Fires in the Deep North: one is enough
In the Deep North one Campfire is enough: fires that overlap, and the big Hearth, send the ground again and again and make every other player at the base lag.
What works
- One Campfire with the Cauldron and the Mead Ketill both over it.
- Stone Ovens, Hot Tubs, Sconces, Standing Wood Torches and Standing Braziers, as many as you like.
What doesn’t
- A Hearth.
- Two Campfires close together.
Why?
In Valheim it isn’t only the server doing the sums. Wherever you are, your computer looks after that place: the fire, the snow, the enemies. Whatever changes there, it sends to the server, and the server passes it on to everyone else. That’s the only way you all see the same world.
The ground and its snow are stored as one big parcel for each patch of land. If a fire melts even a little snow, the whole parcel sets off again: to the server, and from there to you and your friends. Not just the small spot, but all of it.
A Hearth melts without a break, several times every second, even when there’s hardly any snow left around it and it stands in your hut under a shield. Two fires side by side keep getting in each other’s way, and the melting never stops. So the same big parcel goes out again and again.
In the game, the line from the server to each player has a fixed limit. Once it’s full of these parcels, everything else has to wait: whether a chest may open, which walls are already standing, where the floor is. Like a postman who keeps delivering the same heavy parcel while the letters pile up.
A single Campfire soon finishes melting. In our measurements everything ran smoothly again afterwards.