Valheim World-Destroyer Bug: What Is It and How To Avoid It

Valheim is a Viking survival game recently launched via Steam Early Access. Players control a fallen Viking warrior who is taken to a feral realm in the afterlife to rid the kingdom of monsters and beasts that freely roam its landscapes. They need to steadily amass resources to forge Valheim‘s best weapons and armor to stand a chance against these enemies. But something is running rampant throughout Valheim that is even more frightening than any of the bosses developer Iron Gate AB could throw at players: a game-breaking glitch known as Valheim‘s “world-destroyer bug.”

The bug has the potential to be devastating for anyone playing the Nordic survival game. It will delete players’ progress and characters entirely, forcing them to start anew, regardless of how far into Valheim‘s campaign they’ were. Co-op survival games like this can take weeks and even months to master. The world-destroyer bug could make all of that work disappear in an instant, which would be enough to get most players to quit Valheim altogether.

The game’s fatal flaw was only recently discovered, and Iron Gate has verified its existence. Little is known about what causes it, and it remains a danger in Valheim at the time of writing. Here’s everything players need to know about how Valheim‘s world-destroyer bug works, how to avoid it, and what Iron Gate is doing to fix it.

Valheim World-Destroyer Bug: How It Works

Iron Gate CEO Richard Svensson took to Twitter on February 12 to acknowledge the world-destroyer bug is real, cautioning fans to be wary with their saved data. He told players to back up their progress because “the evil world-destroyer bug is still roaming free,” as if it were one of Valheim‘s many bosses. Since then, neither Svensson nor Iron Gate has provided any updates on a potential fix, and that’s because the team is having a hard time understanding what causes it to begin with.

In the same Twitter thread, Svensson explained the dev has been struggling to narrow down what could be causing the bug. Iron Gate has been unable to recreate the issue, but Svensson suspects players who close Valheim using the Windows keyboard command, Alt+F4, could be susceptible to having their progress wiped. He urged users to avoid using the shortcut and quit out of the game manually instead, but is there a way to avoid the world-destroying bug completely?

Valheim World-Destroyer Bug: How To Avoid It

Unfortunately, due to the elusive nature of this glitch, Iron Gate and users alike have been unable to identify a surefire way to avoid the world-destroyer bug. That being said, players can take Svensson’s advice and leave the game by first opening its menu and then clicking Exit. That is only possible preventative, for now. Valheim users should also back up their game data to make sure it’s never in danger of being totally erased. Creating a backup of Valheim data can be done in a few simple steps:

1. Hold the Windows key and hit the R key to bring up the command prompt.
2. Type in “%appdata%” and hit Enter to continue.
3. Open the “AppData” folder displayed at the top of the search bar.
4. Click to open the “LocalLow” folder.
5. Click to open the “Iron Gate” folder.
6. Copy and paste the “Valheim” folder to the computer’s desktop or a separate file.
7. If victim to the world-destroyer bug, to delete the afflicted “Valheim” folder and replace it with the copied folder, then run the game.

Keep in mind this backup process will only save the data found in the “Valheim” folder at the moment it was duplicated. Valheim will not continuously save data onto the copied folder, so players will need to back up their game every time they’re done playing to make sure no progress is lost. If the world-destroyer bug hits a player during a game session they have not backed up yet, all of their progress from that session will be lost, and they’ll need to load their most recent backup if they don’t want to start fresh.

Valheim World-Destroyer Bug: When Will It Be Fixed?

Currently, Iron Gate has not provided a timeline for when Valheim‘s world-destroyer bug could be fixed. But despite the glitch’s “free roam” of the game at the moment, Svensson’s tweets should come as a reassurance that Iron Gate has prioritized developing a fix for it. This has been the only issue with Valheim that Svensson has ever publicly addressed online, suggesting it’s at the top of the developer’s mind and could easily be worked into one of the game’s upcoming updates.

Valheim is still exclusively available on Steam via Early Access, which means it is still a work in progress that Iron Gate is constantly improving. The developer rolled out a patch for its debut title on February 10, which improved its stealth combat and balanced a pesky enemy that had been giving players trouble. Since the game isn’t finalized yet, players should expect many more patches in the coming weeks and months until Valheim leaves Steam Early Access sometime in the future. Svensson will most likely notify his followers on Twitter once the world-destroyer bug has been resolved, based on how he’s handled the issue so far.

Iron Gate’s project is still in its fledgling period, and hiccups like the world-destroyer bug are a natural part of bringing Valheim‘s procedurally generated worlds to life. The game was released early to more than one million fans, many of whom have provided constructive criticism for the devs, so there wasn’t an expectation of perfection from the start. Still, it’s unfortunate that such a time-consuming game might inadvertently delete players’ progress. Until a fix has been uploaded, players will need to venture forth in Valheim with caution.

Source: Richard Svensson/Twtiter