Two Valheim players spent 1,000 hours building their own RPG inside the survival game

Valheim characters face into a vast dark cave
(Image credit: Iron Gate)

Two Valheim builders spent more than a thousand hours over three months to create an entire RPG within the survival hit.

YouTubers Ninebyte and Dhakhar joined forces to take on the wildly ambitious project of creating a whole game within a game. In this instance, both creators had the idea of making unique stories, bosses, and more with Valheim's loveably edge-covered tools.

"We spent the first week of building just bringing in builds and modifying them off the edge of the world, creating the ultimate build graveyard to work from for the rest of the project," the creators explain in a recent video, embedded above. The duo then made five main towns that would "eventually link everything together with a story and lore."

From there, the team filled in gaps with points of interest, connected roads, and several boss arenas that would soon house "amped-up" fights with custom enemies. 12 classes are also available - including classics like berserker, mage, and shaman - inspired by the Legends mod. 

After everything had been initially laid out, the team worked to smooth out roads, optimize code, populate towns with mysterious, quest-giving NPCs, and create lore to connect the entire package. They also "went through every vanilla loot item in the game and placed them" across the map as quest rewards and such. So, everything you'd expect from a normally-developed RPG.

Should you want a taste of what the duo built, the beta version 1.0 is available for free right now over on the duo's Discord server.

Valheim’s developer recently urged modders to “make their mods freely available to all who want to play them.”

Freelance contributor

Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.