I’m once again getting some serious building envy from looking at community creations in Valheim, as someone has managed to construct a ridiculously detailed version of Notre-Dame de Paris – and it might be the best Valheim build I’ve seen so far.
Made by Reddit user GlPv, the virtual cathedral bears remarkable similarities to the real-life version (before the 2019 fire that destroyed much of the roof, at least). It’s got a central spire, bell towers, stained glass windows (of a sort) and even flying buttresses. GlPv said that apart from the stone floor, the entire structure is made of wood, with most of the building “based on the frame”.
“First I made the frame that was based on the real building, then the roof and walls,” GlPv explained. “[The] walls alone looked too flat, so I added some depth with vertical beams. This looks complicated but most of the parts are connected with joints, rarely did I have to place something with precision.”
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, this wasn’t made in vanilla Valheim: GlPv used the game’s debug mode to construct the cathedral, which allows players to fly around and build with no resource cost. Still, the building effort apparently took around 10 hours, and GlPv said it was “extremely time consuming” to keep comparing their work with reference images of the real thing. GlPv also stuck to the game’s normal rules about stability, meaning the build required plenty of reinforced wood iron poles and core wood to prevent the towers from collapsing.
The end result shows just how far you can push the limits of Valheim’s building mechanics: although apparently this also brought GlPv’s frame-rate down to paltry 12FPS, so perhaps Notre-Dame wouldn’t be entirely practical in the vanilla survival experience. Not to mention the carnage if a troll took a swing at that. The inside of this Notre-Dame is currently empty, but GlPv said they might add some interior details in future.
In other Valheim news, the game recently reached a whopping 5m units sold, and became one of only five games in history to achieve 500,000 concurrent players on Steam. And if you want to see more outrageous structures created by that community, you can check out our extended round-up over here.
