Valheim: Building System Guide

I see a lot of people complaining about how difficult Valaheim’s building system is. As a long time builder, I can tell you this is certainly not the worst system. (I still have nightmares about City of Villains base building….) The game gives you plenty of direction. Much more so than most popular games like Ark/Atlas where things just won’t snap where you need them.

You just need to know what the system is telling you.

Valheim depends on a stability system.Anything in blue is fully grounded. Anything in green is properly supported. Followed by yellow, orange and red to tell you if a piece can be supported or not. If a piece is red, any piece placed beyond that will break off and fall.

Use short poles to get your building grounded. The yellow box surrounding your cursor will give you a guide on where the piece snaps. In this case, it is snapping to the side of the pole.


The ground poles are more tricky. They will snap above and below. Watch your yellow box to get to the spot on the ground to get it to snap to the pole above it.

With a foundation in place, it is much easier to place the floor down.

Floors can be tricky once you are away from the foundation. Try to place a line of floor going out so you have an easier time snapping the floors to the little planks underneath.

This floor piece is orange. It is unsupported, floating.

Put a pole underneath and the supports turn green.

Bottom walls are simple. Just remember to watch for where your yellow cursor box is. 

Walls generally do a good job snapping on top of one another if you can pixel your way to the very top of the bottom wall. Once one is up, use that one wall and snap to the side of that wall for a much easier time placing.

This one isn’t snapping. 3 walls is too high for you to snap to the top of the piece.

The solution is to just use ladders. You get all the materials back for everything placed, so scaffold all you want!

Just like with floors, there is a little plank on the roofs that makes chaining them much easier.

This roof is getting close to being unsupported. Let’s use supports.

Before placing

After

You can get a really high roof by being mindful of supports and your well-lit snap points.

I hope this helps someone understand the build system in Valheim.