Iron Gate Studio finally showed the promised difficulty modifiers for Valheim, as revealed yesterday via Twitter by Lead Software Engineer and Game Designer Jonathan Smårs. The brief video shows six difficulty presets: Easy, Casual, Hard, Hardcore, Immersive, and Hammer. Below you can find their respective in-game descriptions.

　　Easy

　　Combat is easier and there are less raids on your base.

　　Casual

　　In casual mode, monsters will not attack you until provoked, there are no raids on your base, resources are more plentiful, you will not drop equipped items or lose skills on death, combat is a lot easier and events are based on your individual progress.

　　Hard

　　Combat is harder and there are more raids on your base.

　　Hardcore

　　Combat is a lot harder and monsters will raid your base more often. When you die all of the items you are carrying and skills gained are lost forever. You have no map and you may not use portals.

　　Immersive

　　In immersive you have no map and may not use portals, so you will need to use your wits to keep track of where you are in the world.

　　Hammer

　　In hammer mode, you can build all buildings for free. There are no raids on your base, and monsters will not attack you until you provoke them. Other difficulty settings are normal.

　　Those are just the preset modifiers, anyway. Valheim players will also have the opportunity to tweak specific mechanics to their liking, including combat, death penalty, resource rate, raid rate, the ability or not to move items through portals, whether there is any build cost or not, whether events are player based or not, whether there are portals or a map, and whether enemies are passive or not.

　　Valheim encountered enormous success when it first launched on PC, easily making it on Valve's list of best-selling 2021 Steam games. It had perhaps too much success for its own good, as the small development team took a while to release new content. The Mistlands update only arrived in late 2022, while Iron Gate was also busy with the Xbox launch that materialized last month alongside its debut on the Game Pass subscription service.

　　Iron Gate Studio confirmed that Valheim is currently exclusive to Xbox consoles for six months. About a month ago, Jonathan Smårs said the developers aren't currently looking at a PlayStation port, though he also didn't outright close the door to it.