Valheim devs finally get around to reading 5 years of player feedback, let you remap dodge key

When battling tree-swinging trolls, ice-spitting dragons, and fire-breathing skeletal demigods, it's hard to think of a skill more important than dodging. A shield or a weapon held up defensively can help, sure, but escaping deadly attacks in Valheim is often down to how quickly you can tuck and roll.

Which makes it a bit curious that over the past five years of early access, you couldn't redbind the dodge skill to a single key or button press. If you want to dodge on keyboard, you have to hold the block button (mouse 2) and press jump (space bar) and pick a direction (WASD). On controller, it's a stick + button combo. No single tap for a deeply important maneuver has been available for the past five years.

Until today! Those busy Valhiem devs finally took a peek at player feedback and noticed the request people have been making constantly for the past five years, seven months, 15 days, 17 hours, and 22 minutes: You have now been granted the ability to remap your dodge key to an alternate—no doubt single-tap—configuration.

Better late than never?

That's not the only key rebinding option that's been added. You can rebind items on the radial wheel and hotbar, too. A much newer request, to disable the intro cinematic (which only appeared with Valheim 1.0 last week), has also been granted. There are also some bug fixes, notably more tinkering with the Valheim cheat-flagging feature that was mislabeling some players and resources as cheats.

Have a look at the full patch notes below, and good luck trying to unlearn the muscle memory you've developed for dodging with three different keys over the past five years or so. One note: the patch, devs say, "will require a few days to get uploaded to all platforms." I've checked and it's live on PC now, however.

Quality of Life:

• Added several new keybinding options to the keyboard (Alternate dodge key, hotbar rebinding (on top of 1-8), support for rebinding radial wheel, support for removing keybinds)
• Added accessibility setting to be able to toggle blocking
• Add toggle to Gameplay settings to skip the intro cinematic on startup
• When attacking, the player’s rotation now also snaps towards the intended attack direction when the “attack towards look direction” option is enabled, not just when it’s disabled.
• Swapped Motion Sensor and Sheath keybinds on gamepad, returning Sheath to its original keybind. Motion Sensor can now be activated with the alt-key + Sheath button instead.

Optimizations:

• Improved GPU performance when tessellation is disabled by eliminating unnecessary GPU overhead in this case.
• Heightmap shadows are now calculated more accurately and at a lower performance cost.
• Optimized particle systems in the main menu to reduce overdraw.
• Multiple GPU performance improvements on Switch 2.

Bugs & Issues:

• PlayerBase effect on some build pieces has been increased to block enemies more
• Fixed inaccuracies in stick input pre-processing that made it heavily weighted towards axis-aligned movement and 30% too slow diagonally.
• Jotun puffs and Magecaps no longer respawn.
• Fix for player characters sometimes mistakenly being marked as temporary cheaters, leading to items dropped by monsters they kill being incorrectly marked as having a cheated origin.
• Cheated stackable items no longer stack with regular items, preventing uncheated stacks from being “corrupted” into a cheated state.
• Persistent Events devcommand (“pevents”) is now actually behind the devcommands toggle and not available in the console by default.
• Fixed errors when using the grappling hook’s secondary attack on creatures.
• Fixed various issues with Ashlands water (VFX, water damage not stopping)
• Fixed a bug where characters didn’t save correctly when manually pressing Save while playing on a server hosted by someone else.
• Disabled biomedata caching, fixing a bug where the cache could end up in an invalid state, making it impossible to join remote servers.
• Fixed Deep North battleaxes tool tier, can now cut all the trees.
• Made placeable boulders persist, only placeable on the ground, break if the ground they’re standing on goes away, and give ground-level support.
• Updated Ballista to make it accept all new trophies (All Deep North enemies + Bjorn + Vile)
• Timberwood build pieces no longer incorrectly show up in earlier biome locations
• Fixed various crashes/errors that could happen in rare circumstances
• Fixed a bug where Helmet of the Protector was craftable directly via the Black Forge
• Fixed a bug where terrain modifications by players or monsters could lead to performance and portal issues in multiplayer, such as performance and portaling issues, terrain seams, and terrain modifications becoming undone
• Updated Deep North and Winding Tunnels music for better balance and to remove some clicks when looping.
• Now plays the correct music in Mörkhalla.
• Better mixing of location music in the Deep North.
• Tweaked Seal and Baby Seal colliders to better match their bodies.
• Fixed an issue where the “No time for snoozing” achievement could sometimes not be unlocked in multiplayer
• Fixed an issue where The Homesteader and The Architect achievements could unlock repeatedly.
• Nintendo Switch 2: The TV output no longer switches from 120 Hz to 60 Hz while the virtual keyboard is open or while in the home menu when using the balanced graphics preset and playing online multiplayer, which caused a black screen while entering and leaving these menus.
• PlayStation®5: The TV output no longer switches from 120 Hz to 60 Hz while in the home menu when using the balanced graphics preset, which caused a black screen when entering and leaving this menu.
• PlayStation®5: The “Stronger Together” achievement is now achievable.
• Steam: Fixed a bug where Steam Cloud could get stuck in an invalid state if the game crashed while saving.

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.