If you were hoping for more concrete news on Valheim’s impending Ashlands update like a date… well, we don’t have any because Iron Gate is still being surprisingly close-lipped on this update to a game that’s been lingering in early access for over three years now. But today’s update does lay down some more concrete in the foundation for Ashlands – including an engine upgrade.
“We’ve got a bunch of fixes and improvements for you today, to smooth out the game and to prepare everything for the upcoming Ashlands update,” the studio says. “This patch touches on everything from enemy spawning and build pieces to language issues and memory leaks. Most notably though, it features an upgrade of Unity and a significant change to how the game loads assets such as dungeons.”
Patch notes say Unity’s been updated to 2022.3.17f, alongside fixes and tweaks for blocks, terrain, emotes, season groups, multiple UI bits, furniture, respawns, light particles, Linux servers, building memory leaks, cloud saves, gamepad camera rotation, boats, minimaps, location loading, friends lists, cursed perma beds (iykyk), and gobs more. Iron Gate does note that modders will want to pay particular attention to the location loading changes as the devs are now using a custom asset management system to “load and unload assets on the fly” instead of keeping everything in memory – which will surely affect mods.
I will say I poked over to Reddit to see whether the modding situation was causing an uproar, and nope. In fact, people are elated; they’re using the current build on the public test branch – and the fact that a dev on Discord said the team hopes this patch is the last before Ashlands – to hype up the prediction that Ashlands is truly imminent.
