A Valheim speedrunner has achieved a unique record by becoming the first player to defeat the game’s bosses in reverse order. The popular survival sandbox game currently features five bosses, including Eikthyr, The Elder, Bonemass, Moder, and Yagluth. Players who want to challenge Valheim’s bosses will need to collect certain items and use them in specific locations to summon the specific boss.
Speedrunning or accomplishing unique challenges are some of the ways players are able to expand the fun and excitement of a game they’re playing. While speedrunning conventionally involves finishing a game in the fastest way possible some players have made the experience even more interesting by either creating specific speedrun challenges or goals. One streamer recently took on and accomplished the awesome challenge of speedrunning Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice whilst they were blindfolded.
Streamer and speedrunner NickRawcliffe recently published a new video documenting their latest challenge, beating Valheim’s five bosses in reverse order. They started the run by defeating the game’s final boss, Yagluth, followed by Moder, Bonemass, The Elder, and finally Eikthyr. In the 17-minute video, NickRawcliffe explains the process of how they were able to accomplish this feat, which took a whopping 45 hours, as some of them would normally be inaccessible without defeating the preceding boss, with Bonemass being one example.
In regular circumstances, players would have to defeat the game’s second boss, The Elder, to obtain the key required to access the swamp crypts where players will find the items needed to summon Bonemass. But since NickRawcliffe is going in reverse order, they had to search for rare-spawning chests that rarely contained the item they needed, consuming a total of 27 hours of their attempt.
NickRawcliffe also showcased the strategies they had to employ to defeat the latter bosses without having the gear that players are expected to have by the time they would ordinarily face the game’s strongest enemies. The strategies involve taking advantage of the boss’s AI to prevent them from attacking the player while the latter very slowly damages the former until they’re defeated. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the Valheim speedrun record NickRawcliffe has set. They previously beat all of the game’s bosses, in the “correct” order, in just 90 minutes.
This latest world first and world record by Nickrawcliffe can arguably be considered much more challenging than their previous 90-minute speedrun, especially when the amount of time and dedication that was required to accomplish it is taken into account. It’s also a great example of how many ways players are able to experience Valheim to make it more interesting and challenging.
Valheim is available on PC.
Source: NickRawcliffe/YouTube