Valheim Performance Optimization Tips

Since Valheim is using the Unity engine, it’s a small miracle it manages to run at all as an open-world game with countless individual objects. Still, once your home base grows sufficiently large, you may start experiencing stutters and slowdowns, and want to make the game run better.

With the full 1.0 release and the new Deep North biome set to go live in early September, you might be logging into your old worlds and experiencing those issues anew. But whether you’re a returning player, or a fresh Viking building their first base, this guide should help you alleviate at least some of the issues with Valheim’s performance.

Technical Fixes

Your first bet when dealing with performance issues in any game is looking for ways to optimize its settings and launch options. Valheim has several ways to do so. Most of them come with their own tradeoffs.

Using Vulkan

When you hit the Play button in Steam, you get a pop-up window asking if you want to play Valheim using DirectX or Vulkan. DirectX is the default option and should be used in most cases. However, what Vulkan offers is slightly better overall performance. It also greatly lowers the stutter when approaching a heavily-populated area like a large base.

If you’re experiencing performance issues with DirectX, or if the base loading annoys you too much, you should switch to using Vulkan. Just keep in mind that for Valheim in particular, this can result in lower overall game stability and more frequent crashes.

GFX Optimization

By default, Valheim has the tendency to underutilize some of your hardware. You can change this behavior by editing a specific config file. You’ll be looking for boot.config in the valheim_Data folder. The path to it will look something like:

• D:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\Valheim\valheim_Data

Naturally, substitute the drive and the folder(s) preceding Steam for whatever you have. Find the boot.config file there and use the regular Notepad to open it. If they’re absent, make sure to add the following lines to the config file:

• gfx-enable-gfx-jobs=1
• gfx-enable-native-gfx-jobs=1

It should look something like this:

The game will be pushing your hardware more after this, so you’ll need to weigh the FPS benefits against that slightly bigger strain on your GPU and power bill. In our tests, enabling these options gave us roughly 5-10 extra FPS on average. Just keep in mind that you’ll want to re-adjust the config file after every game update.

Adjusting In-game Settings

The in-game Settings menu has a number of dials you can fiddle with to improve Valheim’s performance. While it may be advisable to turn everything down in the Graphics menu if you’re not happy with the overall performance, the following items will give you the biggest FPS boost:

• Turning down Shadow and Vegetation quality
• Turning off Active point light shadows
• Turning off Bloom, Motion Blur, and Tessellation

The one option that’s a bit more mysterious is VSync. It’s hard to predict whether you’ll get better performance with it on or off. You should try toggling it to see what works best for you.

In-game Fixes

Beyond the technical things, you can improve your long-term performance by employing certain base-building philosophies. The big thing to watch out for there is the number of active instances around your base. You can check them by hitting the F2 button in-game. Once you start getting past around 10,000 instances, even powerful PCs may struggle to keep up.

You can make sure your instances don’t climb that high by starting your main home base on flat land that doesn’t require excessive terraforming. Other things that contribute to bloated instance numbers and overall performance drops are:

• Farms
• Tamed animal pens
• Portals
• Torches and other fires

With that in mind, you might want to spread your home base around somewhat. This may add some leg work, but it should make all that running around more pleasant in smooth FPS. You’ll want to place your farm and animal pens away from the main base. The same goes for the portals. Alternatively, don’t keep all of your portals permanently connected, instead turning them on only when you intend to use them.

When it comes to torches and fire, you’ll want at least some to ward off the monsters and engage in cooking and crafting. But don’t go overboard. And later in the game, consider replacing most torches with Dvergr Lanterns, as they produce fewer particles to lag up your game.

Optimizing Terrain

This will be primarily relevant to those who started their Valheim bases on earlier versions of the game. Thanks to some engine optimizations during the game’s early access phase, you can drastically reduce the number of instances left over from your terraforming efforts. What you’ll want to do is:

• Enable the in-game console
• Open it and type devcommands
• Once the developer commands are on, type optterrain and hit Enter

We have a detailed guide that should help you use console commands if you need additional guidance. But what this command in particular does, is it flattens the leftover bits of old terrain in your vicinity to reduce the instance count without touching anything else. If our experiments, using this command around a base that was built when Yagluth was the final boss, reduced the instance count from around 9300 to 7300.

Using Mods

There are numerous mods out there claiming to improve the performance in Valheim. You’ll need to experiment with them yourself to see if they help you. However, this mod in particular, SmootSave, should be useful to most players. It aims to eliminate the stutter that happens when the game is saving its world in the background.

If you need assistance in using Valheim mods, our guide should help you out there.