Skills

Valheim has a soft RPG layer underneath its survival systems: skills that level by use. Swing a sword and your Swords skill rises, run and your Run skill rises, chop trees and your Wood Cutting rises. Higher levels make you more effective at that action. It is a gentle system, not a build to min-max, and the most useful thing to understand about it is how little you should think about it and the one exception where you should.

How skills level

Every skill rises by doing the thing it governs. There are no skill points to spend and no respec; the only input is use. Levels improve effectiveness gradually, so a high Blocking skill blocks more, a high Run skill runs cheaper, and so on. Because the system is driven entirely by use, it fills in naturally as you play the game normally.

The skills

The skills group into combat, movement and utility, and gathering.

Group	Skills
Combat	Swords, Knives, Clubs, Polearms, Spears, Axes, Atgeirs, Unarmed, Bows, Crossbows, Blocking
Magic	Blood Magic, Elemental Magic (from the Mistlands)
Movement and utility	Jump, Run, Sneak, Swim
Gathering	Wood Cutting, Pickaxes

The combat skills track each weapon class, so the weapon you favor levels as you use it. Blood Magic and Elemental Magic come online in the Mistlands when Eitr and staffs enter the game. The movement skills quietly reduce the stamina cost of the things you do constantly, which is why a veteran character feels lighter on its feet than a fresh one.

Death and the penalty

Death applies a temporary reduction to all of your skills. This is part of the broader death penalty: you drop your gear at a tombstone and take the skill hit at the same time. The reduction is temporary and the levels climb back with use, but it is a real reason to avoid careless deaths, since a corpse run that ends in a second death compounds the loss.

Do not grind skills. Gear and food matter far more than any skill level, and the skills you use come up on their own. The one worth practicing on purpose is Blocking, because it powers parrying.

The one to practice

Blocking is the exception to the leave-it-alone rule. Block strength scales with both your shield and your Blocking skill, and a higher Blocking skill makes the timed parry land harder and more reliably. Parrying is the core skill of high-level play: a well-timed block as a hit lands staggers the enemy and multiplies your next hit, which is what trivializes Trolls and most bosses. So while you should let every other skill come naturally, it is worth deliberately blocking and parrying early so that the skill is high when you need it. Everything else follows from playing the game.

Related: Survival, Mistlands, and the full-run progression cheatsheet.