This element of asynchronous collective progress, in my opinion, is what makes Valheim really fun and probably one of the main reasons behind Valheim's meteoric success thus far.

For example, I can just enter the game and dedicate an hour just to chop down an entire forest of trees for the sole purpose of relieving stress and yet in doing so, I can use the wood obtained to replenish the stockpile at base which was used earlier for building walls. With a dedicated server, players can decouple their gaming schedules from each other, and play whenever they want and still contribute to the collective progress of a shared world. What a dedicated server can do Asynchronous collective progress

This makes for a less than fun experience, especially given that it is getting increasingly difficult to find a common time slot among friends to play together with the unpredictability of work schedules during these uncertain times brought about by none other than our best friend, COVID-19. The only catch here is that when the host quits the game, all other players in the server are immediately disconnected and will not be able to rejoin the same world unless the host is online and in game. Without isolation Valheim is not much different from your typical MMORPG. This model makes perfect sense for a sandbox game as the very definition of a sandbox implies isolation from outside influences, with each player generating their own world and/or joining other worlds. Players may join directly by IP address or via Steam's friends list. Multiplayer is achieved by inviting other players to join the game. A world, when loaded by the player's computer (host) and configured to be open to other players, is then functionally equivalent to a server. To start the game, the player must first generate a world before creating a character which then joins this newly-generated world. Valheim bears a striking similarity with Minecraft and other similar sandbox games and because of that, shares the same reasons behind why a dedicated server is a crucial addition to the gaming experience. Valheim's peak players statistics on Steam at one point was second only to Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), which is very impressive given that it's only in Early Access and has only been released for slightly over a month then. In case you've been living under a rock, Valheim is currently the hottest survival sandbox game on the market developed by the Swedish developer, Iron Gate Studios, comprising of a team of just 5 people. I bought the Rock Pi X with my own money and I'm writing purely to share my experience of running a dedicated server on it.

Disclaimer: I'm neither affiliated with nor sponsored by Radxa/Allnet, the manufacturer/distributor of the Rock Pi X. I picked up this game just over 3 weeks ago and the first thing I did, given my obsession with self-hosting, was to find the most cost-efficient way to host a dedicated server for it. As much as I'd like to proclaim myself as a non-conformist, I'm ashamed to say that I too, succumbed to Valheim's mysterious allure. Valheim is all the rage these days, surpassing even Dota 2 with 500K peak players on February 21st, 2020 and crossing its 6 million sales mark just a few days back.

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