How to use the map

A quick, no-nonsense guide to the main things people come here to do: find where you are, plan a base site, farm ore efficiently, track down locations and bosses, and bring in your own save to see what you've already explored.

1Loading a world and getting around

The map is generated from your world's seed — nothing is downloaded, it's computed live in your browser.

Find your seed: it's the string shown when you create a world, or drop your world's .fwl file straight onto the page (it also works for a character's .fch or a world's .db — see step 5). On Valheim 1.0.7 there is no .fwl: drop the world folder instead.
Type the seed into the box at the top and click generate.
Scroll to zoom, drag to pan. On a phone or tablet, pinch to zoom and drag with one finger.
Click fit world at any time to snap back to the whole map.
The coordinates in the bottom-right corner track your cursor — the same numbers the game shows you in‑world.

Tip: the same seed always produces the same map, but different game versions can shuffle locations — if things look off, double-check you're on the matching worldGenVersion.

2Finding locations, bosses & resources

Open the hamburger menu (top-left) → Tools → Locations to open the filter panel.

The panel is grouped into sections (dungeons, bosses, spawns, camps, ruins, and more) — tick a section's checkbox to toggle everything inside it, or expand it to pick individual types.
The map opens showing only spawn and the bosses, so it isn't overwhelming — turn on more as you need them.
Hover (or tap) any marker to see what it is; on touch devices a card appears at the bottom-left instead of a tooltip.
The first run computes the whole world once and caches it, so later visits with the same seed load instantly.

ordinary location highest peaks beehive ore deposit boss altar

Faded markers mean a location can only be built once — the game picks one of several candidate sites, so a cluster of faded circles shows every place it might have landed, not several real ones.

3Farming ore efficiently

Ore deposits (copper, tin, silver, obsidian) are drawn as diamonds in the Locations panel, under their own filter group.

Filled diamonds are exact — reproduced at the exact spot the game would place them. Hollow diamonds are upper bounds — real deposits the map's search found, but some in‑game deposits may be missing because of a check the map can't simulate.
Copper is the one fully solved type: every deposit shown is exactly where the game puts it.
Zoom out far enough and individual diamonds turn into a heat field — a quick way to spot which coastlines or biome edges are richest before zooming in to farm.
Copper and tin cluster on Black Forest coastlines and river edges; silver sits high in the Mountains; obsidian is Mountain-only too.

The map never invents a deposit — the honesty rule is: show exactly what's known, and say plainly when a type is a lower bound rather than the full picture. See the per-type tooltip in the panel for the current numbers.

4Planning where to build a base

Open the hamburger menu → Tools → Base planner for a ranked list of good building sites.

Pick a preset chip — First camp, Bronze hub, Iron hub, Endgame hub, Mountain base, Late-game farm or Fortress — to set sensible starting weights, or switch to the Tuning tab and drag the sliders yourself: closer to iron, closer to a boss, more sheltered, and so on.
Under Tuning, tick the biomes you would actually live in. Most presets search the Meadows; Mountain base searches the Mountain and Late-game farm the Plains and the Meadows beside them. You can tick several — each is filtered on its own height band and flatness, because 6 m of slope is a good meadow and no mountain at all.
Click Find sites. The planner searches the whole map for spots that clear hard requirements (buildable, not underwater, not on top of a location) and ranks the survivors by your weights.
Click a result card to see why it scored the way it did, its weakest metric, and a sketched travel route from a chosen start point.
If two of the criteria you weighted measure opposite things on that seed, the panel says so under the list — weighting both cancels them, and it tells you how much ranking power the pair lost. Where the two really are opposites, a single balance slider sits above them and spends their weight on one side.
Everything here is an opinion generated from real map data, not something the game itself calculates — treat a top result as "best under the weights you chose," not "the objectively best base."

Distances are geodesic — actual travel distance over land or sea under this tool's cost model, not a straight line — so a site across a fjord scores accordingly.

5Importing your own save

Open the hamburger menu → Tools → Your save, or just drag a file onto the page.

Drop a character's .fch file to draw your revealed fog and your in-game map pins over the generated map.
Drop a world's .db file to draw outlines around everything you've built and every zone where you've reshaped the terrain. On Valheim 1.0.7 a world is a folder rather than a single file — drop the whole folder (the one holding _main.fwl2 and the .chunk files), and it sets the seed and the game version as well.
A character can hold data for several worlds — if the match to the world on screen is ambiguous, the app will ask you which one.
In the no map (markers only) view, Revealed area does more than darken: it is the only place the map is drawn at all. You get the ground that character has already walked — the same ground the game has already shown them on their own minimap — and nothing beyond it. Turn the layer off and you are back to markers on an empty background.
Nothing is uploaded anywhere; the file is read entirely in your browser.

This is a snapshot of the save at the moment you exported it — the panel always names the file and shows when it was read, because nothing in a browser can tell if you've since kept playing.

6Terrain, contours & other view options

The hamburger menu's View group controls how the base map itself is drawn.

map: switch between lit terrain, flat biome colours only, or no background map at all (useful with lots of markers on).
relief shading: a north-west light source so slopes read as shape rather than flat colour. Purely cosmetic — the game has no such lighting.
tree cover: darkens the ground where trees can spawn, so the clearings in the Meadows and the fir groves out on the Plains stand out. This is the game’s own forest rule read at pixel resolution, not a guess — but it shades where trees can grow, and does not place individual trees. Two things it stays quiet about: the Black Forest is entirely forest by rule and is left plain, so bare Black Forest is not a clearing; and the Swamp, Mountains, Ashlands and Deep North have no forest rule at all, so nothing is claimed there. A clearing is thinned rather than bare too — the game still scatters the odd fir through one.
topographic: contour lines at a chosen interval. Heights are exact; a line's precise position is interpolated and sharpens as you zoom in.
biome variants: outlines the regions where Valheim 1.0.7 changes what spawns and grows — roughly 67 of them, covering about a tenth of the land. A region might add draugr to a Meadows, deathsquitos to a Plains, or block every hostile creature outright. Greyed out on pre-1.0 worlds, where the feature did not exist. Three things worth knowing: the game gives these regions no name of their own (stand in one and you are simply shown “Meadows”), so each is labelled by what it does, with the generator's internal name underneath; a region adds its creatures to whatever the biome already spawns, and since the game's base spawn list is not in the files we can read, there is no way to say how much difference that makes — so the map does not guess; what a region blocks is exact, and is stated plainly. Sixteen location types live only inside a variant, which is why a seed's tar pits are all in one corner.
highest peaks (in the Locations panel): the three highest points the map's scan could find — real heights, from a sampled search rather than an exhaustive one.

7Measuring a journey

Menu → Tools → Measure. Click two points and the map works out the route the terrain actually forces between them — not a straight line, which is usually a lie: a crypt 300 m across a headland can be a 1,400 m sail.

Two clicks, then drag. Click for point A, click for point B, and drag either handle afterwards to re-measure. A click that lands on a marker snaps to it, so “how far to that crypt” is two clicks.
Travel by on foot, raft, karve or longship. With a boat, water the boat can float in and reach from the open sea is sailed, and everything else is walked, waded or swum. Each boat has a draught — a longship runs aground where a raft does not — and water too shallow for it is swum rather than closed off. A landlocked lake is never sailed, because you could not get a boat to it.
Getting in and out of a boat costs time, so the route will not beach your longship to cut across a headland and relaunch on the other side. The flip side is that a boat has to save a few minutes before the route bothers taking one, which is also true of dragging one out for a short hop.
The line is drawn in three styles so you can see which parts you are sailing: solid in the boat, dashed on foot, dotted wading or swimming. The panel carries the same key.
Wooded ground can be counted as slower, using the same forest rule the tree-cover layer draws.
Shade what is in reach tints everywhere within a chosen number of minutes of point A. The search has already worked that out, so it costs nothing extra to show.
The distance is measured; the time is an estimate. Valheim computes no travel time, and this map reproduces world generation rather than the player’s movement — so there is no speed in the game for it to use. Every speed the arithmetic used is printed in the panel so you can see what the figure is made of. Sailing especially depends on the wind, which cannot be known here: a longship running before it does about three times what it does rowing into one.
On foot it will swim. That is the honest answer to “how far is it” and it is not a plan — stamina is not modelled, and a long swim drowns you. The panel warns when a route swims more than 200 m without touching land.
Read the distance and treat the line as a sketch. It still knows nothing about wind or collision, and it samples the world every 32 m — so a strait narrower than that can be closed or opened by the sampling alone, and the depth a draught is tested against is sampled just as coarsely.

8Watching a live session

If someone in your game is running the companion mod, they can press SHIFT-F8 to copy a link. Open it and this map joins their session and draws everyone in it, moving, on the world they are actually playing. Don’t have the mod yet? Setting it up takes about two minutes.

Nothing to install and nothing to type. The link carries the session code and the world’s seed, so the map starts drawing the terrain before it has even connected. Without a link the feature does not exist — the map behaves exactly as it always has.
Players are arrowheads, pointing the way they face, with their names always drawn. Someone who has gone quiet is dimmed rather than removed — “here a minute ago” is useful and “vanished” is not — and a player who has died is shown as a marker where their body is, not where they are.
Tap a name in the list to follow them. The map slides to that player and keeps them on screen while they travel — over a long distance it jumps rather than sliding, because a pan across half the world is a blur that shows you nothing. Move the map yourself and it stops following. Someone who is not sharing their position cannot be followed; there is nothing to press on their row.
Players glide rather than jump between updates. The mod sends a position every metre or so, and the map smooths the gaps — so the arrowhead you see is within about a metre of the last position that actually arrived. Every number the map prints is the reported one: the card on a player quotes what their game said, never the smoothed position it drew.
A player can share the session without sharing their position. They appear in the list, marked, and nowhere on the map. That is deliberate on both sides: an all-or-nothing switch just makes people turn the whole thing off.
You can mark the map back. Drop a marker and it appears on the in-game map of everyone playing; send a ping and it flashes on their minimap. Your own markers are remembered in this browser and go back out if you reload, because nothing else in the session remembers them for you.
Everyone leaves a trail. A fading line behind each arrowhead shows the last few minutes of where they walked, drawn from the positions that actually arrived — so it breaks rather than joins across a portal, a death, or a stretch where the map stopped hearing from someone. Where a jump was too fast for anything in the game to have covered the ground, a faint dotted arc joins the two points — a portal or a respawn, and the map does not claim to know which. Where the trail simply stops with no arc, the map lost them; that is not a claim that they teleported. It is held in the tab and nowhere else, and there is a checkbox to turn it off.
You can record a session and play it back. Press Record and the map keeps everyone’s path until you stop; the Replay panel then gives you a timeline you can scrub, a play button and a speed. A recording is what this browser received while the tab was open — a gap in it is a gap in reception rather than somebody standing still — and it keeps only the last few hours, marking the timeline where the start was dropped. Anyone who is not sharing their position is not recorded, and turning sharing off removes what was already recorded of them.
A recording stays in this browser until you save it. Export it to a .vmrec file to keep it or send it to somebody; drop that file back on the map to watch it again. Only a handful are kept in the browser, oldest first out, so the file is what makes one permanent.
A replay is never on screen beside the live players. Both are drawn the same way, and two of the same person at two different times with nothing saying which is which would be worse than useless. Opening a recording takes the live players off the map and says so; the session itself stays connected the whole time.
The map refuses to draw the wrong world. If the session is in a different world from the one on screen, nobody is drawn and the panel says so, with a button to switch. Every coordinate would be correct and the picture would still be a fiction — a player apparently standing in a lake who is standing on a mountain.

The code is a key, not a room name. Anyone who has it can see every player’s live position for as long as the session lasts, so share the link the way you would share a key. Nothing leaves your browser except through the session itself, and nothing about a session is saved to this map unless you press Record — a recording keeps the names and paths of everyone who is sharing their position, in this browser only, until you export it to a file yourself. An open tab keeps the session alive for everyone, so close it when you are done.

9A note on accuracy

This map reproduces Valheim's own world generation math rather than guessing, and it says so honestly where it can't be certain.

Terrain, biomes and the 147 location types are checked against real recorded worlds and matched exactly.
A few features — relief shading, contour lines, the highest-peaks search, the base planner's scoring, and the measuring tool's travel times — are presentation on top of that real data, not something the game itself computes. They're labelled as such wherever they appear.
Where a result is a bound rather than a certainty (like tin, silver and obsidian deposits), the panel says so rather than presenting it as complete.