Structural Integrity and House Building Guide: Tips For Building the Best House

This guide will show you how to build your dream house in Valheim. Read on to learn how to build a house, what you need for your house, and how structural integrity and the building stability system work!

How to Build a House

A Hammer and Workbench is Required

The two main requirements that is common for every building is the Hammer and Workbench. The Hammer is used as a tool to create buildings, furniture, and other structures, including the Workbench by opening the build menu with the right mouse button. While the Workbench is a required recipe for those buildings, furniture, and others. The Workbench will have a spherical area around it in which you can build inside. You can build out of it, but only if you are still standing in the sphere.

How to Build and Upgrade the Workbench | All Craftable Items

Right-Click With the Hammer and Choose What to Build

After crafting a hammer and building a Workbench, you can start building your house. Pressing the right mouse button with the Hammer equipped will open up the build menu, select the Building tab and choose the walls, floors, and other building pieces. Place them down onto the ground and attach them to each other. Pieces have snap points that other pieces will automatically snap to, making building your house a snap!

For the list of buildings, check out the page below!
List of Buildings (Structures)

Make Sure to Have a Roof

Having roofs over the rest of your building is quite important in Valheim. Not only does it make your house look more aesthetic but it will also protect the rest of your building, and everything else inside from the weather. Without the roof pieces, your building, items, and everything else inside is going to take damage from the weather. This can lower the building's health making it easier to be destroyed. You can also get wet, giving you the Wet debuff, which lowers your Stamina regeneration. Every house needs a roof over it!

Must Haves for your House

Have a Fire Inside Your House

Another requirement every house should have is a fire! It can be quite cold during the night in Valheim, cold enough to give you a Cold debuff, lowering your stamina regeneration. The Cold debuff can be removed or avoided by standing near a fire. If you have wood flooring, you will need to break a piece to place fire on the ground. You can put fire on wood flooring once you can build Hearths. Make sure you keep yourself warm and cozy in your home!

Make sure to have ventilation!

The only downside to having a fire in your house is that smoke can choke you to death. This happens if you do not have an opening somewhere above the fire to let the smoke out, building it up inside your house. Once there is enough smoke you will start taking damage inside until you can get rid of the smoke. You can create chimneys that can let the smoke out, just make sure there's a roof at the top of the chimney so that rain can't get in!

Have Furniture to Increase your Comfort

Another aspect you should be aware of when building your house is your Comfort Level, a stat that is determined by the furniture in your house. Just having a house and a fire inside will give you 3 Comfort already! Your Comfort affects your Rested buff. The Rested buff will increase the speed of Health by 50% and Stamina by 100%. With the length of the buff being based on your Comfort Level, the higher the comfort level the longer the Rested buff. Learn more about Comfort Levels and the Rested buff in our guide below!

Comfort Level and Rested Explained

How Does Structural Integrity Work in Valheim?

What is Structural Integrity (Building Stability)?

When you are building, you might have noticed that some pieces break on their own, usually when they are far away from a piece that can support them. This is the stability system in action, this makes it so that there are limitations and you can't build an impossible structure. Understanding how it works is important if you wish to build a magnificent Viking stronghold!

Structural Integrity is Visible Through Color

Hovering over a building piece with your hammer equipped will highlight that piece in a color ranging from blue, to green, to yellow, and then finally to red. The color will tell you the stability health of the piece is, with blue being the strongest, green being fairly healthy, and red being weak enough to break on its own. If you want to build something large you will want to make sure you keep your pieces more on the green side than the red.

Stability Strength is Based on How Far the Ground is

The stability of a piece will be based on how many pieces away it is from the ground (not the actual distance), the strongest ones being the blue pieces are the grounded or foundation pieces. They are the strongest and healthiest pieces as they are usually the ones directly in contact with the ground. If there are multiple pieces attached, it will check the least number of pieces it takes to reach the ground. This counts pieces both vertical and horizontally attached.

How to Increase Structural Integrity

Use Large Poles/Beams to Reinforce

4 meter Wall	4 meter Pole

Because the health is based on how many building pieces it takes until it touches the ground, this makes large beams/poles useful for reinforcing your building. A large beam/pole is one piece that can easily reach the higher weaker pieces with only a few stacks. If you wish to build large structures, keep in mind to keep reinforcing with these when you have to!

Stone Pieces Count as Ground When Attaching Wood

Stone Pillar	Wooden Pillar

Attaching stone pieces to each other follow the same rules as the wood, but they have one slight difference. If you attach a wood piece directly to any stone piece (its stability does not matter), the stone piece stability will not change, but will act as the ground, and the placed wood piece will become a foundation piece. Being able to build with stone will help you make even bigger structures than you could before!

Valheim Related Guides

Guide for Beginners: How to Get Started

Valheim Tips and Tricks