Unofficial Valheim tools
Valheim World Generator
Preview your world before you set sail — and read the exact seed straight out of your own save file. No upload, no account, no queue.
A Valheim 1.0 world is a folder, not two files. You can instead and the newest completed save inside it is read automatically.
Where your world lives: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\worlds_local
on Windows, ~/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/worlds_local on Linux and Steam
Deck. On a rented server, download the file from your host's file manager.
Live seed-by-seed map rendering is being rolled out. Today you can read the exact seed out of a save file, check a seed's format, and browse the community seed list below.
Tools
Everything here is free and runs client-side. Pick a tool, or start from the seed extractor above.
Tool
Seed Viewer
Drop in your world folder and see the real map inside it — dungeons, altars, traders and your own builds, read straight from the save.
Open →Tool
Build Planner
Lay out a base on a grid, count the materials you will actually need, and export the plan before you sail.
Open →Tool
Interactive Map
How the world disk is laid out, where each biome starts, and what every map symbol means.
Open →Reference
Console Commands
Every Valheim command — player, admin and cheat — plus the 1.0 rule that locks achievements.
Open →How a Valheim world is generated
Valheim does not ship a map. It ships a generator and a seed. When you create a world the game takes the seed string you typed, hashes it into a 32-bit number, and feeds that number into a procedural pipeline: noise fields for height, a radial rule for which biome owns which band, and a placement pass that decides where the trader, the boss altars, the crypts and the villages land.
Two consequences follow, and both matter when you are choosing a world. First, the same seed always produces the same layout — on the same world generation version. Second, the game only stores what you have changed. The seed is the territory; your save file is the furniture.
That is why a seed preview works at all: nothing in the terrain needs your save to exist. The map is already implied by the seed. What the save does decide is the exact position of everything placed into the world, which is why older worlds can disagree with a pure prediction — see the note on Valheim 1.0 below.
What Valheim 1.0 changed about worlds and seeds
Valheim left Early Access on 9 September 2026, alongside the Deep North and the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 releases. The headline is the biome. The change that actually trips people up is quieter, and it is in your save folder.
Before 1.0 a world was a pair of files sitting side by side, MyWorld.fwl and
MyWorld.db. Since 1.0 a world is a folder named after the
world, and the data inside it is split into chunks so the game only rewrites what changed.
Iron Gate's own patch note describes it as a save system "designed to be resilient against
mid-write failures."
What a Valheim 1.0 world folder looks like
_main.N.fwl2— world metadata. This is the file that holds your seed. It is tiny._main.N.db2— world data, replacing the old.db._main.N.chunks— the index that ties the terrain chunks together.XX_XX__X_X.chunk— terrain, one file per explored region. These multiply as you play._main.N.ok— a marker written once a save has finished cleanly.
The N is a save counter that goes up every time the world saves — a brand new
world is _main.0, a long-running one might be _main.34. Any of
them reads the same seed.
Three practical points. Your pre-1.0 .db and .fwl files are not deleted — a world converted on first load leaves the originals in place,
which is why an old save can look like it exists twice. Conversion happens the first time the
world is saved in 1.0, not when the game updates. And an empty world folder with your world's
name on it usually just means that world has not been saved since the patch.
For seed hunting this matters because 1.0 reshuffled locations for worlds created before it. If your world predates the update, a pure prediction from the seed can put the trader in the wrong place. Reading the seed out of your own save — which is what the extractor above does — remains the reliable route either way.
Where each biome sits on the world disk
Valheim's world is a rough circle with a radius of about 10,000 metres. Difficulty scales outward from the centre, and biome choice is largely a function of distance from that centre plus altitude.
| Biome | Starts around | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Meadows | 0 m | Every world spawns its sacrificial stones here, at the centre of the disk. |
| Black Forest | ~500–600 m | Copper, tin and core wood — the first real step out. |
| Mountain | ~600 m out, above ~50 m altitude | Driven by altitude as much as distance from the centre. |
| Swamp | ~2,000 m | Ends around 6,000 m. Worlds created before the Mistlands update stretch to 8,000 m. |
| Plains | ~3,000 m | Flax, barley and black metal. Runs out around 8,000 m. |
| Mistlands | ~6,000 m | The outermost biome of the original disk, ending at the ~10,000 m edge. |
| Deep North | Northern edge | Added in Valheim 1.0 on 9 September 2026. The final biome. |
| Ashlands | Southern edge | The hostile mirror of Deep North at the opposite pole. |
Ocean is not a band — it is everything below about 26 metres of altitude, the water between islands. See the interactive map guide for the full breakdown and what the map symbols mean.
Community seeds worth a look
Seeds that Valheim players keep sharing. They are community-reported rather than officially documented — treat the notes as a starting point, and remember that a generated world only matches if you are on the same world generation version.
Found a seed worth adding? Every entry here is cross-checked before it goes up. Nothing is listed that we could not confirm against more than one report.
Common questions
How do I find my Valheim seed?
Four ways, from the in-game world list to reading it out of a save file. Full walkthrough with the folder paths for Windows, Linux and dedicated servers.
Read the guide →Do console commands lock achievements?
Yes — since 1.0 most of them permanently flag your character. Here is exactly which commands are safe and which are not.
See the command list →Can I plan a base before gathering wood?
Sketch the footprint on a grid, tot up the materials, and export it as a picture to work from in game.
Open the planner →Why does my map look different in game?
Almost always one of four things: the wrong seed, the wrong world version, a mod, or a world made before the current generation pass.
Read the map guide →Can I see my world without loading the game?
Yes — drop your world folder on the seed viewer and it plots every dungeon, altar, trader and building from the coordinates in your own save.
Open the seed viewer →
Sites and sources behind the facts on this page: Iron Gate's 1.0 release notes and patch
notes, the community Valheim Wiki, and the reverse-engineered world metadata format
published under the MIT licence by the corgonia/fwl project. Facts on this page
were last checked on October 8, 2026.