Valheim patch tweaks weapons and food, adds festive Jack-o'-turnip

Valheim Jack-o'-turnip sitting on a table
(Image credit: Iron Gate Studios)

Valheim's developers continue to tweak the balance of last month's Hearth and Home update, trying to find a happy medium between the way the game used to work and how it works now. Once again, the game has been nudged to make things a bit easier on players with a patch that buffs the stats of a number of foods and lowers the stamina costs of using most melee weapons.

And if squinting at a list of nutritional values isn't your thing, a festive new decoration has appeared to help your Viking prepare for Halloween. You can now build a Jack-o'-turnip, which is like a Jack-o'-lantern but (dare I say it) cuter.

First, the food changes. Many players have been unhappy that meals lean heavily toward either health or stamina boosts after the Hearth and Home patch, and Iron Gate Studios walked that back a little in a patch a couple weeks ago. Today's patch continues the trend as meals like boar jerky, minced meat, and blood pudding have been buffed with a slight increase to both their health and stamina values. Some foods, like bread and deer stew, have also gotten an adjustment to the duration of their benefits. This edges things a bit closer to how they worked pre-patch, when most foods provided a roughly similar amount of health and stamina.

Perhaps more importantly, the stamina costs of many melee weapons have been adjusted, no doubt due to player feedback—after the H&H update, many players were struggling to keep their stamina bars filled during combat and while moving through the world. Today's patch means axes, maces, swords, atgeirs, and even tools like pickaxes now require a bit less stamina to swing, which should make combat a shade easier.

As for your new seasonal decoration, the adorable Jack-o'-turnip will appear in your build menu under the furniture tab. To craft it, you'll need to be in range of your workbench and have 2 resin and 4 turnips. (Why not just one turnip? Look, I don't make the rules.) Once you've crafted your Jack-o'-turnip you'll need to keep it fueled with additional resin (just like a torch) if you want it to glow. I'm not sure if the Halloween decoration will be removed after the spooky season has passed, so better craft a few now.

The patch includes a few additional tweaks, like a greater chance to gather acorns and birch seeds while chopping down trees, some improvements in fuling combat AI, and others. Here are the full patch notes:

  • Oven & cookingstation drop food items when destroyed
  • Gamepad sensitivity save fix
  • Acorn & Birch seed drop rate increased
  • Onion seed icon tweak
  • Player number difficulty scale tweaks
  • Removed comfort from Crystal wall
  • Atgeir, Blackmetal axe, Bronze spear tweaks
  • Lower melee weapon stamina drain
  • Knives have more durability
  • Tweaked some food stats based on effort to craft (blood pudding, boar jerky, bread, deer stew, mincemeat sauce, wolf jerky)
  • Night-spawning monsters despawn faster in the morning
  • Parry ranged attacks staggers caster again (illogical but fun)
  • Fuling AI tweaks (Spreads out & circles more)
  • Longer Lox attack cooldowns
  • Frost damage slowdown fix
  • Shield tutorial trigger fix for wood shields
  • Wood log 26° & 45° stability fix
  • Jack-o-turnip enabled
  • Torch + weapon jog animation fix
Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

Read more
Wearing a hazmat suit, a Rust player proudly holds up a freshly cooked pie, foregrounded by a table covered with pies and a large pumpkin on the left.
Rust's crafting update gives the survival sim real-time food cooking and pies to rival Monster Hunter, but the tastiest treat is the ability to make and throw 'bee grenades'
Valheim cheats and console commands
Valheim cheats: All codes and console commands to wield godly power
Man holding gun up to approaching cannibal
Sons of the Forest's first patch in 6 months is a doozy, adding buildable rafts, a procedural wall system, and fixing more than 100 bugs
King wielding his axe against would-be assassins in Norland.
Medieval colony sim Norland is getting a 'damn big update' that completely overhauls the game's mechanics: 'We're rolling out some radical changes to the core gameplay'
no more room in hell 2
No More Room in Hell 2's 'biggest update yet' introduces weapon attachments, new level scenarios, and ensures players no longer spawn 'without a body'
Two people with swords, shields, and armor fighting
Rust goes medieval with the Primitive update: siege weapons, swords and shields, and maybe a few jewel-encrusted assault rifles
Latest in Survival & Crafting
An Enshrouded player in a recreation of Erebor from The Lord of the Rings
Kings under the Mountain! 33 Enshrouded players spent 10,000 hours to recreate this iconic location from The Lord of the Rings
An April Fool's Day Palworld game concept about dating Pals
From Palworld movies to Palworld TV shows: 'Everyone under the sun pitched us every idea you can imagine,' says Pocketpair's communications director
Pacific Drive Endless Expeditions spring 2025 update trailer still - a sexy, tricked-out 1980s station wagon being blasted with magic healing electricity
Pacific Drive developers change their mind: A year after refusing to give it mid-run saves, it's getting mid-run saves
minecraft diamond level sword
Minecraft's never going free-to-play because as it stands it's 'the best deal in the world'
New shaders in Minecraft following Minecraft Live 2025
In the year of our lord 2025, Mojang is finally adding shaders to Minecraft, making reflective lighting and water effects more accessible for all
A dried ghast, a ghastling, and a friendly ghast all smiling
The latest Minecraft Live uncovered the tragic truth of the Nether's most bothersome mob, which has unlocked new levels of guilt
Latest in News
An Enshrouded player in a recreation of Erebor from The Lord of the Rings
Kings under the Mountain! 33 Enshrouded players spent 10,000 hours to recreate this iconic location from The Lord of the Rings
A mech awakens.
Mecha Break developer is considering unlocking all mechs following open beta feedback
Lara Croft Unified Art
Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics lays off 17 employees 'to better align our current business needs and the studio's future success'
A long bendy arm stealing money from people in a subway car
'You're a very long arm. You steal things. It's a comedy game,' explains developer of comedy game where you steal things with a very long arm
The heroes are attacked by monsters
Pillars of Eternity is getting turn-based combat to mark its 10th anniversary, and that means PC Gamer editors will soon be arguing about combat mechanics again
Image of Ronaldo from Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer
It doesn't really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened