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Valheim Valheim Valheim, it's all we've been hearing lately. We're guilty of it, other websites and content creators have covered it a lot and so expectedly it's hit new highs again.

Less than one month since entering Early Access, Iron Gate AB and Coffee Stain Publishing have announced they've managed to sell 4 million copies. Not only that, Valheim managed to hit over 500,000 players online at the same time on February 21, which means more people were in game than there were actual Vikings in human history. A more modern detail is that it makes Valheim now on the top 5 of most played games on Steam — ever.

Other fun details include the game being played for "a combined total of 10,000 years" and it continues to climb the Steam Top 250 leaderboard for the best reviewed games of all time and they've hit over 92,000 reviews on Steam.

This is absolute madness. Amazing though, and completely deserved. Fantastic to have such a popular game developed on and for Linux with full support. Iron Gate CEO Richard Svensson has previously made it pretty clear in the official Discord for the game, that they're a "pretty dedicated linux supporter".

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A fresh update for Valheim just recently went out too, here's what's new:

  • Crafting item-dupe bug fix
  • Harpooned player & ship bug fix
  • Fixed player ragdoll
  • Bonemass,Moder,Yagluth difficulty tweaks
  • Moder music updated
  • Tombstone bugfix (probably wont fix disappearing tombstones though)
  • Fixed world corruption caused by pressing ALT+F4 while logging out.
  • Deathsquitos have slightly longer audio range
  • Tweaked audio on blast-furnace & spinning wheel
  • Shared map position setting is saved per world
  • Updated network stats (F2)
  • Building destruction drop-fix
  • Vulkan support in windows builds (Linux is Vulkan by default)
  • Network disconnection bugfix
  • Updated socket-backend

In our previous article we talked about how it caused the popularity of the command-line game hosting tool LinuxGSM to explode too. It's since risen from around 750 servers being hosted to well over 1,400 so it also continues being a very popular way to host games.

With full Linux support you can buy Valheim on Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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24 comments
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slaapliedje Feb 27, 2021
Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: slaapliedjeI have to ask... is this popularity solely based on the game only being 20 bucks?

I've played the prototype when it was on itch.io before it was pulled. It's a fun game. I'd say it's a combination of factors. Fun game mechanics, interesting setting and increased interest in gaming in general due to the pandemic. So the game hit the stride.
Ha, yeah. My point was more 'but 4 million, holy shit!' than it was 'It's a pretty fun game.' 4 million sales this fast is pretty insane for anything outside of what most call a triple A game. I think the last time such a thing happened like this would be Minecraft, right?
drlamb Feb 27, 2021
As noted by Phoronix, Mesa was just patched enabling OpenGL threading for Valheim.

Forcing it with the mesa_glthread=true launch argument further improved performance. I've yet to see a dip below 70 FPS in the swamp (dips below 60 previously) while performance elsewhere hovers between 90-130 fps. It's completely resolved the occasional hitching I'd experience.

My steam launch options are now:

 
gamemoderun mesa_glthread=true %command%



Last edited by drlamb on 27 February 2021 at 5:35 pm UTC
WorMzy Mar 3, 2021
Whoops, five million now: https://steamcommunity.com/games/892970/announcements/detail/3055101388621224472

Took them a bit longer to reach this milestone -- a week rather than five days for the last million -- maybe they're losing their touch.
Linuxwarper Mar 6, 2021
Great to see a native game succeed to this big degree. Something to keep in mind, that the less success developers have the more they depend on other tech companies. Which gives leeway for Microsoft to influence these "vulnerable" developers to use their tech. Beyond that the game looks fresh, far more so than Valhala if you ask me.


Last edited by Linuxwarper on 6 March 2021 at 12:52 am UTC
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