Valheim, despite being a massive success with over 5 million copies sold, is still in early access for a reason. Developer Iron Gate still has a lot of work to do on the game as it needs some serious optimization and gameplay changes. Luckily, the game’s next patch takes a crack at both of those issues. Patch 0.146.8 for Valheim isn’t an enormous one, but it features some major changes, including the addition of Vulkan support and tweaks to multiple bosses.
Of all the changes listed in this patch, the addition of Vulkan support stands out the most. If you’re not familiar with Vulkan, it’s a graphics API that, simply put, will let your GPU perform just a bit better in-game. There’s no settings option for enabling Vulkan just yet though. Instead, players will have to add the line “-force-vulkan” as a launch option in Steam. You can find Valheim‘s launch options by right-clicking on the game in your Steam library then clicking on properties. The launch options section will be at the bottom of that pop-out window.
The second major part of the latest update to Valheim is easy to skip over in the patch notes. That being said, it could be the most gameplay-impacting change being made to the game. Three of Valheim‘s bosses, Bonemass, Moder, and Yagluth are having their difficulties tweaked. These tweaks will make the bosses a bit more challenging, because according to Iron Gate, “u guys are killing them too fast.”
Squashing more bugs, and not just Deathsquitos
Like any other patch, the latest one for Valheim also fixes some bugs. Player ragdolls have been fixed, along with a crafting item-dupe bug. Another bug that boosted ship speed thanks to harpooned players was quashed as well.
The largest bug fix this time around though should improve player’s connections to each other. Iron Gate has updated the socket backend of Valheim, which “should improve connection issues for a lot of players.”
