"The reality is, it was incredibly popular," Murray said. "We just shot up like the Steam wish list charts. There's, like, 20 million views on that tease. We're the number two game on the [Steam] wishlist.

"All of that, and given our past, made us feel like, okay, we don't need to say anything more right now. And our attitude in general is to avoid saying anything to the press or outwardly unless we really, really need to, and sort of let the game do the talking."

While he won't show it to us yet, Murray told me he'd played Light No Fire earlier that day.

"What I'm looking at on screen is way, way beyond what any normal studio would have and not have shown more of it to the rest of the world," he said. "We're lucky from that point of view. We can kind of just keep [it] to ourselves, keep working on what we're enjoying, and not have to spend our time marketing and hyping and showing the game to people."

As for my original question, whether or not we might see some more of Light No Fire before the end of the year… well, the answer probably won't surprise you.

"I've learned the very, very hard way to not talk about anything ahead of time," Murray said. "And our attitude in general is to avoid saying anything to the press or outwardly unless we really, really need to."

It's hard to believe, travelers, but No Man's Sky has turned 10 years old. As part of the sprawling space sandbox's double-digit anniversary, Sean Murray took some time to talk to PC Gamer about No Man's Sky's decade of development, as well as the future of earth-sized multiplayer fantasy game Light No Fire. It was announced in December of 2023, but we haven't heard much about it since.

Looking back over the sheer number of free features that have been added to No Man's Sky over the years since it launched, I asked Murray if he anticipates that Light No Fire will be similar to No Man's Sky—in terms of how it was released as a sandbox with a core experience but had lots of major features added post-launch, many of them based on player requests.

"I think about this a lot," Murray said. "When we had been working on No Man's Sky and it had come out, and we were talking about what we were going to do next, one thing that rang true across the team was that they were saying 'What I really enjoy about No Man's Sky is that I can think of ideas, and they generally fit.' Especially if they are sci-fi related. So many sci-fi things can fit in the No Man's Sky universe, and it's this really broad canvas, and you can bring your imagination to it."

The team wanted the same sort of canvas, though based in fantasy instead of science-fiction, for their next game. "Something that is ambitious enough and broad enough that lots of ideas make sense there."

Murray mentioned a post-launch update, 2025's Voyagers, which added large multi-crew spaceships to No Man's Sky.

"That started as something on Light No Fire, where we were making ships that you could have as a crew and [use in] multiplayer, but they are their own physics world, and they can travel across oceans because we've got these huge oceans on Light No Fire," Murray said.

"And so we were like, 'Oh, well, that could work with No Man's Sky actually, and so we started working on the sort of spaceships that were buildable and that multiple crew could get inside of."

"So to answer your question, yeah absolutely," he said. "We feel that [Light No Fire is] a game that will fit with that way of making games, where you can think of a lot of ideas, and they would make sense, and we can feed off the community.

"Whether we'll be lucky enough to get to work on it for 10 years after launch, I don't know, but I'd like to," Murray said. "I've worked on it for seven years now, and I'm still really enjoying it."

Smartly Dressed Games, developer of the wildly popular free-to-play zombie survival sim Unturned, has released the game's source code for non-commercial use.

"Unturned's source code and project files are now freely available!" the developers wrote in a Steam post. "Whether you have a new feature or total conversion in mind, the sky's the limit."

The source code is available via GitHub. In an accompanying FAQ, Smartly Dressed Games explained that the reason behind the release is to further support the community's creative efforts.