Valheim testing a Unity upgrade with lots of optimizations

Iron Gate announced a new public test release Beta of Valheim, which brings with it a Unity game engine upgrade that includes multiple performance enhancements to improve the game. So time to get testing.

In the announcement they note that worlds used in this update are not backwards compatible, so if you plan to test perhaps don't do it on a main world.

Nice to see the performance work, as while it can run really well, once you get a big castle area with lots of building work done the framerate can be reduced quite a lot (especially so on Steam Deck). So once this upgrade rolls out to the stable version of the game, perhaps it might be better.

Here's all that's in the patch:

• Jack-o-turnip enabled. Spooky season!
• New seasonal item: Pointy hat.
• Added a new “Render scale” graphics setting that enables the main camera to be rendered at a lower resolution than the viewport and UI.
• Improved automatic input switching so that connected gamepads with stick drift no longer take over control when .playing with keyboard and mouse.
• Optimized code that determines which objects in the world to instantiate, lowering the baseline CPU time by up to 5%.
• Optimized structural integrity calculations, massively decreasing CPU time in areas with large builds.
• Optimized enemy AI.
• Optimized underwater logic.
• Re-enabled objects to have more than 255 KVPs of arbitrary data of the same value type (important for some mods).
• Fixed a bug that could cause traps to trigger multiple times in multiplayer depending on how many players were near it
• Engine upgraded to Unity 2022.
• Upgraded Steamworks.NET and PlayFab Party libraries to newer versions.
• Engine-side optimizations for dedicated servers.
• Tweaked boss spawning to prevent them from occasionally getting stuck when spawning.
• Fixed a bug that caused clicking sounds when selecting building pieces via controller.

The developers also recently showed off some of the new weapons coming in the Ashlands update, which they're now internally testing so it's slowly getting closer to release. It also really looks like somewhere that's going to be quite difficult due to all the lava…

Valheim has Native Linux support and it's Steam Deck Verified you can buy it on Humble Store or Steam.