Instruction: What you see above is a scatterplot of all food choices in-game, and where they land based on the health and stamina they offer. The colors represent the stage of the game where you can obtain them, while the size of the circle represents their active duration. You can hover above them to see more info.

Introduction

Valheim is an exploration and survival game that takes you to the heights of Viking culture. It’s like the love child of Minecraft, Terraria, and Dark Souls—yes, you read that right.

Food is an essential component in Valheim as it drastically affects one’s gameplay. Eat a high-meat diet and you get loads of health to tank hits, to the detriment of your stamina. Fill yourself with fruits so you can do more, but be careful being one-shotted by an enemy.

Yes, I’m officially addicted to Valheim, and I also get frustrated when I run out of stamina while drawing my bow. I never really cared about my food intake—until now.

Methodology

  • I scraped the food data from the Valheim Fandom page. To get the “DroppedBy” and “Crafting Material” columns, I traversed each food page and parsed the infobox. You can see more of my process in this notebook.
  • I manually annotated the “Progression” column. I checked the following variables to determine the age / progression a food item can be found in a normal playthrough: (1) ore dependencies, (2) food recipe and its dependencies, (3) enemy and biome difficulty.

If you see any discrepancies in the collection process, feel free to create a Pull Request in the valheim-viz Github repo. You can also find the dataset in Kaggle.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the maintainers of the Valheim Wiki, and u/174nana for the banner photo from their Reddit post. Of course, huge thanks to Iron Gate for making this awesome game!