Valheim 1.0 is live. Iron Gate posted "Valheim 1.0 Has Arrived!" at 12:55 UTC on 9 September 2026, ending five and a half years of Early Access and shipping the Deep North, the game's first PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 versions and full crossplay. The launch hour is no longer an estimate, the patch notes are public, and dedicated servers are pulling the new build. Here is the confirmed time in your zone, what actually shipped, and what to do with your server tonight.
Valheim 1.0 Release Date and Launch Time
Iron Gate never announced an hour in advance, and in the end it did not need to. The studio's own Steam announcement carries the timestamp: 12:55 UTC on Wednesday 9 September 2026. That is when the post went out and when the build went live.
Worth saying out loud, because we published the estimate this morning: the widely reported window was 6:00 AM Pacific. The real release landed five minutes earlier, at 5:55 AM Pacific. The table below is the confirmed time, not a guess.
| Region | Zone | Time on 9 September |
|---|---|---|
| US West | PDT | 5:55 AM |
| US East | EDT | 8:55 AM |
| UK | BST | 1:55 PM |
| Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Poland, France | CEST | 2:55 PM |
| Finland | EEST | 3:55 PM |
| Reference | UTC | 12:55 PM |
Every row is the same instant: 12:55 UTC on Wednesday 9 September 2026.
What Shipped With Valheim 1.0
The full patch notes went up with the build, on Steam: Valheim 1.0 Has Arrived!. They are long. The headline numbers, straight from Iron Gate's own list:
- The Deep North, the last biome on the roadmap, at the northern edge of the world
- 40+ new weapons, across the Nord, Frostfire and Thunderblood lines, plus new bombs and ammunition
- 10+ new creatures, and a new boss, Kall Fimbulbringer
- 80+ new build pieces, plus 5 new crafting stations and extensions
- 20+ new food items and 30+ new crafting materials
- Two new dungeons, the Winding Tunnels and Mörkhalla
- A Grappling Hook for climbing, and a Snow Shovel, because snow now piles up and has to be cleared
- Achievements
Under the hood: a Unity engine upgrade, a new Draw Distance graphics setting, faster world generation and a rewritten save system that splits world data into chunks. That last one is the part a server owner should care about, and it comes up again below.
On the achievement count, the patch notes list achievements as a feature and give no number at all. Press coverage has settled on more than 50. That is reporting, not an Iron Gate figure, so hold it loosely until the list is in front of you. Valheim 1.0 achievements: how they work and what counts goes through what does and does not carry over from Early Access.
PS5, Switch 2 and Crossplay at Launch
1.0 arrived on every platform on the same day:
- PC (Steam on Windows, Mac and Linux)
- Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S
- PlayStation 5 (new)
- Nintendo Switch 2 (new)
PS5 and Switch 2 are new to Valheim with this release. Crossplay runs across all of them, so a Steam player, an Xbox player, a PS5 player and a Switch 2 player can share one world on one dedicated server. If friends are arriving on a console tonight, How to Join a Valheim Server on Xbox, PS5 and Switch 2 covers the join flow for each of them.
Crossplay does not disable mods, whatever you read elsewhere. We checked it on our own test server today and BepInEx loaded its plugins normally with crossplay switched on.
What Server Owners Should Do Now
Four things, roughly in this order.
Restart the server. The restart is the update. Steam patches your client the moment you open it. A dedicated server only asks Steam for a new build when it boots, and automatic updates are on by default, so a restart is the whole procedure. Our own test server made the jump on its next start: the Steam build id went from 21981590 to 25185644, and the console line went from Valheim version: l-0.221.12 (network version 36) to Valheim version: l-1.0.7 (network version 39). The network version moved from 36 to 39, and that number is what decides whether two machines will talk to each other at all. It is exactly why a friend who has updated gets refused by a server that has not. The fix is a restart, never a reinstall. How to Update Your Valheim Server has the full sequence, including how to read that version line back out of the console.
Your mods are not automatically dead. Everyone is publishing "1.0 breaks every mod" today. That is not what we measured. We booted our test server on 1.0 with the BepInEx stack still in place and read the console: the loader 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 it was already failing on before 1.0, so that is a pre-existing problem and not a 1.0 regression. Two plugins and a library is a small sample and we are not claiming the ecosystem is fine. What it does show is that the loader itself runs on 1.0 and that simple or server-side plugins can load. The engine moved to a new Unity build and a lot of game code changed with it, so the mods genuinely at risk are the ones that patch what Iron Gate rewrote. Read your own server console for the Loading [...] lines and see which of yours came up, instead of assuming everything broke.
Your save survives, and 1.0 changes how saves are written. The patch notes describe a new save system that splits world data across chunks, so less data is serialized on each write, and that is designed to survive a failure mid-write. Terrain is still generated once and then stored, though, so ground you have already explored keeps the biome it was generated with. A long-running world will not sprout a Deep North where you have already sailed, and Iron Gate recommends starting over. To get the new biome without abandoning the old world, Valheim 1.0: How to Start a Fresh Deep North World covers running a second world on the same server.
The server will be busier than usual. Console players, returning players and a five-year backlog of "we should play Valheim again" all arrive in the same week. If your world is meant to stay private, set a password before tonight. When something misbehaves, Common Valheim Server Problems and How to Fix Them covers the failures we see most.
Never run a Valheim server before? Getting Started with Your Valheim Server is the short version.
Host Your Valheim Server with DoomHosting
DoomHosting's Valheim servers run on dedicated Ryzen 9 hardware with instant deploy, full FTP access, DDoS protection, one-click BepInEx and 24/7 support through launch week. Automatic updates are on by default, so getting a world onto 1.0 is a restart.
Valheim stopped being an Early Access game at 12:55 UTC today. Restart your server, check the version line, and we will see you in the Deep North.
