5 Valheim Buildings That Put Form Over Function

Looking for some Valheim building ideas? There's a lot of freedom to make what you want, but sometimes you need a little inspiration. That's why we've put together five Valheim buildings that are all about looking cool!

Building the Tallest Valheim Buildings Can Be Fun

Let's kick off this list of cool Valheim buildings with the obvious choice: building really big. Or, to be more specific, building really tall.

Building in Valheim is not quite like Minecraft—everything you make has structural integrity. Build too tall, and your building will start to collapse. An enemy (or your incompetence) destroying critical supporting walls can also cause it to collapse. Buildings can fall apart pretty easily if you're not careful.

So how do you make a tall building? Well, the solution is all around you—the stone pillars in the Plains (seen in the above example) or the really tall trees of the Black Forest can be used to reinforce a pretty darn tall building. There's just one catch: If the supporting object is destroyed, your whole building can come down with it.

The Lonely Island

Valheim's Ocean biome is devoid of anything interesting at the moment. There's water, the occasional Kraken or Sea Serpent, and not much else. Every now and again, however, you might come across a small island—and that provides an opportunity.

Technically, these islands are not in the Ocean biome; they're actually a very small part of another biome. That doesn't mean you can't build on them, though! There's something special about having a castle quite literally out in the middle of nowhere.

Aside from the challenge of getting all of the necessary materials out there—I'd recommend a Longboat—you'll have another big problem: flooding. When a storm gets going, the ocean goes up and down. This is one of those Valheim buildings where you're not gonna want to use your first floor (unless you like being underwater).

A Monument to Victory

One of my favorite Valheim buildings is all about dunking on your enemies. The boss fights in this game can be particularly challenging, and defeating one of these monstrosities is cause for celebration, is it not?

Well, what better way to celebrate than turning the defunct boss altar into your new home? Boss altars technically "float"—you could dig out all of the ground underneath them and build right underneath it (The Elder's boss altar is particularly good for this). You can build on top of it, too (or heck, you can do both as I did here!).

As with most of these designs, it's not very practical. You're going to have a challenging time building around and through objects that you can't really destroy. Some of the cooler boss altars might be in especially hostile areas.

And then there's the biggest challenge of all: once you actually build a base here, you probably aren't going to want to summon a boss from that location again. Odds are, they'll smash your base to bits. You're not safe with Stone buildings, either—both Moder (the fourth boss) and Yagluth (the fifth boss) can reduce Stone structures to dust with minimal effort.

You Can Build Underground, Too (Kinda)

The Valheim buildings on boss altars are one of the very few ways you can build underground. They're not the only way, though.

You may have noticed that some objects (such as trees) will fall down to ground level if you dig out the ground underneath them. Not everything does that, though—aside from the aforementioned boss altars, the big rocks in the Black Forest and Mountains biomes won't move, either. That means you can dig out a space underneath them and build an "underground" base.

Building such a base in the Black Forest can be cool, but why not go for the full dwarven experience and build in the Mountains? The downside is that there's an equal amount of hazard in both cases — Trolls and Stone Golems alike will do a hefty amount of damage to your underground bunker. Make sure to keep your eyes and ears open!

This Floating Valheim Building is a Game-Changer

And now, we get down to one of the coolest Valheim buildings of all: the floating Valheim building. This isn't a glitch — you can do this by exploiting the way the game's mechanics work. If you really want to get impressive, you could always cheat.

Let's start with the more honest way of building—as I've already said, certain objects such as boss altars and the big rocks won't sink down to the ground if you dig out underneath them. You could go to the Black Forest, Mountains, or Plains biome, dig out all of the ground underneath one of those big rocks, and put your building on top.

If you'd like to be a little more ambitious, you could always cheat. First, you'll have to enable the Valheim console before starting the game. After that, you need to do the following steps:

1. Bring up the console with F5.
2. Type in "devcommands" to enable cheats in-game.
3. Type in "debugmode" to turn on Debug Mode.
4. (Optional) Type in "god" to make yourself invincible (in case you accidentally fall).
5. (Optional) Type in "ghost" to make enemies ignore you.
6. Press Z to toggle on flight.
7. Fly up into the sky where you'd like to build your floating castle.
8. Type "spawn rock1_mountain" to make a giant rock appear right in front of you.
9. Build on top of the rock.

It's that easy! You could even spawn a bunch of rocks right next to one another and build as large as you'd like to. As with many of these other structures, though, you'll have to be careful—accidentally break part of the rock that's supporting your new floating base and the whole thing can come crashing down!