Skill Leveling Guide: Max Skill Cap and How to Grind

This is a guide on leveling up your skills as well as tips on grinding your skills in Valheim! Read on to learn what the max skill cap is, how to level your skills up, how you can lose your skills, and how to grind your skills.

What is the Max Skill Cap?

Skills Cap at 100

In Valheim, skills are the stats that determine your proficiency in certain actions based on the level of the skill. Just like in some other RPGs, you can increase the levels of the skills by gaining experience for it, increasing your proficiency in those actions. The max skill cap for all the skills in Valheim is 100. At that level, you reach max proficiency, making the skill more effective, increasing damage, and decreasing stamina drain for that action. Trying to max out your skill levels is necessary if you want to deal more damage, lose less stamina, or just be more effective.

List of Skills

Skill Effects at Max Level

How to Level Up Skills

Gain Experience by Using Skills

Just like in real life, to gain experience for your skills to get better at them, you will need to do the actions tied to the skill (e.g., running will give your experience for Run skill, jumping will increase your experience for Jump skill). Once you get enough experience, you gain a level, increasing your ability in that skill. For skills that deal damage, you will also need to be dealing damage (even 0 damage) to a target to gain experience for it. The best way to get better at something is to keep doing it!

Stamina must not be depleted

Another requirement for gaining experience is to be spending stamina when using a skill. Doing an action with a drained stamina bar is not going to give you experience. So you will want to recover stamina before you continue using the skill. This makes it that you can't just AFK grind with a macro. You will have to keep an eye on your stamina bar and make sure to regenerate when you need to.

How You Can Lose Skill Levels

Dying Makes you Lose Skill Levels

Just like in any other game, dying in Valheim can be punishing. Not only do you drop the items you were carrying but you end up losing some skill levels too. Each death you will lose 5% of their total level of each skill. This might not seem a lot at first but can add up if you keep dying. Try to avoid death as much as you can, but don't worry if you do end up dying, you can still grind back those Skills.

What Happens When You Die?

How to Grind Skills

Eat Stamina Boosting Food

The only way to increase your experience in a skill is by doing an action and decrease your stamina. Having more stamina means being able to do more actions before having to wait for your stamina bar to regenerate, increasing your actions per minute and thus increase the amount of experience you can get in a minute. When choosing what to eat, take a look at how much stamina the food gives you and go for the food combo that maximizes the amount of stamina you have.

Cooking Guide: How to Make Food

Grind Inside a Building

Because of the simple requirements to gain experience and increase your skills, you can make a building just for grinding some of those skills. You will only need a boulder for you to hit. Once you found a boulder, you can build a building around it. Add a fire, and other furniture to have the rested buff. Then start attacking the boulder with the weapon you wish to increase your skill for. This method also counts to the bow.

Because you are indoors and have the rested buff, your stamina should regenerate quickly. Decreasing the downtime and allowing you to get more experience in a shorter amount of time. You can do something similar but with a Birch tree and a wooden ax to increase your Wood Cutting skill without destroying the tree and allowing you to keep cutting.

You can also increase your movement-based skills indoors. Run, Jump, and Sneak can still be leveled up if used inside.

Level Up Blocking by Catching Boars

Leveling up Block skill can be tough. You will need a non-friendly NPC to use your Block on to gain experience. An easy way is to lure some wild boards into a pen. After luring them in, you can make them attack you and you will just need to block their attacks. Parrying their attacks gives double the experience so try to parry as much as you can.

How to Parry

Level Up Sneak While Taming Animals

You can level up your sneak just by sneaking, but the experience you gain won't be much. To gain the most amount of experience for sneaking you will need to sneak around unaware creatures. You can kill 2 birds with one stone by catching boars by luring them into a pen. You then will need to wait for them to go out of the frightened state. Now you can keep sneaking near them for you to continuously gain sneak experience. You can also feed them while they are in the pen to tame them. More information on taming below!
Taming Guide: How to Tame Boars and Animals

Increase Your Skill With Cheats

Enable Cheats to Increase Your Skill Level

Another way to increase your skills quickly is through using cheats. You will need to enable the console by typing in "-console" in the launch options, details on how to do that here. In-game you will then need to press F5 and input devcommands. You will see Cheats: True, you can now use cheats.

Use Raiseskill to Level Up any Skill

With cheats on, you can use the commans "raiseskill [skill] [level]" to level up any skill to any level.

Below are the codes for the skills for you to input when using raiseskill. The code are case sensitive and must be typed in exactly the same below.

Reset Skills with Resetskills Command

If you wish to reset one of your skills back to level zero to increase it to another value again or for whatever reason, you can use the "resetskill [skill]".

Valheim Related Guides

Guide for Beginners: How to Get Started

Valheim Tips and Tricks