6 Essential Valheim Buildings Everyone Should Have

There are countless images of Valheim buildings out there in the world, but there are also many useful structures that are overlooked—and some are as essential to your survival as a good home.

Valheim is all about defeating Odin's enemies in the Viking equivalent of purgatory. You're going to need to properly prepare for battle, and that means you'll need a safe place to do it. Buildings are essential to beating the game's many bosses, but they can be used for more things than protecting your bed—here are five essential Valheim buildings that everyone should have!

Bridges, Bridges Everywhere

The first of the Valheim buildings we're highlighting also happens to be the one you probably need the most: bridges.

At some point in the game, you've surely crossed a river or had to run through a canyon, draining your Stamina and adding to your frustration. Building bridges doesn't just help with saving Stamina, mind; it can be awfully challenging to get a Cart over a cliff or through a river. Bridges make crossing difficult terrain much easier and you should build one wherever you think it would help.

Making a good bridge can be challenging for a new player, especially without access to Stone buildings. Worry not—you can get Core Wood in the Black Forest to make some larger structures than you could with regular Wood. If a gap is especially deep, you could always use the Hoe to raise up the land underneath the bridge and make it structurally stronger.

A Portal Room

Your first Portal probably goes to some faraway place. Your second Portal does, too. By the time you get to your third Portal, you might be thinking that you should have a centralized place for them.

Building a Portal room (or a Portal tower, or whatever structure you might want to make) is a good idea for several reasons. To start, it can be used as a centralized resting spot—plop down a bed, a fire, and some decorations, and you can rest for a brief moment to boost up your Comfort score.

There's another consideration, too; these Valheim buildings might put a hurting on your frame rate. Valheim is an Early Access game and it's not as well-optimized as it should be, so make sure to build your Portal room far away from your base. It will add maybe 30 seconds to your travel time, but fewer buildings at your home will probably help make your frame rate higher.

Logcatchers

"Logcatchers" are something that I haven't really seen very many people use, but it immediately came to mind when I saw a log roll down a hill and stop on a tree.

Anyone who has played Valheim for a few hours has probably chopped down a tree, watched it fall down a hill, and roll into the ocean. Now you have to swim out there and try to bring it closer to land so you can actually get the wood out of it. Or heck, maybe it just annoyed you by rolling down the side of a mountain, forcing you to make a stupidly long hike.

This is a very solvable problem: plop some wood sticks into the ground (or any building, really) in a line like you see in the image above. The days of those troublesome logs rolling off a cliff are over! Best of all, you can pick them all back up once the area is cleared of trees and recoup the materials, too.

A Storehouse

Games like Valheim have two kinds of people: those of us who carefully organized things into labeled chests and the savage, uncivilized animals who just throw junk into whatever random chest has space.

Building a proper storehouse (or a dedicated storage area in your home) makes your life so much easier. I know what I have and what I need with just a minute of poking into the relevant chests rather than 10+ minutes of digging through various detritus. There are tons of great designs you can find online, or you can just build a simple rack of shelves like I have.

A Dock (or a Boathouse)

Valheim's boats are a bit janky. Whether you're using a Raft or a higher-tier boat like a Karve or Longboat, it's not a bad idea to have a place to put it in your base. There are, however, some caveats.

This is one of the Valheim buildings that isn't going to get as much use as you'd think. You see, Valheim is still very much in Early Access, and players continue to report their docked boats being destroyed. It could be enemies, it could be a physics bug, or it could be some other problem entirely. No matter how you cut it, your boat will probably be destroyed if you don't check on it regularly.

I personally destroy a boat when I'm done with it and recoup the materials. A dock can make that easy, especially if you raise up the ground or build a floor underneath—you don't want to have to go diving underwater every time you dismantle your boat.

There's also the matter of transportation. Boats are commonly used to transport ore since it won't go through Portals. Building a dock or a boathouse can make it much easier to pull a Cart right up to your boat and unload it much faster.

A Garbage Dump

Believe it or not, there's not actually any way to destroy items in Valheim. I would have about a hundred deer trophies on my single-player file if it weren't for the fact that I throw them by the side of the road whenever I pick them up.

However, there are still some issues. Logging out and logging back in can apparently "reset" the items you've dropped and you'll pick them up again. Clearly you need somewhere to put them, so why not build a garbage dump?

In the above picture, I've built a simple pyramid composed of 45-degree Roofs. A set of Ladders gives me access to a hole on the top and a Gate gives me access to the underside. This allows me to drop items into the pyramid without risk of picking them up, but I can also head inside if I accidentally drop something that I need to recover.

As best as I can tell, the current knowledge states that items will not despawn (or are less likely to despawn) if they're near a Workbench, Bed, or Campfire. Take a Workbench a good distance from your base, build something like this, and then destroy the Workbench—you should then have a convenient place to dispose of all of your unwanted junk.