There was a time when chatter about Valheim seemed to be ubiquitous, such was its popularity and word-of-mouth hype. While that buzz may have died down a bit since then, the survival and sandbox game maintains a burning player base and has attracted more players since it launched on Xbox in March.
However, most of its players can be found on PC with a platform that offers certain advantages, such as the ability to add mods. Here, Valheim’s developers found it necessary to break into this community with some comments about the modding scene and their availability. In a blog post titled ‘About Mods’ on Steam, the Iron Gate team addressed the topic after saying they’ve received a lot of questions about it (via Eurogamer ).
In short, Iron Gate wants mods for Valheim to remain free. Although Valheim has no official support for mods, the developer is happy to see players engaging with the game, but is against modders charging for their products. “The thing we get the most questions about, however, is the phenomenon of mods costing money,” the blog post says. “We certainly understand that you spend a lot of your time creating a mod and that you may want to be financially compensated for it, but Iron Gate does not allow mod content to be locked behind a paywall.”
“We believe that charging money for a mod goes against the creative and open spirit of modding itself, so we urge all mod authors to make their mods freely available to anyone who wants to play them. This should include the entire mod and not just part of the mod make it available for free, and the other part costs money,” he continues.
However, Iron Gate isn’t opposed to modders making money from their creations, saying “If you want to show your appreciation to the mod author, you can of course still support them with a voluntary contribution,” but explains that they simply don’t want to see money exchanged for access to mod. Currently Valheim mods are available on mod sites like Thunderstore and Nexus Mods and GitHub. The blog post also makes it clear that Iron Gate would prefer mods to be labeled as unofficial both in-game and on their mod pages to avoid confusion about when a player is playing a modded version or not.
Launched in 2021, Valheim became a hit after players enjoyed its atmosphere and building mechanics, with the title selling two million copies within two weeks of its release.