'Valheim' Glitch Guide: Boat Disappeared? Devs Explain How This Happened

KEY POINTS

There is a bug in "Valheim" that causes player-built boats to fly away and "disappear"
A Twitch streamer claimed it was because birds were taking control of boats
Iron Gate clarified that the issue is caused by the game's misinterpretation of data

Bugs in an Early Access title are expected, and for all of the hype surrounding it, “Valheim” isn’t exempt from this. The smash-hit Viking survival game is particularly famous for its amazing level of polish upon its release, but this doesn’t mean that it is completely bug-free.

The bugs and glitches in “Valheim” range from harmless to game-breaking. While most (if not all) of the save-corrupting and world-deleting bugs in the game have been addressed, there are many more less-serious issues that need tackling.

The disappearing boat bug is one of the more frustrating ones in the game, yet it’s also one of the most hilarious things players can experience in “Valheim.” The boats don’t just despawn, they literally fly away.

The Flying Dutchman - an absolute staple of Norse mythology. from r/valheim

These Flying Dutchman incidents have been going on for the past month, and up until now, it’s still an issue. Twitch streamer GliitchWiitch tweeted that birds that land on boats were causing this bug, saying that ravens and seagulls were flying away with the players’ boats.

However, an Iron Gate representative told Polygon that this was not the case. Apparently, the bug happens due to faults in the code that mix up the data between two objects.

A player being chased by a Fuling and a Fuling Berserker across the Plains biome in Valheim. Valheim

“There was a glitch which saw one object get the data of another, so for the above example, a bird could have gotten the data of a ship, thus a player could’ve experienced a flying ship,” Iron Gate said.

This may also mean that somewhere in a flying boat’s original vicinity, there is a bird that’s standing suspiciously still for extended periods of time.

It’s only a matter of time before Iron Gate fixes this issue despite the ensuing hilarity of a flying Raft or Longship. The bug that launches harpooned players across long distances also got fixed, much to the dismay of fans who were enjoying the “Viking Space Program.”

March marks the second month of “Valheim’s” stay in Early Access, and the devs have been releasing small weekly patches that address the game’s stability and network performance. More fixes are expected in the future before the eventual release of the first major content update dubbed “Hearth and Home.”