Do you feel safe in your Valheim base? Secured walls, dug trenches, sealed windows? Even with all of these precautions in place, you still might not be safe from Valheim’s new enemies. With the introduction of the Mistlands update comes a new raid type – and this one is wreaking havoc on established playerbases. Quite devastatingly, some players are losing houses that took them hundreds of hours to build.
The new event, called “they’ve been looking for you”, unleashes hordes of bugs on your player base – and even worse, they can fly. Seekers and Seeker Soldiers are able to jump over ditches and then crush stone walls as if they were papier-mâché. The event can occur any time after defeating the Yagluth Plains boss, so anyone who has cleared Valheim biomes is vulnerable to these attacks. And of course, it takes a lot of players by surprise.
“When we were raided, we were caught off guard and lost our three-story base, which took us hundreds of hours,” said a Reddit user. “It was protected by walls, trenches and most upgraded gates – that didn’t slow the searchers down at all… We all quit after surviving the raid, but after looking around we found realized all the rebuilding wouldn’t matter because we lost seasonal item buffs for comfort level and we couldn’t survive another raid like that.”
Buildings aren’t the only casualties here either, as players lose their beloved pets to the swarm. “They killed my three stranded sea snakes by jumping over the walls. Very sad,” said a player on Steam. “I had a very disappointing experience with this event: my stone house was destroyed, all the boars killed and I was naked, full of stamina food,” said another Reddit user. “I was not at all prepared”
To test the new raid for myself, I created a fake stone and iron base, then used console commands to trigger the event. As you can see from the video below, the results are quite devastating. If you don’t go out immediately to deal with the seekers (a challenge in itself), you can expect serious damage to your base. And if your house is made of wood…good luck.
While some players will enjoy this new base defense challenge, it looks extremely tough for those who want a calmer lifestyle. Part of the appeal of Valheim is that you can choose to venture into dangerous territory and then return to relative safety to build a home. It’s one thing to build in the Mistlands where you can expect to face tough enemies on a daily basis, but it’s quite another to spawn them in your wooden cabin in the Meadows.
The other major problem is, of course, that many players will have no idea they need to prepare for this raid. Many will have completed the Plains biome and not yet ventured into the Mists, unaware that killer ants are about to visit their homes. Many players will already have built houses in easier biomes that just can’t deal with that amount of damage.
The extreme difficulty of this raid also prioritizes base defense over other ways to play Valheim, as those who want to build decoratively or play a role will find their options limited. ‘What’s the use of having a cozy mountain hut, a camp out on the plains, maybe a miner’s hut in the Dark Forest if every one of them needs a moat and walls to be in?’ viable'”, said Reddit user Joshy_Moshy. “Building is my favorite thing about this game,” said user Moriartis. “If I have no choice but to have a giant dirt wall around my base or a giant moat, otherwise the whole base is destroyed due to damage from new mobs, that’s really shitty and really degrades what I love about the game.”
“I feel like progressing through bosses is more of a punishment than a reward,” said another user.
If you are concerned about the security of your base, you have several options. One is to cover the surrounding area with workbenches so that no enemies can spawn near you. You’ll have to be careful not to miss any patches though, and it looks a bit ugly. Another option is to dig very large trenches and earthen walls, which will unfortunately spoil the surrounding landscape. You can also progress through the Mistlands to find base defense items, but it’s a slow process. As a last resort, some players disable raids entirely using the development commands. Perhaps the best advice is to back up your save file, if things go wrong.
Personally, I know that my group’s base would have been devastated by this event. Our moats would not have been enough to stop the ants, and they would have torn apart our lovingly built wooden village. While we could upgrade our base with more walls and trenches to deal with this new threat, it would ruin the quaint and cozy vibe of our home. To prevent our 150 hour base from being destroyed in an instant, we opted to avoid the event altogether by defeating Yagluth on another server, bringing all the required items to our own. Hopefully Iron Gate will reconsider how raids work – or at least reduce the damage seekers can do to buildings. Does anyone have the pest control number?
