Valheim 1.0 Launches With Deep North Biome, Debuts on PS5 and Switch 2

Five and a half years after players first crawled out of a starter meadow with nothing but a stone axe, Valheim finally has an ending. Iron Gate’s Viking survival game left Early Access on September 9, closing out with the Deep North, its eighth and final biome, and shipping on PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 for the first time.

Valheim is developed by a five-person team, building on development work which studio co-founder Richard Svensson had undertaken as a side project in his spare time. That’s still the outfit behind one of the biggest survival games of the last five years, and 1.0 is the moment they finally called it finished, even if support keeps going.

What the Deep North Actually Adds

The Deep North caps off Valheim’s biome list, throwing in new enemies like the Gammeltroll alongside a stack of fresh weapons and an unlimited-use grappling hook and Winding Tunnels dungeons. It’s the region players have been staring at from the edge of the map since 2021, and it’s finally got content instead of empty ice.

Players immediately started arguing over whether the new grappling hook, the ice terrain, or the tougher enemy roster changes Valheim’s flow the most:

PS5, Switch 2 and Full Crossplay on Day One

On the same day Valheim also launched on PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2, with cross-play between platforms. That’s a genuinely big deal for a game that spent five years as PC and Xbox only. Valheim 1.0 went live around 12:55 UTC on September 9, 2026, on one build across every store, and crossplay works everywhere on day one.

Cross-saves aren’t as generous. Cross-saves only carry over between Xbox and Microsoft Store PC, so Switch 2 and PS5 owners are stuck starting fresh worlds on their own hardware. If you’re playing on Steam Deck, that’s less of an issue: the handheld keeps its Steam Deck Verified badge, and Valheim’s bigger bases still lean harder on CPU and memory than the GPU, which is good news for anyone dragging a Deck into the Deep North instead of a desktop.

Modders got a rougher deal. Enabling crossplay switches Valheim’s networking layer to Microsoft’s PlayFab backend and disables the BepInEx mod framework, so players who want mods active have to disable crossplay, which locks console players out of their session. It’s a fair trade for cross-platform play, but it’s one modded servers will need to plan around.

Price Jumps to $29.99, First Change Since 2021

Iron Gate took its Viking survival game out of early access on 9 September, after more than five and a half years, and used the 1.0 launch to raise the price for new buyers from $19.99 to $29.99, a 50% increase. It had sat at $19.99 since February 2021, and anyone who already owned the game paid nothing extra.

We’d argue that’s fair given what launched alongside it. A studio that shipped an entire console debut, a new biome, and a full ending without ever selling a battle pass or paid DLC across five years has earned the ten-dollar bump. Iron Gate has also confirmed it isn’t chasing a sequel, and plans to keep adding to Valheim itself rather than starting over.

Reviews Land High, Players Flood Back

The long-in-development hit has officially, and finally, released to an impressive 90% aggregate review score on Metacritic. PCGamesN’s review called the Deep North one of the standout areas the outlet had seen in a survival game, though it flagged that getting there is still a slog that will test people’s patience.

The player count numbers back up the review scores. Valheim reached over 168,000 concurrent players on Steam alone the day after launch, a huge jump for a game that had been sitting well outside Steam’s most-played chart for most of 2026. It’s the kind of return that only really happens when a five-year Early Access run actually delivers on its promise.

Launch wasn’t spotless. Iron Gate pushed hotfixes on September 11, two days after 1.0 went live, addressing bugs discovered once the full player base got into the Deep North. There was no Public Test Branch for this update, a deliberate choice so every platform experienced the finished biome at the same moment rather than PC players getting weeks of early testing.

Existing owners keep their save files, their characters, and every hour they’ve already put in. New Deep North terrain only generates in parts of the map nobody’s sailed to yet, so anyone with a fully explored world will need a fresh save to see the whole thing properly. Five years of early access is over. What comes next is whatever Iron Gate decides to add to a game it’s already said it won’t abandon.