I'll let you all watch the video...

Needless to say, I am frustrated! I am playing hardcore (very hard combat, no-map, no-portal, on death I lose all items on me and skills permanently)... So dying is a very big deal that sets me back about 20 hours of progress. It feels unfair since this looks like a glitch?

The only thing I can think to do is restore the last backup, which happened about 1.5 hours before this incident. It's against the spirit of a survival game in general, but maybe as a way to make up for a glitch, it's acceptable? What do you guys think?

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Update: I've made my decision!

Thank you to everyone for the thoughtful responses, the funny ones, and even the meanies. I needed some community feedback to get some clarity through the frustration of the moment, and I got a lot!

Before I get to my decision, I just wanted to specify a couple things that several people had assumed wrong in the comments:

1. I am wearing the bear chest, bear legs and iron helmet, but I use a visual mod to transmog it, mainly because the bear chest looks insane on female characters. My armor at the time of the incident is 41, and only 2-star draugrs can one-shot me when I am at my full 125HP.
2. I am playing on the hardcore death setting, which means losing my inventory and skills permanently on death. However, I keep my world. So a death is essentially a character reset, not a world reset.

Now for my decision...

The main thing I've decided is to adopt a "honestman" ruleset, as several of you have suggested.

That means that for this incident, and moving forward, deaths resulting from obvious bugs, glitches or other technical mishaps, will not count. I will keep my current settings as is, but in those cases I will reload the last backup and go from there.

I will still be very strict with my application of this. For instance, if there had been any part of the 2-star draugr poking out of the scrap pile, I would not consider this a glitch death. But because he was fully hidden, I do.

My main reasoning is that if I were to consider every death to bugs, glitches or technical mishaps as "real deaths", it would actually diminish my sense of immersion and therefore diminish my fun and motivation to do this playthrough.

It's the same line of reasoning that makes me avoid "cheese" strats. Despite being "efficent" and "allowed"... to me they hurt immersion and I don't use them for that reason.

As many of you pointed out, in the end, as a solo player, it really is up to me. So I've allowed myself time to let my frustration die down, and now I can see clearly what actually matters to me, which is an immersive playthrough that's very hard and demands of me that I prep as much as I can and take things slowly. Considering BS deaths as real deaths wouldn't add any value to that.

Hey all!

I'm doing my first ever hardcore (very hard combat, no map, no portal) playthrough, and I found myself constantly trying to guess which enemy could or could not one-shot me.

I decided to have Claude spin up a little calculator that would allow me to input all my relevant stats and see at a glance every attack from every enemy in each biome. After a few days of using it and making small tweaks... I now find it so useful, and thought, why not share it?

You can see on the screenshot an example of my stats as I'm entering swamps for the first time. The calculator shows me quickly which enemies are currently in the "run away from" category. No more guessing. :-)

Hope it's useful to someone else. If anyone has any feedback or notices any mistakes, please let me know.

https://valheim-defense-calculator.vercel.app/

Made a little mockup of my greenhouse layout plan in Canva. I prioritized symmetry because it makes my brain happy, but also tried to be as space efficient as possible.