Valheim patch tweaks weapons and food, adds festive Jack-o'-turnip

Valheim's developers continue to tweak the balance of last month's Hearth and Home update, trying to find a happy medium between the way the game used to work and how it works now. Once again, the game has been nudged to make things a bit easier on players with a patch that buffs the stats of a number of foods and lowers the stamina costs of using most melee weapons.

And if squinting at a list of nutritional values isn't your thing, a festive new decoration has appeared to help your Viking prepare for Halloween. You can now build a Jack-o'-turnip, which is like a Jack-o'-lantern but (dare I say it) cuter.

First, the food changes. Many players have been unhappy that meals lean heavily toward either health or stamina boosts after the Hearth and Home patch, and Iron Gate Studios walked that back a little in a patch a couple weeks ago. Today's patch continues the trend as meals like boar jerky, minced meat, and blood pudding have been buffed with a slight increase to both their health and stamina values. Some foods, like bread and deer stew, have also gotten an adjustment to the duration of their benefits. This edges things a bit closer to how they worked pre-patch, when most foods provided a roughly similar amount of health and stamina.

Perhaps more importantly, the stamina costs of many melee weapons have been adjusted, no doubt due to player feedback—after the H&H update, many players were struggling to keep their stamina bars filled during combat and while moving through the world. Today's patch means axes, maces, swords, atgeirs, and even tools like pickaxes now require a bit less stamina to swing, which should make combat a shade easier.

As for your new seasonal decoration, the adorable Jack-o'-turnip will appear in your build menu under the furniture tab. To craft it, you'll need to be in range of your workbench and have 2 resin and 4 turnips. (Why not just one turnip? Look, I don't make the rules.) Once you've crafted your Jack-o'-turnip you'll need to keep it fueled with additional resin (just like a torch) if you want it to glow. I'm not sure if the Halloween decoration will be removed after the spooky season has passed, so better craft a few now.

The patch includes a few additional tweaks, like a greater chance to gather acorns and birch seeds while chopping down trees, some improvements in fuling combat AI, and others. Here are the full patch notes:

• Oven & cookingstation drop food items when destroyed
• Gamepad sensitivity save fix
• Acorn & Birch seed drop rate increased
• Onion seed icon tweak
• Player number difficulty scale tweaks
• Removed comfort from Crystal wall
• Atgeir, Blackmetal axe, Bronze spear tweaks
• Lower melee weapon stamina drain
• Knives have more durability
• Tweaked some food stats based on effort to craft (blood pudding, boar jerky, bread, deer stew, mincemeat sauce, wolf jerky)
• Night-spawning monsters despawn faster in the morning
• Parry ranged attacks staggers caster again (illogical but fun)
• Fuling AI tweaks (Spreads out & circles more)
• Longer Lox attack cooldowns
• Frost damage slowdown fix
• Shield tutorial trigger fix for wood shields
• Wood log 26° & 45° stability fix
• Jack-o-turnip enabled
• Torch + weapon jog animation fix