Valheim Controls and Settings

The default keys worth memorising

Valheim hides several of its most useful controls behind keys nobody tells you about. These are the defaults from the wiki’s controls table:

Auto pickup: one key, no menu option

Press V to toggle auto pickup. That is the whole feature — there is no checkbox for it in the settings menu, despite guides that claim otherwise.

The common failure cases are worth knowing because they look like bugs:

• Your inventory is full. Auto pickup disables itself, and it does not grab partial stacks. If an item’s stack is bigger than your remaining capacity, it skips the whole stack rather than taking what fits.
• You dropped the item yourself. Items you drop manually will not be auto-collected again until you leave the current world cell and return.
• You pressed V during a corpse run. Turning auto pickup off before running to your gravestone is a common deliberate tactic to avoid filling your pockets with junk — and then it never gets turned back on.

On a controller the toggle is hold left bumper plus click the left stick, and it is not on the controller layout screen in an obvious place.

Boss powers: F, five minutes, shared cooldown

Forsaken powers unlock by hanging each boss trophy on the Sacrificial Stones at your spawn. Until you do that, pressing F does nothing.

The rules are stricter than most players assume:

The cooldown does not reset or shrink when you log off, sleep, or change which power is set. And the 10-metre sharing rule cuts both ways: a four-player group can chain their powers and keep one running almost permanently, which is why coordinated groups treat F as a party cooldown rather than a personal one.

Eikthyr’s power cuts stamina use for running, jumping and swimming by 60% — the strongest of the early powers for exploration, because stamina is what limits how far you can travel before you have good food.

Eikthyr himself has 500 health, is summoned with two deer trophies at his Forsaken Altar, and drops his trophy, three hard antlers and the power itself.

Signs: colour codes, no mods

Sign text accepts Unity rich-text markup. Put the code at the front of the line and the rest of the text takes it — no closing tag needed:

<#ff0000ff>Weapons
<color=green>Food

Two limits to respect: a sign holds 50 characters total, including the codes, and you cannot close a style — whatever you set applies to everything after it on that sign. Unicode symbols work too, which is how people build icon-only storage walls.

Graphics: what to change first

Before you load a world, set a Graphics preset that actually holds your frame rate, then turn off depth of field and camera shake. Camera shake matters more than it sounds — falling trees shake the screen hard enough to be disorienting in a forest, and depth of field costs frames for an effect you stop noticing after an hour.

Leave world modifiers alone on a first run. They can be changed later, and a character is not bound to a single world, so a fresh character on a fresh world is the cleaner start if you last played before 1.0.

Related guides

• Valheim beginner guide
• Valheim console commands
• Valheim base building guide
• Valheim boss strategies