Valheim’s 1.0 update brought in new discoveries, zones, and also a new way to upgrade gear. But recent patch changes and player response has alerted everyone to the annoyances inherent within it.
The Forge of Destruction
The Forge of Potential system allows Vikings to upgrade their armor & weapons utilizing the new Idols items that are hidden throughout each biome. While the concept seems straight forward and interesting – the actuality is anything but frustrating. This has caused players to find workarounds to make it easier on themselves.
In order for an item to be eligible to be upgraded, it must already be upgraded to max level through it’s respective crafting bench (usually around 4)- and when trying to upgrade it further using the forge, there is a chance to fail. However the failure comes at a great cost – the item is lost and only 50% of the resources are returned. Of the BASE item – not including your upgrades!
And the max % of success is 65% with no way to increase this – which means a 35% chance of pure destruction and sadness.
I think Cohh said it best – it feels so out of place within the game itself which is fairly approachable for gamers of any level. Of course you could just ignore the Forge altogether – as it’s not truly necessary to progress. However with achievements tied into it, it feels like something that the Devs are encouraging us to try out.
While I’m in Plains of my current 1.0 play-through – we found the Forge just a hill away from our Moder altar. At the time, I had no fully upgraded gear or idols to try it out – but hearing about the system also didn’t encourage me to really look further into it or even be excited about. So I was surprised when the latest Valheim 1.0.20 patch – had a new patch note for the Forge.
– *Fixed a possible exploit to Forge of Potential
Within hours across social media, and Reddit, everyone was up in arms about the removal of “save scumming” – where upon a failure you would reload your save and simply try again. Save when successful, and try again when you aren’t.
Is Save Scumming a Viable Strategy?
Save scumming in games is not terribly uncommon – where you may be able to reload a character, the whole game, or a map and taking advantage of not saving the progress where things may have gone wrong, usually due to RNG. As a Fate: Grand Order player of 9 years myself, I am not new to this concept. In that game, you can force close the game and reload in order to reset your current battle turn – which is a viable strategy on very difficult fights. Is it okay to do? Yeah sure, why not. It’s a single player game and maybe I don’t want to take another 10 turns to try and recover my mistakes. Or risk starting over completely and wasting my time – and also my AP – game energy for the node that is used for most battles.
Is it viable in other games? I mean, sure – why not? There are tons of comments and debates on whether save scumming is A-OK – but at the end of the day, it’s you deciding what’s fun or not when progressing.
The main point of gaming is to have fun. And if defeating challenge content is not interesting to you – then sure – you may employ these types of strategies to push through.
However in this case, IronGate decided that this was Not Okay and removed the ability to save scum your way to victory.
Tons of players have been writing up entire thesis-level of suggestions/opinions on how the system can be reworked. Nobody enjoys losing their earned gear or items – especially when it’s a harsh resource sink.
Everyone hating Hollgrehenn for decades in Ragnarok Online can attest to that. Since the original RO days, upgrading gear had the risk of failure and complete deletion of an item. No refunds! To be fair, when you did achieve that coveted SUCCESS! sign it was definitely extremely thrilling. And in the recent mobile iterations of RO – including titles like Ragnarok Mobile and Ragnarok Online Origin – achieving +15 across your equipment is definitely very rewarding, but at the complete cost of your zeny and sanity in most cases.
A system like this definitely feels out of place for a game like Valheim however – in other games like RO where you have an entire player economy due to being an MMORPG, it’s possible to save up tons of zeny to simply purchase the upgraded gear from another player. Or you can farm materials together with friends through endlessly spawning monsters, could even simply buy the resources off other players to create the item again. But in Valheim, while can be played as multiplayer, it doesn’t have these same social systems to support the major loss of resources in my opinion. Especially when the resources themselves can be quite limited – if we even just take into account the Idols themselves needed for these upgrades, they can only be found by exploration. And I have to wonder: What is a worlds max amount of idols per biome? Per World?
It would make sense to lose the Idol – sure – but is failure of upgrading worth complete demolition of the item in an atmospheric survival game? Losing all resources related to it as well? (Gaining back only 50% of the base item is really not much for more endgame items from my experience – I can’t even imagine losing so many iron bars would let you sleep soundly at night.)
With the removal of Save Scumming to upgrade – players hit Reddit and social media to vent and share new ideas. But someone went even further to investigate if there was another way – and boy did they find one.
Clever Use of Game Mechanics
One could say that this IS just an exploit, or simply a clever use of game mechanics. No matter the opinion, it still leaves a lot of questions on how this system was truly supposed to work and feel satisfying in the first place.
According to @Melichorak on reddit – after digging through the code itself, they have figured out that successful upgrades are linked to the game character – specifically their Name.
Using this information, Melichorak was able to build a web tool that can help out other Vikings upgrade their gear. Not only that, but they figured out that you can even “Plan Out” an entire army of Vikings to reach your intended max upgrade.
This is a really great example of how coded RNG is not always true RNG – an actual throw up into the air dice roll – games can utilize all kinds of systems or data in order to generate results. Most commonly using pseudorandom number generators, they can generate results while still being tied straight into their game code.
“Games typically use algorithms that produce sequences of numbers that appear random. These systems can start from a seed, which helps determine the resulting sequence. Video game RNG works with pseudorandomness, not pure randomness. That is because there is a computer algorithm programmed to determine the result. When you are talking about true randomness, it means anything can happen. Nothing is impacting the result in any way.”
Source: https://umgamer.com/en-us/articles/how-rng-works-behind-the-scenes-in-modern-video-games
Are players now full on cheating the systems put in place? Or simply trying to find an easier way to deal with a game system no one expected or asked for in the first place?
Do Games Devs Hate Their Players?
Across Valheim’s development time to 1.0 there’s been much criticism of how they handle common complaints. A primary one, limited Inventory space, has been something they had double downed on repeatedly. In 1.0 it was a nice surprise that expanded slots options were finally added with game progression through bosses – but it was a true dice roll if they were ever going to relent on this. Even still – player equipment still takes up to 4-5 slots of space alongside trinkets and curios for exploration.
Common issues with lack of Quality of Life options has drawn ire and frustration, and what is seemingly passive aggressive responses to players. I was actually pretty annoyed when realizing I wasn’t earning any steam achievements or progress to them – just because Hubby and I wanted a few Quality of Life mods to make our play-through easier on ourselves. Prior to 1.0, I had already clocked in around 600 hours of playtime – reaching Ashlands endgame twice on different maps. Stoking coal in the smelters is just not that interesting – someone has to say it! I honestly think it’s fine, but I think I have also earned the ability to move past it.
When adding the command to allow players to earn achievements; “yesiuseddevcommandsbutiwantmyachievementsanyway” even WITH full on “cheating commands” (which if they didn’t want to allow mods or a console / devcommands in the first place, then they should have updated their TOS and client years ago…) – I think reddit user @blastcat4 said it best.
It just comes across so antagonistic when Developers just seem to be so stubborn that the audience does not appreciate ~Their Vision~.
Will They Change It Again?
It’s really hard to say if they will bother to change it again or leave it as is. As I mentioned earlier, I had no idea save scumming was even happening in the first place until they removed it. I honestly feel that one little patch note has placed a Spotlight on the Forge of Potential issues that were always there to begin with. It’s becoming an entire Streisand Effect if you ask me – now I know about what players were doing. And now I’m keeping up with what players are finding out to overcome this new system. Even if it is just for the free entertainment.
It would be wise for them to acknowledge why it’s so frustrating and try and reduce that feeling altogether so players don’t feel like they need to jump through inane hoops to upgrade their items if they so wish.
Because RNG systems can be fun – but the Forge of Potential ain’t one of them.
