Why This Gamebreaking Valheim Bug Is So Hard To Fix

Every game has its bumps along the road, especially those in early access. Even massive titles like World of Warcraft have run into problems that made the game nearly impossible to play. Valheim, the hit survival game that seemingly appeared from thin air, has run into its own crippling bug: players' worlds are being completely erased.

Richard Svensson, the CEO of Valheim developer Iron Gate, told players on Twitter to backup their characters and their worlds because the "evil world-destroyer bug is still roaming free." The bug, which was reported on Reddit by mikester999 on Feb. 11, 2021, has been giving the developers the runaround, as they haven't been able to reproduce the issue a single time. In another tweet, Svensson mentioned that exiting the game via ALT+F4 may cause the bug to happen more frequently, but the devs still hadn't been able to force the bug to take out their own games. He also gave players instructions on where they could find their backups.

There are a lot of player theories about what could be causing this bug, but its elusive nature has prevented any definitive answers. Twitter user @Dallagen2 asserted that dedicated server providers are renaming files, which could be at fault. Another Twitter user had information on a dedicated server resetting, and Svensson replied trying to get a copy of that world file specifically. On the original Reddit thread, user Rejuvin1992 offered a possible fix for the problem that included opening forwarding ports.

While the Valheim developers struggle to recreate the bug to find a solution, most fans on Twitter were understanding. The original Twitter thread saw players praise the game, give encouraging words, and even make the occasional joke or two. The project is in early development after all, so most players expect things to go wrong at some point. Some fans even defended the game and the studio. In one tweet where a player rage quit because of the bug, another player argued that you should always backup saves when you play early access games.

Despite the bug, Valheim has enjoyed massive success, even overtaking behemoths like GTA 5 in number of concurrent players on Steam. The developers previously mentioned that they weren't prepared to see these kinds of numbers after the game's early access launch. While Iron Gate searches for an answer, you can still sample Valheim, though certainly with a bit more risk than is typically expected — even for a survival game.