Well met, travellers!

Summer has reached its end, but the Ashlands remain hot as ever. As you might have seen on social media a couple of weeks ago, we shared another piece of concept art – this time a light armour design. That brings us up to three separate armour sets for the Ashlands, which means there should hopefully be something you’ll like regardless of your playstyle!

Last time we focused a lot on the landscape and terrain – and we’ve shown off another landscape image on social media since then too – so this time we figured we’d take another look at the Ashlands’ inhabitants instead. Like we have said many times already, game development is an iterative process and things often change over time. For example, we have ended up giving a new look to the Bonemaw Serpent, which lives in the seas surrounding the biome. Keep an eye out for those sharp spikes when you’re sailing!

We also felt that there was a type of enemy lacking. Oftentimes when we need inspiration we look back at the Black Forest, and this time was no different. By borrowing some aspects from the greydwarfs we have added this subcategory of Charred, which currently make up for quite a large portion of the Ashlands population:

We’re also of course filling out the landscape with various kinds of structures. You know by now that Valheim carries plenty of traces of old civilisations, and the Ashlands will be no exception. And even while most of the biome will be a fiery wasteland, the old ruins will still have kept a thing or two intact. We’ll let you discover for yourselves what can be found there, so for now we’ll just show you the Blender version of what they can look like:

With the submissions for our Trial of Tyr closing last week, we would like to thank and commend everyone who managed to complete the game on hard mode! We’re all very impressed with how fast some of you really managed to get through the game, and we will reveal the winners shortly!

For this month we want to show off the sea base built by CapCrumbsGaming, well done! If you want your creation to be featured in this section, use the hashtag #ValheimBotM on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Due to changes in the tagging system on Facebook and Instagram, please also send us a DM with a link to your entry as well as using the hashtag if you post there! You can view previous builds in this thread on Steam.

Skål!

/The Iron Gate team

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