Tool
See a Valheim world before you play it
Valheim generates its terrain from the seed, and never stores it. Type a seed below and the generator runs again, here in your browser — the coastline, every biome, the mountain caps and the world edge, drawn from the same algorithm the game uses.
A seed is the word or phrase you typed when you created the world. Case matters —
j3QV2ftr3y and J3QV2FTR3Y are different worlds. Scrolling
zooms, dragging pans, and the readout under the map tells you what is under the cursor.
How the generator works
A Valheim world is a disc about 20 km across. Everything about it comes out of a single 32-bit number, which is why the seed phrase you typed at world creation matters so much: the game hashes that text once, and that hash drives the rest.
The constructor draws seven values from it before generating anything — four
offsets for the continent noise, a seed for the rivers, a seed for the streams, and
a fifth offset used by the Mistlands mask. The order is off0,
off1, off2, off3, riverSeed,
streamSeed, off4; off4 being last is not a
curiosity but a hard requirement, because an extra draw anywhere before it shifts
every offset after it and produces a different world.
Those offsets are fed into Mathf.PerlinNoise, Unity's noise function.
It is not textbook Perlin and the difference is not cosmetic: the inputs pass
through abs(), which makes the field mirror across both axes, and the
raw result is rescaled by (raw + 0.69) / 1.483. A textbook
implementation fails silently — the world it draws is self-consistent, plausible
and completely wrong.
From six noise samples to a continent
The continent shape is one function. It multiplies three pairs of Perlin samples together, forms a running product, subtracts a constant, then does two more things: a pair of low-frequency samples that carve sea channels wherever they agree, and a cap that flattens anything over a certain height near spawn. Multiply the result by 200 and you have metres.
Past 10,000 m from the centre the rim fades down to a two-hundred-metre drop, and for the last ten metres to the world edge there is a second sharp step — that is the wall of water at the boundary, not a rendering artefact. Inside 1,000 m of the world centre, terrain above a threshold is squashed back down, which is why the starting island is usually walkable rather than a mountain range.
How biomes are chosen
Biome is a sequence of tests, and the order of the tests is the specification. Ashlands is checked first and beats everything; then Ocean; then Deep North; then Mountain. Only after all four have had their say are the four noise-gated biomes tried — Swamp, Mistlands, Plains, Black Forest — and anything that falls through all of them is Meadows.
The four gated biomes each need two things: a Perlin mask above a threshold, and a distance from the world centre inside a band. Swamp wants a mask above 0.6 between 2,000 m and 6,000 m and low ground; Mistlands wants 0.4 above 6,000 m; Plains wants 0.4 beyond 3,000 m; Black Forest wants 0.4 beyond 600 m. Because the bands are defined by distance but the masks are noise, you get ragged rings rather than clean circles — which is the texture you are looking at on the map.
Ashlands and Deep North are not bands but discs: everything more than 12,000 m from a point 4,000 m south of centre is Ashlands, and everything more than 12,000 m from a point 4,000 m north of centre is Deep North. Both distances carry a wobble of about ±100 m in twenty lobes, which is why the two regions have a scalloped edge instead of a circular one.
What this cannot tell you, honestly
It does not show dungeons, altars, traders or villages yet. The land is generated from the seed alone; locations are placed under a separate set of rules that live in the game's data, not its algorithm. Until that table is in, this page draws the stage and not the actors, and it will keep saying so.
It does not show trees, ore or berries. Vegetation is seeded per 64 m zone from the world seed, so it is in principle generative — but two of the tests that accept or reject a candidate depend on a physics raycast and on what is already standing in the zone, neither of which can be reproduced from the seed. A layer drawn without them would be candidate sites rather than ore, and it would be silently right in open ground and silently wrong next to your base.
It is not your save. If you want what a world actually contains rather than what its seed produces, the seed viewer reads your world folder and plots the real objects out of it. The two tools are deliberately different, and neither replaces the other.
It is not official. This is an independent reimplementation of a fan-documented format and a fan-reverse-engineered generator. It is not affiliated with Iron Gate Studio, and it uses no game assets — every colour, glyph and layout here is drawn from scratch.
Reading the map
The world view opens at 22 km across, which is the whole disc plus the ocean margin. Bright green in the middle is Meadows, the ring that surrounds it is Black Forest and Plains, the grey-white flecks are mountains, the purple is Mistlands, and the white and red bands at the top and bottom are the Deep North and the Ashlands. The dark blue is water — the map classifies anything at or below sea level as Ocean regardless of what biome the land underneath would have been.
Scrolling zooms toward the cursor and dragging pans. The readout under the map
follows the pointer and reports the world coordinates, the biome and the ground
height in metres, which is the fastest way to answer a question like "how high is
that hill" or "is this spot actually Plains". Typing a new seed regenerates
everything; case matters, so j3QV2ftr3y and J3QV2FTR3Y
are two different worlds.
Seed map questions
Is this map generated or read from a save file?
Generated. Valheim never stores its terrain — it stores the objects standing on it, and the seed it started from — so the only way to draw a world you have not played is to run the same generator the game runs. That is what this page does. It is a different tool from our seed viewer, which reads an actual save folder and shows what that world really contains.
Can a generated map ever be wrong?
Yes, in one specific way, and it is worth knowing. The land itself is a pure function of the seed, so the biomes and the coastline are exact. Locations are not: a world created before Valheim 1.0 had its dungeons, altars and traders re-rolled the first time 1.0 loaded it, using 1.0's rules but never into a zone the player had already explored. In country you have never visited, that re-roll is identical to fresh generation. Where you have played, it is not — which is exactly why reading the save is the right tool once you have one.
Does it show dungeons, boss altars and traders?
Not yet, and this page will say so until it does. Those need the game's location table — the per-location rules for how far from spawn each type may sit, which biome it belongs to and how many candidates it rolls — which is data rather than algorithm and has to be extracted from the shipped game. The terrain and every biome are already drawn from the generator itself. The location layer is the next thing being built.
How do I know the shape is right and not just plausible?
Because it is checked against the game rather than eyeballed. The generator here is verified against recorded output from Valheim 1.0.16: on a lattice of one million points spanning the world, all million biome classifications and all million terrain heights are bit-for-bit identical to the game's, and that holds across 64 different seeds. A render that merely looked right would pass a screenshot check; this one cannot drift a single bit without failing.
Where do I find my seed?
In the world metadata inside your save folder. On Windows that is %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\worlds_local; on Linux and Steam Deck it is ~/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/worlds_local. If you would rather not go digging, our seed extractor reads it out of the file for you, or you can use the in-game console command printseeds.
Why are the biome bands arranged in rings?
Because that is how the generator places them. Every biome except Ocean is gated on distance from the world centre as well as on noise: Black Forest starts at 600 m, Plains at 3,000 m, Mistlands at 6,000 m, and the Ashlands and Deep North are outside a 12,000 m ring around two off-centre points. The noise decides where inside those bands a biome actually appears, which is why the rings look ragged rather than concentric.
What is the difference between the two views?
Biome colours each pixel by the biome the generator assigns it, which is what the in-game map colours show you. Terrain ignores biomes and paints height instead, with a hillshade and contour lines, so you can see the shape of the land — where a ridge runs, where a slope flattens out, how high a plateau sits. Both come from the same single pass over the world.
Does it work for Deep North and Ashlands worlds?
Yes, and it is one of the few places you can check them cheaply. Both are defined by their own ring in the generator and both appear on the whole-world view — Deep North across the top of the map, Ashlands across the bottom. On a typical seed they cover roughly a tenth and a quarter of the land respectively, and you can see exactly where that falls before you commit to a world.