Valheim 1.0 Achievements — How They Work and What to Watch Out For

How achievements work in 1.0

Valheim ships its first full achievement system with the 1.0 release: 53 achievements in total, 17 of them hidden. They range from simple early-game milestones (building a house, surviving 30 days) to large challenges that require defeating every boss on Hard difficulty, crafting or gathering in bulk, and exploring without a map.

A few important rules to know up front:

• Tracking starts at 1.0. The counters only began counting once you install the 1.0 client. Progress you completed in Early Access (e.g. an Eikthyr you killed last year) does not count toward the achievements — you need a fresh kill on 1.0.
• Devcommands can lock achievements — and the way they lock matters. Most developer commands (the item-spawning ones in particular) mark your character or world as “cheated” and block normal achievements. According to Iron Gate’s 1.0 FAQ, the mechanics work like this:
  • Spawning an item stamps it with a “cheated” flag. If a player who has not cheated then picks up a flagged item, they enter a temporary cheat state for as long as that item is in their possession. Dropping all the flagged items again clears the temporary state and restores achievement eligibility.
  • World modifiers such as hammer-mode count as cheating too. They lock achievements even when they look like a “temporary” convenience toggle, because they change how the world behaves.
  • A handful of harmless commands (like freefly) do not lock achievements.
  • Once a character is marked as having used real devcommands, the lock is permanent for that character — 1.0.12 (Steam only) added an opt-in command, yes i used devcommands but i want my achievements anyway, that re-enables achievements for characters that were cheated before 1.0.
• The Platinum is “The Most Worthy.” It unlocks only after every other achievement is complete.

Boss achievements

Each main boss has its own achievement (in-game, listed under the boss’s descriptive title):

Achievement	Requirement
Eikthyr	Defeat the Lightning Stag (Meadows)
The Elder	Defeat the Living Forest (Black Forest)
Bonemass	Defeat the Writhing Dead (Swamp)
Moder	Defeat the Dragon Mother (Mountain)
Yagluth	Defeat the Twisted Soul (Plains)
The Seeker Queen	Defeat the Crawling Matriarch (Mistlands)
Fader	Defeat the Emerald Flame (Ashlands)
Kall Fimbulbringer	Defeat the Shackled One (Deep North)

On top of the individual kills, three achievements track your run by difficulty: The Viking (defeat every main boss on any difficulty), The Tough Viking (Normal difficulty or higher), and The Toughest Viking (Hard difficulty). Clearing all the mini-bosses — Brenna, Geirrhafa, Zil & Thungr and Lord Reto — unlocks Odin is Pleased.

Other categories

The remaining achievements fall into these groups (a mix of Bronze, with a few Silver and Gold):

• Building & comfort — build a house, build a village, place 500 building pieces, build a very tall structure, and reach Comfort level 20.
• Food, farming & gathering — cook 100 dishes (plus a “cook everything” tier), eat 500 food items, harvest 500 crops, collect 500 honey, gather 250 berries and 250 mushrooms, and chop 500 trees.
• Crafting & the Dyrnwyn — craft items across every category (craftsman, smith, carpenter tiers), and assemble the Dyrnwyn sword.
• Exploration, sailing & fishing — travel far in all four directions, do it without a map, circumnavigate the world (with and while steering), find 10 buried treasure chests, sail to the edge of the world, catch a 4-star fish, and fish every fish type.
• Survival & death — survive 30 consecutive in-game days, die for the first time, die to a falling tree (and to each tree type), die next to an Obliterator, and die in every required way.

Note: We list the categories and the achievements we have confirmed, but the full 53-item list is best viewed in-game or on your Steam profile. We have deliberately not guessed at the exact name or wording of every single achievement — where a name was uncertain we left it out rather than risk listing it wrong.

What can be missed on an old save

Because tracking started at 1.0, most achievements that depend on first-time events can be missed if you already did them in Early Access. In practice this mainly affects:

• The first-death and “die in every way” achievements, if your character is already long dead.
• First-discovery style achievements tied to 1.0 content (e.g. first entering the Deep North), which may not retro-credit on worlds generated before 1.0.
• Boss kills you completed before 1.0 (the old kill does not count).

For a clean achievement run, Iron Gate recommends starting a fresh world on 1.0. See our new save vs old world guide for the trade-offs.

Related

• valheim-1-0-overview — the full 1.0 feature rundown
• boss-order — the complete boss progression order
• new-save-vs-old-world — whether to keep your old world