What happens when 50 howling wolves battle Valheim's final boss?

You can tame and breed wolves in Viking survival game Valheim, and unlike tamed boars, wolves actually follow you around. They'll loyally fight your enemies, too, and quite effectively—a two-star wolf can make quite a mess of Valheim's first boss, Eikthyr, or so I've heard.

But how would a wolf fare in the battle against Valheim's final boss? And what if that wolf had 49 additional howling wolves at its side? One player decided to find out and it's quite a glorious scene.

Over on Reddit, WoodDivision5 has been busy breeding wolves and (somehow) coping with the near-constant howling that has driven many of Valheim's wolf-breeders 'round the bend. (Seriously, wolves. You've gotta give the howling a rest.) Starting with a pair of two-star wolves, WoodDivision5 bred 48 more of them and then led the fuzzy army over to Valheim's final boss, Yagluth, for a fight. And here it is:

Follow up to my Wolf breeding post, I decided to take them to Yagluth...again. Solo this time. Yagluth VS ~50 2 star wolves. from r/valheim

I have not gone up against Yagluth, myself yet, but this makes the giant glowing skeleton look like a bit of a joke. By my count, the battle lasts a total of 11 seconds. Yagluth's massive health bar appears after he's been summoned—and it's already missing a notch on the end due to the incredibly eager wolves who simply cannot wait to take a bite out of him.

And then they just utterly shred Yagluth. Within about six seconds he loses half his HP. In the middle of the mob, the skeletal giant slowly lifts one massive bony hand to launch its first attack, and... it's all over. Death by wolves. A lot of wolves. What a pack of good dogs! Odin would be proud, and possibly even a little bit horrified. "I said destroy my enemies, but that... that was just brutal."

So, how do you breed so many wolves? WoodDivision5 says they used a version of the "boar machine" breeding tower that you can see one version of in this video. Essentially, two boars (or wolves) are trapped in a small chamber at the top of a tower where food can easily be dispensed. Fed animals are happy, and happy animals breed, and when the baby animals are born they fall through a gap in the floor and into a collection pen below. This will keep the pair up top breeding continuously, because breeding will only stop if there are too many adults in one area.

As for transporting 50 wolves from the mountains to the plains, you can forget about trying to get them all onto a ship. WoodDivision5 says they instead took a pair of wolves (one at a time by boat) and put them in a breeding tower built on the Plains near Yagluth's summoning altar.

None of the wolves were even killed in the fight, though two died to a deathsquito en route to the showdown. After the battle, WoodDivision says the wolves were given their freedom, both due to the massive fps hits that comes with having that many wolves in one spot, and "the slow insanity I was being pushed into with the howls." Understandable. They are good dogs, but noisy ones.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.