Valheim 1.0's Permanent Achievement Lock Is a Command, Not a Modifier

One sentence in Iron Gate's 1.0 FAQ has players going back through their world settings: "Some world modifiers such as hammer-mode will also lock achievements." Read at speed, it turns the World Modifiers screen into a minefield, and it suggests the Casual preset your group has been running for two years is about to cost you every achievement in a game that is only now getting them.

Read properly, it says something far narrower. It names a single modifier out of a menu holding five sliders, seven presets and five toggles — and the sentence immediately after it files that modifier under the recoverable heading: "Hammer-mode counts as a temporary cheat."

The permanent damage the FAQ describes is real, but it lives somewhere that is not the modifier menu, and it does not stay with the player who caused it. When achievement tracking begins on 9 September 2026, the thing that costs your group its run will not be a slider anyone moved. It will be a command somebody typed.

Hammer-Mode Is the Only Modifier Iron Gate Names

Hammer mode is a preset on the World Modifiers screen, one of seven alongside Normal, Casual, Easy, Hard, Hardcore and Immersive. What it does is narrower than its reputation: it removes the build cost from anything you can place with a hammer. It does not make gear free. Anything that comes off a crafting station — armor, weapons, tools, food — still costs exactly what it always costs. So a hammer-mode world is one where the longhouse is free and the iron armor is not, which means you are still gathering, smelting and grinding for everything that decides whether you survive Moder. The thing hammer-mode deletes is the hauling, not the progression.

Hammer-mode removes the build cost for anything placed with a hammer, and nothing else.

It is not a pure gift either. Deconstruct a log pile or a rock pile while hammer-mode is active and the stack simply vanishes — you do not get the 50 items back that it normally returns. If you have ever cleared a Meadows start by knocking down every pile you find, that habit stops paying while the modifier is on. Free building and free harvesting are not the same switch.

The word that decides how much any of this matters is temporary, and it means something concrete because of where the setting lives. World Modifiers is reached from the Join World screen: you pick your world in the main menu, open the modifier screen, and set it before the world loads. Turning hammer-mode off is the identical action in the identical place — select the world, open the screen, choose something else.

Be careful about what that does and does not mean, because it is easy to overstate. The setting is not weightless: modifiers are stored on the world as Global Keys, which is why they are still set the next time you load in. What matters is that they are stored the way a setting is stored. You change one from the same screen you set it on, one at a time, as often as you like — which is a different kind of thing from a mark that gets written once and stays.

Iron Gate has been more explicit about some of this than others, and it is worth separating. For marked items it spells out the exit. For hammer-mode it says only that the modifier counts as a temporary cheat, and does not describe the moment eligibility comes back. What "temporary" is doing in that sentence is distinguishing it from the flag that commands write, which the same FAQ calls permanent — so the reasonable reading is that the state lasts as long as its cause, and its cause is a dropdown. Until 1.0 is actually in players' hands, treat the exact timing as the one part of this that is inferred rather than stated.

Timing puts an edge on that. Iron Gate says the achievement system begins tracking statistics from the moment you download the 1.0 version, and nothing before that counts — killing Eikthyr 500 times already does not bank the achievement for killing Eikthyr. Everything you build between now and 9 September sits outside the tracking window entirely, whatever modifiers you used to build it.

That gives builders a clean way to have both, and the safest version of it needs no inference at all. Say you want a bridged fortress across three biomes and you also want the achievements. Build it now, in hammer-mode, before 9 September. Spend a week placing stone, moving the walls twice, tearing out the great hall because the roof line was wrong — none of which is fun at full material cost, and none of which is achievement progress you are giving up, because there is no tracking to lose yet. Then set the preset back and let the update arrive on a world you have already finished building. Nothing about that plan depends on how quickly a temporary cheat state clears, because the modifier was off before the system existed.

So hammer-mode is a state you occupy, not a mark you carry — the switch is two menu screens deep, and it is the same switch in both directions.

The Sliders Iron Gate Never Ruled On

The settings most groups actually run are the ones nobody has ruled on. Casual death penalty, so a bad corpse run in the Mistlands does not end the evening. Resources at 2× or 3×, because a fourth playthrough does not need the same number of copper trips as the first. Raids dialed down, or combat dialed up. Not one of those appears anywhere in the FAQ.

Combat is one slider that moves player damage, enemy damage, enemy size and star rate together.

Iron Gate has not said whether any of them affects achievements. The FAQ names hammer-mode and stops. It does not mention combat, death penalty, resource rate, raids, portals, or any of the five toggles beside them — and the words it uses are "some world modifiers such as hammer-mode," a phrase that leaves the list open rather than closing it. There is no confirmation that the sliders are safe, and there is no statement that they are not. Anyone telling you otherwise is reading a sentence that has not been written.

What is documented, in detail, is what these settings actually do — the community wiki has carried the exact values since the update that introduced them. They are worth having in front of you, because the size of the numbers is what makes people assume a ruling must exist. Combat is a single setting that changes four things at once:

Hard and Very Hard also raise the chance of starred enemies, and the player damage change never appears in the weapon numbers on your inventory screen — a bronze axe still reads the same at 125% as it does at 70%. The death penalty slider is blunter still:

Resource rate runs from 0.5× to 3×, rounds up — which is why 1.5× behaves like 2× for a lot of drops — and leaves fish, trophies and boss drops alone entirely. Raids at Normal are a 20% chance every 46 minutes; Much more is 66.67% every 13.8 minutes; None switches raids off, except that night raids still come anyway. Portals run from carrying everything through them to having none at all. The five toggles are No Build Cost, Passive enemies, Player based raids, No Map and Fire Hazards.

The question is genuinely live. A Steam discussion thread posted on 5 July 2026, titled "Need more details as what will count as cheating after 1.0," has players asking precisely this — whether 3× resources or a Casual death penalty would lock them out. Nobody from Iron Gate answered it. Other players in the thread argue that sliders are not cheating because they are not dev commands, which is a reasonable read and still only a player's opinion. Treat that thread as proof the question is open, not as the answer to it.

What the FAQ does give you is a taxonomy, and it is more useful than a ruling. Everything it describes as permanent comes from a command: those place a flag on your character and world save that locks them out for good. The one modifier it names is classified the other way, as temporary. The line it draws runs between commands and settings, not between generous settings and strict ones.

That is enough to decide without waiting for a ruling, because the advice comes out the same under either reading. Suppose Iron Gate eventually says Casual death penalty counts. It is still a menu setting, on the same screen, changed the same way and one at a time — the exact profile the FAQ already assigned to the one modifier it named. The worst case for a slider is a state that applies while it is on. The permanent case, on the FAQ's own account, needs a command, and there is no command in the modifier menu.

So do not reroll a world over a slider. Starting a fresh save on 9 September because you spent last year on 2× resources is throwing away a world to solve a problem that has not been shown to exist, and that a dropdown would fix if it did. Do the cheap thing instead: before launch, open World Modifiers on the worlds you care about and write down which of the five sliders and five toggles are off default. That is a two-minute note. If Iron Gate names more modifiers after launch, you check your list and change a setting. If it never does, you have lost two minutes.

That covers everything the menu can reach — and the menu is not the whole system.

The Console Has Two Tiers, and Only One Marks You

Beyond the menu is the console, and the console is where the FAQ's permanent language actually lives. That makes "never open the console" sound like the safe rule. It isn't, because the console is not one thing. On Steam you add -console to the game's launch options and press F5, and what opens is a single text box sitting in front of two separate command sets. Only one of them carries the flag.

Both tiers share one window: setworldmodifier sits a few lines above spawn.

The first set needs nothing. Player commands work straight from the chat window, and they include setworldmodifier, setworldpreset, resetworldkeys, nomap and noportals. Read that list again, because it is the surprising part: the modifier system itself is in the unmarked tier. Typing setworldmodifier is the same class of action as moving the slider — the World Modifiers screen and the console's player tier are two doors into the same room, and neither door is the one with the alarm on it.

The second set has a lock, and the key is a word you type. The word devcommands is what switches the console into cheat mode, and only after it do setkey, removekey, resetkeys, listkeys, spawn, fly, tame, itemset and location do anything at all. What that tier costs is spelled out plainly: commands such as spawn place a flag on your current character and world save, informing you that it is permanently locked from getting any achievements. One command, two things marked, and no described way back. Iron Gate is treating that boundary as a deliberate crossing rather than a slip — 1.0 adds a confirmation prompt before you enter a cheated state, specifically so it does not happen by accident. And the marking is not waiting for launch to start caring about your history: characters that used cheats before 1.0 will be marked as well, which means the flag can predate the achievement system it disqualifies you from.

One command is carved out of the bottom-right box. freefly is the FAQ's named exception, and it is worth knowing exactly which command that is, because there are two that look alike. freefly toggles the free camera — the one you use for screenshots of your longhouse. fly toggles actual flight, and it is not named as an exception anywhere. They are one letter apart in conversation and a permanent flag apart in effect.

There is an unresolved edge on that exception, and it is worth naming rather than papering over. The FAQ attributes the flag to commands, and it separately says 1.0 will ask you to confirm before you enter a cheated state. It does not say whether clearing that prompt is itself the crossing, or whether the prompt is only a gate in front of commands that individually decide. If it is the former, the freefly exception is thin comfort, because you would have to pass the prompt to reach it. Iron Gate has not answered that, so in a world whose achievements you care about, treat enabling the cheat tier at all as the line — and take your screenshots in a world you do not mind marking.

Which raises the question most readers actually arrive with: how do you find out where you already stand? The FAQ's wording is the useful part — the flag informs you that the character and world are permanently locked. It is surfaced, not silent, so you are not expected to audit anything by hand. What Iron Gate has not described is any way to take it off once it is on. There is no cleanse command in the list, no penance, no "reset achievements" toggle. For a five-year-old game where a large share of the audience has typed something into that console at some point, that is the honest position: you will be told, and being told is the end of the conversation for that character and that world. The recovery is a new pair, not a repair.

None of which would matter to a player who never wanted to spawn anything — except that the cheat tier is also the only route to a whole set of world modifiers. World modifiers are stored as global keys; the menu is a front-end over the same key system that setkey writes to directly. And several keys have no slider on that front-end at all. AllPiecesUnlocked gives you every building recipe. AllRecipesUnlocked gives you every crafting recipe. NoCraftCost makes crafting free. NoWorkbench lets you build with no station in range, and DungeonBuild lets you build inside a dungeon. Not one of them appears on the World Modifiers screen.

That is the trap the whole distinction comes down to, and it catches people who think they are asking for a small thing. Say you want free crafting — not free building, free crafting, so that iron armor and a full set of tools stop costing eight trips to a swamp. That is NoCraftCost. There is no menu route to it. Hammer-mode, the one modifier the FAQ actually names, deliberately stops at the hammer and leaves the crafting station alone, so the preset that looks closest is the preset that specifically does not do this.

Nor can you take the safe door. setworldmodifier sits right there in the player tier, but it takes a slider and a value — the five named ones, and nothing else. NoCraftCost is not a slider with a value; it is a key that is either set or not, and keys are what setkey writes. That is why two commands exist for one system, and it is exactly where the tiers diverge: the front-end you can reach safely was only ever given the settings Iron Gate put on the screen. So your only route to free crafting is to open the console, enable devcommands, and type setkey NoCraftCost — which is to say, through the tier that permanently marks the character and the save. The dividing line is not how generous the setting is. It is whether the setting has a slider.

Even the safe tier rewards caution about undo. setworldmodifier portals casual works exactly as typed; there is no working setworldmodifier portals normal to put it back. The only way to clear a console-set modifier is setworldpreset default or resetworldkeys, and both of those clear every modifier on the world at once. Set five things by hand over three months, decide you want portals back to standard, and you lose the other four with it. The menu has no such edge — you change one setting, the rest stay where you left them.

So use the menu. It reaches every modifier most players actually want, it costs nothing the FAQ describes as permanent, and it can be walked back one setting at a time. If what you want is one of the keys with no slider, be clear-eyed that you are not adjusting a world, you are ending its eligibility — so spend that on a world you do not care about. Roll a sandbox, take a character you are willing to lose with it, and go build inside a dungeon with every recipe unlocked and nothing to pay for it. The flag lands on the character as well as the save, so the throwaway character is not optional; bringing your main in to do the typing marks your main. Kept separate, that sandbox costs you exactly nothing on the world you intend to take into 9 September.

All of which assumes yours are the only hands on the keyboard.

A Dedicated Server Takes the Choice Out of Your Friends' Hands

They rarely are. Valheim 1.0 is a game for 1–10 players with crossplay between all platforms, so the realistic launch-week group is six or eight people on three different devices, at least one of whom has been playing since the early access days and knows exactly what spawn does. And the flag the FAQ describes does not stay with the person who earns it. It lands on the current character and the world save. In a world one of you hosts out of your own game, that second half is the whole run: one player opens the console, enables devcommands, clicks through the confirmation, spawns in the iron they did not feel like farming for a fourth time — and the world save is marked.

A 1.0 campaign can carry ten players across platforms; the hosting model decides who can reach the cheat tier.

It is worth being exact about who loses what there, because the two halves of that flag behave differently. The character belongs to the person who typed the command, and that is their problem to carry. The world belongs to everyone. Nothing in the FAQ describes bystanders' characters being marked for standing nearby, so the other five keep clean characters and can go and earn achievements somewhere else. What they cannot do is earn them here — in this world, in the base they spent a month on, in the campaign that was the reason they logged in. One person's decision does not follow them out; it just takes the thing they were all doing together.

You cannot solve that with a group agreement, because the cost of one person forgetting is the whole world's eligibility. You can solve it with where the world lives. From the console documentation: "The cheat commands are available in singleplayer or manually hosted mode only. They do not work on a dedicated server." Not discouraged, not admin-gated — unavailable. On a dedicated server there is no devcommands tier for anyone to reach, so the thing that writes the permanent flag is not something your friends have to be trusted around. It is something none of them can do.

Be precise about what that buys you, because it is not a blanket. A dedicated server removes the players' ability to cheat, not the operator's ability to configure. Modifiers on a dedicated server are set through the startup parameters -preset, -modifier and -setkey, and the player-tier modifier commands stay live in the game for anyone on the server's admin list — setworldmodifier, setworldpreset and resetworldkeys, alongside kick, ban and save. Whoever runs the box still holds the modifier system, and admin rights are handed out by SteamID64 or crossplay ID, which on a mixed-platform group is a list somebody has to sit down and assemble rather than something that configures itself.

-setkey deserves its own line, because it is the one parameter that reaches past the menu. Those keys with no slider — free crafting, every recipe unlocked, building without a workbench — are settable at server startup. Iron Gate has not said whether keys set that way flag the world, and the FAQ's permanent language is written entirely around commands typed by a player in a cheated state. So the honest position is that the operator can put a world into a configuration nobody has ruled on, and the group should decide before launch whether it wants to be in that position at all. On a plain preset, there is nothing to wonder about.

The other leak is loot, and it does not care how the world is hosted. Spawned items are visibly marked, and if a character that has never cheated picks one of those items up, that character enters a temporary cheat state. That is the recoverable heading — the same one hammer-mode sits under — and the exit is the item: get rid of the marked gear and the state goes with it. But it means the risk travels in an inventory. Somebody's old sandbox character, the throwaway from a world where they unlocked every recipe, arrives in your clean 1.0 world with a chest of spawned iron as a housewarming gift, and now every person who takes a bar is carrying a temporary flag they did not ask for. This is also where a veteran friend surprises you: characters that used cheats before 1.0 are marked as well, so somebody can join your brand-new server on day one already flagged, on the strength of something they typed years ago.

Which makes the pre-launch conversation short and worth having:

• Pick the hosting model. Dedicated server if achievements matter to the group.
• Build the admin list before launch night. It needs each player's SteamID64 or crossplay ID, which on a mixed-platform group is a collection job, not a checkbox.
• Agree the startup parameters. -preset and -modifier are settled ground; treat -setkey as the one that needs a conversation.
• Settle the loot rule. Fresh characters, or at minimum nobody hands out gear from a save where someone used spawn.
• Ask who is already flagged. A character that used cheats before 1.0 arrives marked, and the new run will not clear it. That person starts a new one.

Four of those five are fixable after launch. Someone can be dropped from the admin list in week two; a chest of marked iron can be thrown into the sea; a flagged friend can reroll. The hosting model is the one that is not, because by the time it turns out to have mattered, the world save is already carrying the flag and no configuration change takes it back off. That decision has a deadline, and the deadline is 9 September 2026.