Go and look at your trophy hall before you read anything else.
Valheim 1.0 shipped a new save format, and converting a pre-1.0 world through it stripped the durability, upgrade level and variant from every item sitting on an item stand or an armour stand. Your legendary blackmetal atgeir is still on the wall. It is also back to quality 1.
Iron Gate did not find this in testing. It was fixed in Patch 1.0.12, so any world converted from that point forward converts correctly. The conversion that already happened is a different matter, and the studio has been straight about it: the data is lost in the conversion.
What you can actually get back
Two routes, and the first one costs more than people expect.
Revert to the backup. Valheim made a backup when you first loaded the world into the new save format. Restoring it returns your items intact and deletes every bit of progress you have made since, which after a month of 1.0 is usually the worse trade.
Or raid your own backup. Copy the backup file, load the copy as a separate world, take the affected items off the stands onto your character, then go back to your main world and swap them for the broken versions. You keep your progress and your gear. This is the one to use.
Iron Gate's support channel on Discord will walk you through it if the file juggling goes wrong.
One standing warning that has not been lifted: do not pull high-level items off your stands without a backup if you have been playing 1.0. That applies to fish, weapons and armour alike.
The cheater flag that was not your fault
A separate 1.0 bug marked player characters as temporary cheaters by mistake, which then stamped a cheated origin onto anything dropped by monsters those players killed. It spread the way you would expect: cheated stackables merged into clean stacks and turned the whole stack cheated.
1.0.14 fixed both halves, stopping the false flag and preventing cheated stackables from stacking with regular items. A further fix had to ship on every platform simultaneously to avoid breaking crossplay, which is why it lagged. In the meantime Iron Gate's line was clear: keep playing, the items will be corrected.
If devcommands blocked your achievements at some point, 1.0.10 added an opt-in to turn them back on. The studio left the ethics to you.
Terrain, which took four patches
This is the thread that ran longest, and the Deep North is where it hurt.
- 1.0.15 fixed terrain duplication that was costing performance. Seams can still appear, but they now persist correctly after a reload instead of coming back every time.
- 1.0.16 fixed Deep North terrain modifications reverting after the area unloaded. Iron Gate apologised for how long that one went back and forth.
- 1.0.16 also stopped snowballs rolled far from the player producing seams and, in some cases, crashes, and stopped snow deposits from trees raising the terrain around them.
The seams themselves are cosmetic and fixable by hand: pickaxe them, hoe them, or just walk over the snow.
Patch 1.0.17, and the one line worth reading twice
The most recent patch, 6 October, is small and one entry is not small at all:
Fixed a rare bug that could erase all objects in parts of the world when one large world save chunk file was split into smaller ones.
That is total object loss in a region of your map, caused by the chunked save system doing exactly what it was designed to do. It was rare. It is fixed. If you have an unexplained bald patch where a base used to be, that is the likeliest culprit and it is not coming back.
Also in 1.0.17: invalid item types, most visibly an invalid shield of root variant that reached PlayStation 5 in 1.0.15, no longer cause buggy behaviour. Invalid styles now reset to the default and keep working rather than breaking the item. And the credits, hidden by 1.0.16, are back.
The rest of the run, briefly
| Patch | Date | What it was for |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0.10 | 11 Sept | Deep North heavy armour repairable, Greydwarf Shaman damage, achievement opt-in |
| 1.0.12 | 11 Sept | Forge of Potential recipe unlocks, the item stand fix, zone crash |
| 1.0.14 | 17 Sept | Keybinds, accessibility, GPU work, the cheater flag |
| 1.0.15 | 18 Sept | Terrain duplication, Deep North armour mould drops, Writhan spawns |
| 1.0.16 | 25 Sept | Terrain reversion, raid overspawn, four achievement fixes |
| 1.0.17 | 6 Oct | Chunk split object loss, invalid item variants |
Two of those are worth a second look if you are still gearing in the Deep North. 1.0.15 made both Jotun Warrior types drop both medium and heavy armour moulds, which roughly doubles your chances per kill, and raised Writhan spawn rates and spawn areas. 1.0.16 fixed raids spawning far too many enemies, so if your base defence felt impossible in week two, it was.
About the platform lag
Nearly every patch since launch carries the same note: internal restrictions mean it takes a few days to reach all platforms. Crossplay keeps working the whole time, so a Switch 2 friend on an older build can still join your Steam world. You do not need to wait for everyone to be on the same number before playing.
The tier list is current for 1.0 gear, the Deep North preparation guide covers the biome these patches keep touching, and Kall, the Fimbulbringer is what the gearing is for. If your controls feel off rather than your saves, that is a different set of patch notes.
Sources: Patch 1.0.17, Patch 1.0.16, Patch 1.0.15, Patch 1.0.14 and Hotfix 1.0.10 and 1.0.12, all from Iron Gate's own announcements.
