Valheim's multiplayer experience is a lot of fun to play, especially with a group of dedicated players. What starts as a bunch of half-naked Vikings in a field quickly turns into a group of fully-armored warriors fighting fantastical beasts and roaming around the world in their longship.
And, a lot of the enjoyment of this survival game comes from players slowly building up their skills, resources, and armory. That said, that are still quite a few, relatively easy, ways to exploit the systems in Valheim to essentially "cheat", so let's go over a few of them, so players can know what to look out for in their servers or if they would be fine utilizing these exploits and so on.
7 The "Heavy Load" Workaround
This first exploit is by far the sneakiest one and the one most commonly used in multiplayer servers. Basically, it's the act of using the way that Valheim's character and world systems work to transfer thousands of pounds of valuable materials (Copper, Iron, Silver) from their source back to the player's home base without any risk.
Usually, when players farm a bunch of Iron, Copper, and so on, they then have to load it all back into their boat and make the arduous journey back to their base to smelt and store it, as the teleporter system, by design, doesn't allow metals through it. But, with this exploit, a player just gathers everything they want to bring home into their inventory, hops into a single-player game, unloads their inventory into a chest they've put inside a tiny home, hops back into multiplayer, heads through the teleporter home, goes back into single-player and empties the chest before making one last trip back to multiplayer to unload all their loot in their storage room without having to make any sort of journey at all.
6 Don't Bring Your Cheat-Spawned Items In Here
Though, to be honest, the players using the load transferring exploit stated above might as well just start using the dev command console in single-player, as the load transfer exploit is just about what most would consider "cheating" anyway. While this next trick is less of an exploit and more of just a straight-up self-made Creative Mode in single-player, being able to bring those cheated materials into a multiplayer server is absolutely an exploit.
Say there's a player who is jealous of all the Stone another player worked hard to get for their castle construction. This player can head into their single-player game, open the command console, and spawn thousands of Stone to fill their inventory. That said, it's pretty obvious when someone is doing this during a play session where multiple people are logged into the server. If someone is constantly leaving the server only to rejoin a minute or two later, it's almost guaranteed that this is what they're doing.
5 All The Abyssal Harpoon Shenanigans
Finally, an exploit for multiplayer that's less fun-ruining and more just creative thinking. Essentially, there is an item players can get in Valheim called an Abyssal Harpoon that's made from some basic materials as well as Chitin harvested from the barnacles found on the Leviathan floating island creatures.
Now, at its core, the Abyssal Harpoon is meant to be used as a way of dragging tamed animals into their pens or even dragging sea serpents close to shore so that their item drops won't sink. But, players have found a lot of other creative ways to use it, with one being harpooning another player with PvP on and dragging them along with them. The reason this is an exploit is simply because a two-player team could go silver mining, gather thousands of pounds of it, and load it all into one player's inventory. Then, the second player just throws an Abyssal Harpoon into them and drags their absurdly heavy body down the mountain and back to the boat or portal. But, even if this is "technically" unfair, it's such a fun and creative use of in-game tools that it's difficult to find any server that bans utilizing this trick.
4 Turning Trolls To Lumberjacks
When players first start Valheim and venture into the Black Forest biome for the first time, only to come face to face with the giant blue Trolls native to this Biome, it's very scary. Trolls can kill a player in one or two hits easily in the early game, and they're the first mob where a block can fail and stagger the player. But, once players upgrade their armor and shield as well as learn how to parry, they're a lot less scary.
At that point, they can then be used as lumberjacks, as their wide horizontal swings almost always knock down any trees they hit. Sure, this doesn't help players level up their Axes skill, but kiting a Troll into knocking down half a forest is a surefire way to get some wood very quickly, especially with a Portal nearby.
3 Hammer Hand-Clearing For Ease Of Movement
Next up is an exploit that is sort of a speedrunning staple in any game, abusing an animation to save time and allow the player character to avoid movement penalties. In Valheim, whenever a player equips any weapon, there's a short animation where they pull the weapon out and a movement penalty (which scales depending on the weapon/shield) is applied while the tool is out as well. And, with stamina management being such a crucial part of the game, the Hammer Hand-Clearing exploit makes it much easier to avoid enemies, run from a mob, or even escape one of the many Swamp monsters without getting stuck in the bog.
Essentially, all it involves is double tapping whatever inventory slot the Hammer is in. It turns out the Hammer tool has no animation for pulling it out or putting it away, so players can equip and un-equip it (hence the double tap) to quickly clear their hands and start running.
2 The Infamous Greydwarf Spawner Exploit
Out of everything on here, this has to be the most commonly used "exploit" of them all and is basically a required function of the game at a certain point unless players want to sink 50+ hours into farming wood and stone throughout their entire playtime. This trick involves finding a Greydwarf spawner somewhere in the overworld (these mobs often drop a bit of wood and stone on death) and using a pickaxe to dig a giant crevice underneath it.
This spawner won't fall once the ground is gone below it like stones, branches, and some trees do. Instead, it'll just float there, and any Greydwarfs that spawn from it will spawn in the hole below. Then, players just need to tame two wolves and push them into this crevice, and it's done. Now, these wolfs will kill any Greydwarfs that spawn for the rest of time, and players can just hop in every once in a while to suck up all the drops. Additionally, players can also have the wolves create a couple more puppies as well to make this whole process a bit smoother.
1 Item Duplication Using The Game Files
Last up is an exploit that involves tampering with Valheim's save files, so this one is another trick that's basically just cheating. In any case, Characters and Worlds are saved as two separate files in the Valheim folder, meaning that anything in the player's inventory is in their character file and anything in their chests is in the world file. So, if players want to duplicate anything at all, all they have to do is put it in their inventory, exit the game, make a copy of their character file and keep the copy in another folder, restart the game, empty their inventory into a chest, then overwrite their character file with the copied version.
Then, once they hop back on, they'll have all the items in their inventory again as well as a copy of all the items in the chest. Sadly, this one is a bit harder to catch than the other tricks, so players really just have to use an "honor system" when it comes to stopping exploits like this one in a multiplayer setting.
Valheim is available now in early access for PC and releases in early 2023 for Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.