Unofficial Valheim tools

Valheim World Generator

Preview your world before you set sail — and read the exact seed straight out of your own save file. No upload, no account, no queue.

Where your world lives: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\worlds_local on Windows, ~/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/worlds_local on Linux and Steam Deck. On a rented server, download the file from your host's file manager.

Runs entirely in your browser Knows the Valheim 1.0 save format Your files never leave your device

How a Valheim world is generated

Valheim does not ship a map. It ships a generator and a seed. When you create a world the game takes the seed string you typed, hashes it into a 32-bit number, and feeds that number into a procedural pipeline: noise fields for height, a radial rule for which biome owns which band, and a placement pass that decides where the trader, the boss altars, the crypts and the villages land.

Two consequences follow, and both matter when you are choosing a world. First, the same seed always produces the same layout — on the same world generation version. Second, the game only stores what you have changed. The seed is the territory; your save file is the furniture.

That is why a seed preview works at all: nothing in the terrain needs your save to exist. The map is already implied by the seed. What the save does decide is the exact position of everything placed into the world, which is why older worlds can disagree with a pure prediction — see the note on Valheim 1.0 below.

What Valheim 1.0 changed about worlds and seeds

Valheim left Early Access on 9 September 2026, alongside the Deep North and the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 releases. The headline is the biome. The change that actually trips people up is quieter, and it is in your save folder.

Before 1.0 a world was a pair of files sitting side by side, MyWorld.fwl and MyWorld.db. Since 1.0 a world is a folder named after the world, and the data inside it is split into chunks so the game only rewrites what changed. Iron Gate's own patch note describes it as a save system "designed to be resilient against mid-write failures."

What a Valheim 1.0 world folder looks like

  • _main.N.fwl2 — world metadata. This is the file that holds your seed. It is tiny.
  • _main.N.db2 — world data, replacing the old .db.
  • _main.N.chunks — the index that ties the terrain chunks together.
  • XX_XX__X_X.chunk — terrain, one file per explored region. These multiply as you play.
  • _main.N.ok — a marker written once a save has finished cleanly.

The N is a save counter that goes up every time the world saves — a brand new world is _main.0, a long-running one might be _main.34. Any of them reads the same seed.

Three practical points. Your pre-1.0 .db and .fwl files are not deleted — a world converted on first load leaves the originals in place, which is why an old save can look like it exists twice. Conversion happens the first time the world is saved in 1.0, not when the game updates. And an empty world folder with your world's name on it usually just means that world has not been saved since the patch.

For seed hunting this matters because 1.0 reshuffled locations for worlds created before it. If your world predates the update, a pure prediction from the seed can put the trader in the wrong place. Reading the seed out of your own save — which is what the extractor above does — remains the reliable route either way.

Where each biome sits on the world disk

Valheim's world is a rough circle with a radius of about 10,000 metres. Difficulty scales outward from the centre, and biome choice is largely a function of distance from that centre plus altitude.

Approximate biome bands, measured from the world centre. The generator jitters these boundaries, so treat them as bands rather than walls.
Biome Starts around Notes
Meadows 0 m Every world spawns its sacrificial stones here, at the centre of the disk.
Black Forest ~500–600 m Copper, tin and core wood — the first real step out.
Mountain ~600 m out, above ~50 m altitude Driven by altitude as much as distance from the centre.
Swamp ~2,000 m Ends around 6,000 m. Worlds created before the Mistlands update stretch to 8,000 m.
Plains ~3,000 m Flax, barley and black metal. Runs out around 8,000 m.
Mistlands ~6,000 m The outermost biome of the original disk, ending at the ~10,000 m edge.
Deep North Northern edge Added in Valheim 1.0 on 9 September 2026. The final biome.
Ashlands Southern edge The hostile mirror of Deep North at the opposite pole.

Ocean is not a band — it is everything below about 26 metres of altitude, the water between islands. See the interactive map guide for the full breakdown and what the map symbols mean.

Community seeds worth a look

Seeds that Valheim players keep sharing. They are community-reported rather than officially documented — treat the notes as a starting point, and remember that a generated world only matches if you are on the same world generation version.

Beginner-friendly HJcB9i

Balanced starting island with all bosses reachable.

Easy lduTRpBHca

Large starting island, several biomes close by.

Easy maypoleplz

Spawns a Maypole — a rare decorative item.

Hard 42069

Scattered resources and a demanding layout.

Found a seed worth adding? Every entry here is cross-checked before it goes up. Nothing is listed that we could not confirm against more than one report.

Sites and sources behind the facts on this page: Iron Gate's 1.0 release notes and patch notes, the community Valheim Wiki, and the reverse-engineered world metadata format published under the MIT licence by the corgonia/fwl project. Facts on this page were last checked on October 8, 2026.