Valheim 1.0 went live at 12:55 UTC on 9 September 2026, and it brought the achievement system the game went without for its entire Early Access run. The question almost every returning player has: no, your old hours do not count. Achievement tracking starts when you install 1.0, so nothing you did before the update is credited retroactively.
That is the short answer. The longer one matters most if your world lives on a dedicated server.
Do Early Access Achievements Count Retroactively? No
Iron Gate answered this in the official Valheim 1.0 FAQ. The achievement system begins tracking statistics from the moment you download the 1.0 version. Five and a half years of Early Access, the bosses you already killed, the base you already built: none of it registers.
Three things follow from that, and they are not the ones people expect:
- You do not need a new character. Old saves are eligible. Tracking simply starts now, on whatever character you load.
- You do not need a new world either. Whether to start fresh is a Deep North question, not an achievement question.
- One thing does block unlocks permanently. A character that has used cheat commands carries a flag, and Iron Gate says that flag blocks achievement unlocks. It does not wear off.
That last point deserves a second read if you run a server for friends. The flag rides on the character, not on the world, so a group where one person spent an evening in god mode does not lose anything collectively. That one player does, on that one character, for good.
The 1.0 patch notes push the same idea further down into the game: items spawned with cheat commands are now marked as "cheated item" when you look at them in your inventory. Iron Gate still has not published exactly what trips the character flag, so keep the console off any character you intend to chase achievements with and test on a throwaway one instead. Normal server work is a different mechanism: restarting, taking a backup or editing the admin list touches server files, never your character save.
What the 1.0 Achievement System Actually Is
Valheim spent its entire Early Access without Steam achievements, which is why "valheim achievements" has been an autocomplete fixture for years. That gap closed with 1.0.
What is established: 1.0 ships with an achievements system. The patch notes list it as a feature and give no count at all, and Iron Gate's own FAQ never committed to one either. It said "a whole bunch". Steam answers it now: 53 achievements, each with its own icon and its own unlock condition, and 17 of them hidden.
The list itself is public now. Iron Gate showed a handful of icons in a Word From the Devs post back in May and deliberately kept the unlock conditions to itself, and the patch notes did not fill that gap either, so the full set only became readable when 1.0 shipped and the Steam achievement page went up. The authoritative version of your own progress is in your own copy of the game: the game's own achievements screen, and the Steam overlay on PC, show the real set with your own progress against it.
The patch notes also add two new dev commands, achievements and getstat, alongside the existing console. Both are console commands, and the console is the thing we just told you to keep away from a character you care about, so use them on a throwaway character and read your real progress off the achievements screen instead.
The full list of Valheim achievements
Steam lists 53 achievements for Valheim, and 17 of them are hidden, meaning the name is shown but the unlock condition is not.
Bosses
| Achievement | What to do |
|---|---|
| The Viking | Defeat every boss on any difficulty. |
| The Tough Viking | Defeat every boss on normal difficulty or higher. |
| The Toughest Viking | Defeat every boss on hard difficulty. |
| Odin is Pleased | Defeat every miniboss. |
Building
| Achievement | What to do |
|---|---|
| The Homesteader | Build a house. |
| The Architect | Build a village. |
| The Builder | Place 500 build pieces. |
| The Carpenter | Build every kind of piece. |
| Mighty Halls | Raise a very tall structure. |
| Top of the World | Build something very high up. |
| Comfort is King | Reach a comfort level of 20. |
Crafting, cooking and food
| Achievement | What to do |
|---|---|
| The Blacksmith | Craft every kind of weapon. |
| The Artisan | Craft every kind of item. |
| The Cook | Cook 100 dishes. |
| The Master Chef | Cook every kind of dish. |
| The Gourmet | Eat every kind of edible item. |
| No Adventuring On an Empty Stomach | Eat 500 items of food. |
| The Farmer | Harvest 500 crops. |
| The Forager | Pick 250 berries and 250 mushrooms. |
| The Beekeeper | Harvest 500 honey. |
| The Lumberjack | Cut down 500 trees. |
Exploration and sailing
| Achievement | What to do |
|---|---|
| The Explorer | Travel far in all four directions. |
| The Pathfinder | Travel far in all four directions without using a map. |
| The Sailor | Sail far enough to circle the world twice. |
| The Captain | Sail far enough to circle the world while manning the helm. |
| The Fisherman | Catch every kind of fish. |
| A Catch Worthy of Njord | Catch a four star fish. |
Survival and combat
| Achievement | What to do |
|---|---|
| The Hunter | Kill every kind of creature. |
| The Master Hunter | Kill every kind of creature on hard difficulty. |
| The Trophy Collector | Collect all trophies. |
| The Survivor | Survive for 30 consecutive days. |
| Are You Alright? | Die in every way possible. |
| Kings and Queens of Valheim | Hold The Viking, The Hunter, The Artisan, The Master Chef, The Carpenter and The Explorer. |
| Child of Odin | Hold The Toughest Viking, The Master Hunter, The Survivor and The Pathfinder. |
Multiplayer
| Achievement | What to do |
|---|---|
| Stronger Together | Kill a boss together with a friend. |
| Lone Wolf | Kill a boss all by yourself. |
Hidden
Steam shows these 17 by name only. The conditions below are what players have confirmed since launch, not text Iron Gate published.
| Achievement | What to do |
|---|---|
| I Have Arrived! | Enter the tenth world. It fires as you arrive in Valheim. |
| The First of Many | Die for the first time. |
| Eikthyr | Defeat Eikthyr, summoned at the altar in the Meadows. |
| The Elder | Defeat The Elder, summoned at the altar in the Black Forest. |
| Bonemass | Defeat Bonemass, summoned at the altar in the Swamp. |
| Moder | Defeat Moder, found in the Mountains. |
| Yagluth | Defeat Yagluth, summoned at the altar in the Plains. |
| The Seeker Queen | Defeat The Queen inside the Mistlands citadel. |
| Fader | Defeat Fader, summoned at the altar in the Ashlands. |
| Kall Fimbulbringer | Defeat Kall, summoned at the Strange Bowl in the Aesir Passage with 3 Malicious Blood. |
| The Chosen One | Assemble Dyrnwyn at a level 4 Black Forge. |
| Accidents Happen | Get killed by a falling tree. |
| That Can't Be an Accident | Get killed by every kind of tree. |
| Obliterated | Stand too close to an Obliterator and die to the strike. |
| The Legends Are True | Sail over the edge of the world. |
| The Treasure Hunter | Dig up 10 buried treasure chests. |
| No Time For Snoozing | Wake a sleeping sea creature. |
Only one of the 53 genuinely needs a second player: Stronger Together, a boss killed alongside a friend. Its opposite, Lone Wolf, needs a boss killed with nobody else helping. Kings and Queens of Valheim and Child of Odin read like group achievements from the names, but both are completion chains that fire once you hold the achievements they list, so a solo player earns them exactly the same way. The long grinds behind them are what a rented server actually helps with: our Valheim servers stay up whether or not the host is at their desk, and they hold several worlds on one plan, so a fresh Deep North run can sit next to the save your group has been building on for years.
Achievements on a Dedicated Server
The worry that comes up in every group chat on a launch day: does playing on a rented server cost us the achievements?
It does not. Achievements unlock client side, on the account of the player who did the thing, so it makes no difference whether the world runs on a friend's PC or in a datacentre. Five people on one server are chasing five separate sets of unlocks rather than a shared pool, and one person's cheat flag does not touch anyone else's progress.
The FAQ names exactly one blocker for unlocks, the cheat flag above. Dedicated servers are not on that list.
What genuinely costs you achievements is more boring: not being able to play at all. There are two ways that happens, and both are fixable in minutes.
Blocker One: Your Server Is Still on the Old Build
Your client updated itself the moment Steam noticed 1.0. Your server did not, and it will not until it boots again. Automatic updates are on by default and a Valheim server asks Steam for the newest build every single time it starts, which means the restart is the update.
We watched ours do it on launch day. The Steam build id went from 21981590 to 25185644, and the console version line went from Valheim version: l-0.221.12 (network version 36) to Valheim version: l-1.0.7 (network version 39). That network version, 36 to 39, is the number that decides whether two machines will talk to each other. It is why a friend who has updated cannot join a server that has not, no matter how healthy the server looks in the panel. The client and the server have to agree on it.
Give the boot more time than usual: a release this size pulls several gigabytes before the game process even starts, so a slow first start is the update working, not a hang.
The full walkthrough, including how to read that version line back out of the console to confirm what landed, is here: how to update your Valheim server.
Blocker Two: Mods
Iron Gate shipped no public test branch for 1.0, so no mod author could build against the final code in advance. The story that ran everywhere at launch is that mods are broken across the board. That is not what we measured.
We booted our own test server on 1.0 with its BepInEx stack still installed and read the console. BepInEx started normally, logged Chainloader started and then Chainloader startup complete, and brought up Loading [MaxPlayerCount 1.2.4] and Loading [Jotunn 2.28.0] without complaint. One plugin, Epic Loot, failed on a missing dependency, and it was failing on the same dependency before 1.0, so that is a pre-existing problem rather than a launch-day regression.
Hold two things at once. The loader itself works on 1.0, and simple or server-side plugins can load, so "everything is broken" is wrong. But two plugins and a library, one of them a dependency framework, is a small sample and not a clean bill of health for the ecosystem. The mods genuinely at risk are the ones that patch game code Iron Gate changed: the engine moved to a new Unity build in this release and a lot of code moved with it, so a plugin that hooks a method that no longer looks the same will fail, while one that only changes a server setting usually will not.
So check rather than assume. Open your server console after the restart and look for the Loading [...] lines: every plugin that came up is named there, and anything that failed is named too, along with why. A failure does not take the server down either, BepInEx skips the plugin and boots anyway. Installing BepInEx mods covers the update and reinstall loop for the ones that do need a new version, and common Valheim server problems explains how to read those console lines. Crossplay does not disable mods either: we checked that on the same test server, with BepInEx loading its plugins while the server registered with the crossplay backend.
Old World or Fresh World for an Achievement Run?
Achievements do not force this decision. Old saves are eligible, so you can start unlocking on the world your group has been on for years.
The Deep North does force it, up to a point. Saves survive the update, but terrain is written into the world file the first time somebody loads it and never rewritten, so the new northern biome needs map nobody has visited, or a new world. Iron Gate recommends starting over for the best 1.0 experience.
On a rented server that is not an either/or. A server holds as many worlds as you want, so keep the long running save and create a fresh 1.0 world beside it, then switch whenever the mood changes. How to start a fresh Deep North world walks through it in about a minute.
The Console Question
1.0 launched simultaneously on PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2, with crossplay across all of them. Your server does not care which one a player is on: joining from Xbox, PS5 and Switch 2 puts a console player in the same world as everyone else. How each platform's own trophy list lines up with the Steam one is not something we have seen published. For the launch time itself and everything else that shipped, see Valheim 1.0 release time and what shipped.
Frequently asked questions
Do Valheim achievements work on a dedicated server? Yes. Achievements are tracked by your own game client, so a rented server counts exactly like a local one. The one condition is that the server runs the 1.0 build, which is the first blocker described above.
Does my Early Access progress count? No. Tracking starts when 1.0 is installed on your PC. Bosses killed and hours played before that are not credited, and a character that used cheats before 1.0 starts flagged.
Do cheats or mods block achievements? Cheat commands flag both the character and the world as cheated, and a flagged save cannot unlock achievements. For mods, follow the mods section above and keep the client clean for an achievement run.
How many achievements are there, and how many are hidden? Steam lists 53 for Valheim, 17 of them hidden. Every hidden one is listed above with the condition players have confirmed since launch.
Host Your Valheim Server With DoomHosting
DoomHosting's Valheim servers run on dedicated Ryzen 9 hardware with one-click BepInEx and Thunderstore mod installs, full FTP access, DDoS protection and 24/7 support. Multiple worlds sit on the same plan, so your long running save and a fresh Deep North world can live side by side.
Sharpen your swords.
