How to Install Valheim and Join a Server

The first troll that finds your house does not open the door. It swings a tree at the wall, and the wall stops being a wall, and then the roof falls in because you built it out of wood and gravity in this game is not decorative.

Valheim is a Norse survival game about that gap — between what you have built and what the next biome is going to do to it. It sold an absurd number of copies in its first month, then settled into a long life as the game a group of four friends returns to every time an update lands.

Listings collect on the Valheim hub, and the way servers work here is genuinely unusual, so it is worth understanding before you set anything up.

Your character is yours, the world is not

This is the mechanic that separates Valheim from every other survival game on this site.

Your character — its skills, its inventory, everything it is carrying — is saved on your own machine, separately from any world. Worlds are saved separately again, on whoever is hosting them.

That means your character can walk out of one server and into another with everything they own. Join a friend's world with your fully equipped Viking, help them fight a boss, and take your gear home. There is no per-server character, no starting from nothing, no progress trapped somewhere you no longer play.

It also means a very specific piece of server etiquette. Bringing late-game equipment into a world where everyone else is on their first boss ruins that world, and a lot of community servers have a rule against it. If you are joining someone else's ongoing game, ask before you turn up in the good armour, and be prepared to make a fresh character.

What you need

Valheim is a paid game on Steam and on the Microsoft store, and it is remarkably small — this is a game that fits in the space a modern shooter uses for one language pack. It also runs on hardware that has no business running anything from this decade.

Signing up takes a few minutes and our Steam guide walks through it.

Crossplay exists between the storefronts, which matters if your group is split across PC and Xbox. It is a setting rather than automatic, and it changes how you share access to a world — see below.

The three ways to play with people

Host from your own game. When you start or load a world, there is an option to open it to others. Your machine becomes the server while you play. It is the least effort and it has the obvious problem: the world only exists while you are in it.

Run the dedicated server. Iron Gate publish a free server program alongside the game — a separate item in your Steam library, under tools rather than games. It runs headless, holds the world, and stays up whether or not anyone is playing. This is what you want if more than two people care about the base.

Join someone else's. Which is the rest of this article.

The password rules that catch everyone

Any Valheim server you can join needs a password, and the game is fussy about it in ways the error message explains badly.

It has to be a few characters long — a one-character password is rejected. And it cannot simply be the server's own name or contain it, which is a deliberate anti-lazy-host measure and which surprises people setting up a server for the first time.

If your host cannot work out why their server will not start, this is the reason roughly half the time.

Joining a server

From the main menu, choose your character, and you are given a list of tabs.

Community servers are the ones where the host ticked a box to publish them. They appear in a browsable list, they can be filtered, and they are how you find a public world with strangers on it.

Favourites is the tab you will actually use, and adding to it is the single most useful habit in this game.

Join by address is the direct route. Enter the address and the port the host gave you. That port matters — Valheim's dedicated server uses a small range of consecutive numbers rather than one, and the number you type in the game is not always the one that appears in a hosting control panel. If a connection fails with what looks like a correct address, the port is the first thing to check with your host.

A join code is the crossplay route. Where crossplay is enabled, a host can share a short code instead of an address, and anyone on any supported platform can use it. This is by far the easiest way to get a friend on a console into your world, and it avoids the whole port conversation.

Whichever route you use, you will be asked for the world's password before you get in.

Then favourite it. Valheim populations are small groups on private worlds rather than large public servers, and the address you need is the same one every time.

What the game will do to you, in order

The progression is gated by bosses, and each biome is meaningfully harder than the last.

Meadows is gentle and where you build your first hut. Black Forest has trolls in it, which is where the wall-swinging happens, and it is where the game first tells you that running away is a legitimate tactic.

Swamp is the difficulty spike everyone remembers. Dark, wet, full of things that poison you, and containing the crypts you need to enter for the material that gates the rest of the game.

Mountains are cold enough to kill you without protection, which is a mechanic rather than a warning. Plains contains an enemy that will end a well-equipped Viking in two hits and is the reason experienced players still approach it carefully.

Mistlands turned the lights out and added verticality. Ashlands turned the heat up. The biome after those was the last one on the roadmap, and whether it has arrived depends on when you read this.

Each boss drops a power you can carry and activate — a stamina boost, a resistance, a reduction in weight — and the good ones are game-changing enough that switching between them is part of preparing for an outing.

Portals, ore, and the reason boats matter

The rule that shapes every group's logistics: portals will not carry metal.

You can build linked portal pairs and step between them instantly, which makes the map feel small and makes a shared base practical. Ore and ingots are the exception. They have to travel the long way, by cart or by boat, which turns every mining expedition into an actual operation with a return journey attached.

This is why Valheim has sailing at all, and why a group's first longship is a bigger moment than most of the bosses. Wind direction is modelled, so you tack rather than pointing at your destination, and the open sea contains things that will come up underneath you.

Some servers change this. There is a setting that lets ore through portals, and groups who have done the sailing once and found it tedious frequently turn it on. Ask before you plan a trip around it. Turning it off partway through a world is a decision the whole group should be in on, because it silently changes where it makes sense to build.

Three things the game does not explain

Food is not healing. Eating raises your maximum health and stamina for a while rather than restoring them. Three different foods at once, kept topped up, is the difference between surviving the Swamp and not. Almost everyone gets this wrong for their first ten hours.

Buildings need support. The game models structural integrity — pieces further from the ground are weaker, and a roof with nothing under it collapses. Core wood beams carry weight further than plain wood. If a build keeps falling down, that is why.

Skills drop when you die. Every skill levels with use and takes a hit on death, which means dying repeatedly compounds. It also means your character is genuinely worse after a bad night, and there is no way to buy that back.

Running one for your group

The dedicated server is the right answer for a group of more than two, and the setup is not hard.

Install the server tool from your Steam library, configure the world name, server name and password, and start it. It has no interface — it prints text and holds a world. Back up the world file, because a factory game and a survival game have the same failure mode: hundreds of hours in one file that nobody thought to copy.

If you would rather rent than run something at home, the practical questions are in what game server hosting costs and where to host by region. Valheim is unusually light — the player counts involved are small, and it does not want the resources a big multiplayer game does. Our note on how many slots a server should have applies here in reverse: the temptation is to over-provision for a game that will never have more than eight people on it.

One quiet detail worth knowing: map exploration is per-character, not shared. If you want everyone to see the same discovered map, the cartography table is the building that does it, and a group that does not build one will spend weeks describing directions to each other.

Problems

"Incorrect password" with the correct password. Check for a leading space and check that the host has not restarted the server with a different one. Also confirm you are joining the right world — a host with two worlds can easily be running the other.

Cannot connect by address. Port first, then whether the machine is reachable from outside its own network. Those two account for almost everything.

The server is up but not in the community list. The host did not tick the community server box. Join by address instead.

Everything is dark and you cannot see. Valheim is genuinely dark at night and the brightness setting exists for a reason. Also, carry a torch.

Your base is a ruin. Something attacked it while you were away, or it collapsed under its own weight. Both happen and both are fixable, which is more than can be said for most survival games.

If you finish it

V Rising is the closest thing in feel — the same building-and-boss structure from an overhead view, with actual raiding if you want it. Enshrouded took Valheim's shape and put a much larger building system in it.

Sons of the Forest is the horror-flavoured co-op version, 7 Days to Die adds a scheduled siege every week that is the best argument for building properly, and Core Keeper does the same progression underground and in two dimensions.

For something that will hurt you considerably more, Project Zomboid is the survival game where the trolls are already inside the house.

<!-- joingg-footer -->

---

JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Valheim servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.