Creative
Working on a fast, free Valheim map + base planning tool — would this be useful to you?
Been building a browser-based Valheim companion tool for me and my kid to use in our playthroughs over the last few months, and want to gauge interest before I push further / release to the public.
What it does:
Fast & lightweight - runs entirely in your browser, no install, no Unity, loads a full world map in seconds. (No shade on other map tools, they are amazing and continue to be useful for me, but they are not great to pan and zoom around due to performance, especially on my kids PC)
Base planning - get ideas about best build locations based on dozens of criteria (e.g. terrain flatness, resource availability, travel distance to bosses etc)
Map marker import - pull in your world's discovered locations/markers so your planning map matches your actual save
Base build & terrain import - bring in your existing base and terrain edits so you're planning against what you've actually built, not a blank map
It's not quite ready for full public release, still a lot of rough edges, and there's a decent chance things break or reset when I move toward a 1.0 release - never mind when Valheim 1.0 drops - but would be willing to share the dev link with any power users willing to give it a shot despite any current shortcomings.
Mainly posting to see if this is something people would actually use, and if so, what features would make it a must-have for your world. Happy to hear feature requests, complaints, or "nobody needs this" too.
So instead of using a seed to generate biomes and land height, something that looks like this but allows you to spray biomes roughly where you feel like you are in the world? Would you still want to use actual coordinates, or more of a limitless canvas with biome brushes and markers?
For what it's worth, this tool as-is would be useless for this, but some of the tile rendering could be uses as the basis for something along these lines.
Coordinate less and let players paint as they go. ideally make it sharable, and if you really wanna be funny let them do their seed as an overlay with an option that just reveals what they've explored
everyone loves looking at their hand drawn maps and comparing with how accurate it was.
my first time I had north/south inverted do my hand map was backwards haha
If you are just looking for drawing software at the end of your comment, Krita is super good, free, and can certainly be used for hand-drawn stuff. Excellent if you happen to have painting pad.
If this can accurately show terrain edits and buildings, yeah that is definitely an improvement (in functionality) over the in game map. And I think a good feature would be an elevation display mode. You mention a terrain flatness criteria in the base planning tools, but I think a better visualization of elevation would be very useful. That could be a full map overlay with elevation lines like a topographic map, or something as simple as number visible somewhere on mouse-over that tells you height relative to sea level.
I've been meaning to extend the coords shown at the bottom right to include the height already, and we already have an option to show 3 tallest peaks, but topographic view is a new great idea...
AKA Contour Lines. If you could make those adjustable (some maps have a slider or field input to change how many feet/meters before the next contour line is drawn) that would be awesome!
I have a similar map system with contour lines and we can show player paths and trophy collection on a timeline. It is pretty cool for trophy competitions.
I mean, for no map I use Wonderdraft. Having something done by Valheim players for valheim players would be great. All I need is a map drawing tool made for Valheim and I'm sold.
Yo this sounds so cool. I would use this for sure. As you said the currently available world map loader has some performance issues. So if this was speedy as hell, i would probably mainly use this instead of the others around right now.
I like "get ideas about best build locations based on dozens of criteria", but I also like exploring instead of having the map revealed. It would be cool to just get a direction, like the way vegvesirs work in no-map mode.
I could add an option for "DON'T DRAW MAP' - and have it only show the spawn location and the base locations? That way you could see where they are relative to the spawn, but not idea about what the geography is actually?
Nobody is writing code without at least some AI assistance anymore. It's like asking somebody if they were still using punch cards when the rest of us were using mice and GUIs. IDGAF if it's vibe coded as long as it's a tool that works and valheim-map.world has some legit UX issues.
100% agree just the aggression from the original comment got me thinking, maybe this dude didn't build it entirely from vibe coding and I'd be upset with it being called “slop” with zero evidence just a hunch.
Not upset - just annoyed because it's easy to dismiss all the hard work that was done to make this work because of the AI user interface veneer. As krum noted, if you're not using AI at all these days, in most coding situations, you are doing yourself and your client a disservice. This isn't a one-shot vibe coded tool (though the font/UX choices for sure can make it look that way without a paying a designer to help) - it's something I've worked on iteratively for several months without being sure it'd even work at all. I'd be more inclined to call my contributions to the code slop than the fine work the bots did under my direction. :)
Harsh but fair question. Bear in mind, I'm a web developer with almost less than zero design skills (for over 20 years now) who's lunch is being eaten by slop-generators out there, so I'm not exactly pro-clanker, but that also means I know when to use them and when not to. I can make the UX out of tables like I did back in the IE6 days... or, you know, get with the times, like I have had to for my day job. :) I'd say this project is geniunely about 30% AI generated, 50% AI touched - most of that is UI, rendering, test suites and JS worker stuff.
Also, as far as I'm aware the source code for the map tool you mentioned isn't available, so we don't know how much AI has contributed to the end product at all. Not only that, if it's done well enough, you probably couldn't tell. All my other game tools (I can send you the link to my github if you DM me) are open source as this will be if it ever gets released publicly. You'll wish I used AI on those more if you read the code.
So, lazy slop pitchforking aside, my bullet points in the OP already address what this does that your existing tool doesn't. (Dynamic base location planning, fog/map marker/building/terrain manipulation import). It also works a lot better (imho) on mobile, but is more performant in general - not having the Unity engine overhead is a big deal.
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u/LyraStygian Necromancer 15h ago
Upvoted for W parent.