Valheim is a survival/adventure game released into early access February 2, 2021. In it, players become the soul of a dead viking, tasked with defeating several bosses scattered around Valheim, one of several afterlives from Nordic mythology. Throughout the in-game world are several procedurally-generated biomes, which provide distinct difficulty increases for players to overcome before being able to (relatively) safely explore the next biome. Additionally, players are provided several systems to interact with, including base-building, combat, and cooking. If you ask me, the cooking and food system is one of the best parts of the game, if not one of the best iterations of that system in recent memory.
What is a cooking and food system?
Food is hardly a new concept in games. In many, many games, consuming food restores a set amount of the player’s health. Wheels of cheese, buns, and jars of milk all restore some amount of health when consumed in Skyrim, Gunfire Reborn, and Breath of the Wild, respectively. Breath of the Wild takes this system a step further by allowing players to combine certain foods through cooking in order to create dishes that restore more health and/or provide stronger, temporary buffs.
So, how does Valheim’s system work?
Valheim’s cooking and food system feels like it was grown from Breath of the Wild’s cooking. Raw ingredients, such as berries, meat, and carrots, can be obtained and consumed for a small benefit. Once the cauldron is unlocked, players can combine these ingredients into more complex dishes, each of which provides a more potent benefit.
Where Valheim’s food differs, is in the benefits it provides players. Players normally have a maximum of 25 health points (HP), and do not regenerate any health. In an open-world survival game that has fall damage, this is less than ideal. Eating food, whether it is basic ingredients or a multi-ingredient meal, increases players’ maximum HP and provides health regeneration. While berries (one of the first ingredients players can collect at the start of the game) provide +10 maximum HP and regenerate +1 HP/10 seconds, blood pudding (a very late-game, cookable meal) provides +90 maximum HP and regenerates +4 HP/10 seconds. Additionally, each of these munchables only provides their benefit for a limited amount of time, anywhere from 10 minutes to 40 minutes. Similarly, meals also provide additional maximum stamina, allowing players to attack, swim, and run more before becoming tired.
Why is it so good?
Each facet of Valheim’s cooking and food system is an important part of why the system works as well as it does:
Higher quality ingredients are found in higher difficulty biomes.
Players are limited in what they can eat.
The benefits provided by eating food are temporary.
Tackling danger
Games across a plethora of genres have tied higher quality loot to overcoming more challenging obstacles. In this regard, Valheim is no exception. Some cooking ingredients are acquired by defeating enemies native to the biomes, while others are simply found scattered around, waiting to be picked up. Regardless of how they are obtained, players must venture into biomes populated with dangerous enemies to collect their desired ingredients. By making sure players must risk their character’s well-being (and inventories, since items are dropped upon character death) to get higher quality ingredients, players are incentivized to carefully consider which meals to consume when venturing into potential danger.
Picky eating
Another trait of the food system is that players can not eat a meal if they are currently benefiting from that meal’s boons (i.e. a player cannot eat more blood pudding if they are currently benefiting from a previously consumed blood pudding). Additionally, players can not benefit from more than three meals at any time. This means that lower benefit foods still provide important bonuses once higher quality meals are available; weaker meals are still necessary to help keep players alive until they can acquire enough higher tier foods. This also forces players to carefully consider which foods to eat at any given time, since they can only benefit from 3 different bonuses at once.
Additionally, players must consider a balance of health and stamina. Players can consume foods that provide a high amount of bonus stamina, but doing so will leave them with a lower health pool and more vulnerable to attacks. Consuming food suddenly becomes an important, strategic decision, instead of a backpack full of oddly shaped health potions.
Coming back for more
The part of this system that ties everything together nicely is that the bonuses from consuming meals are always temporary. Immediately after eating, players benefit from the full stat increase the consumed meal provides. A few seconds later however, the provided bonuses begin to slowly decrease until they eventually disappear all together. This provides yet another strategic choice to make: do players consume three meals all at the same time to get a huge boost to their stats, or do they space out their eating to have a more consistent health and stamina pool.
Making the bonuses temporary is also a simple way to ensure players are not always at 100% strength. Giving players windows where they are weaker helps remind them that the world of Valheim is a hostile place and mandates respect. If players are not careful with their culinary decisions, enemies of past biomes and lower difficulty levels can suddenly pose a threat again. This helps keep the majority of the map interesting and engaging, even when players have progressed to more difficult biomes.
In conclusion
Valheim’s cooking and food system is one of the best I have encountered in games to date. Instead of food just being a sub-optimal way to heal my character, Valheim incorporates it as an essential way to help player characters survive its hostile world. On multiple occasions, I found myself leaving the shelter of my main base solely to scavenge for more ingredients to make the meals I had grown accustomed to having while out on an adventure. I also frequently found myself looking for new ingredients, as I was always looking forward to unlocking the next tier of recipes to bring into battle. I would love to see more games incorporate similar systems moving forward... because food can and should be so much more than a shitty health potion.
In the meantime, happy munching, and I’ll see you next week!
-Mark