Valheim speedrunner becomes the vegan viking king

Youtuber NickRawcliffe loves a Valheim challenge—this is the man who did the world-first takedown of all bosses in reverse order, as well as managing to kill all five bosses in 90 minutes. So he decided to really challenge himself, by trying to beat the game using a vegan ruleset.

"So no animal food products but also no using or crafting and items that use hide etc. so basically no weapons plus no boats portals etc," writes Rawcliffe. In Valheim terms this is about as big as challenges get: The game's survival mechanics are basically constructed around butchering animals endlessly. I'm not sure what the equivalent in other games would be, but this is extreme survival.

Unsurprisingly, Rawcliffe runs into endless obstacles—the above video is fairly substantial, but also a supercut of many hours of streaming the challenge live (all of which is archived if you're vegan-mad). "This one almost beat me," writes Rawcliffe. "It took 15 days of gameplay, several days of planning and almost 3 weeks to sift through all the footage." The long and short however is that Rawcliffe bashes his head against this rock enough times that the rock shatters, and he becomes the king of vegan vikings.

It's so impressive that Robin Eyre of Iron Gate Studios popped into the comments to say this "was a very interesting and eye opening challenge, very informative! Job well done!"

Valheim is one of 2021's breakout hits, and has been so successful it's guaranteed support for years to come. The developers have already teased new biomes that will arrive in 2022, and it's also possibly getting new difficulty modes. As the vegan challenge shows, however, you can always make it difficult for yourself.

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."