Valheim Leaves Early Access on September 9: The Deep North Arrives, PS5 and Switch 2 Join In, and Everyone Plays Together

Valheim has been "almost done" for so long that the actual finish line snuck up on us. Iron Gate's viking survival game leaves Early Access on Tuesday, September 9, 2026, more than five and a half years after it first appeared on Steam in February 2021. Version 1.0 brings the Deep North, the frozen final biome players have been asking about since the Mistlands, and it opens the doors to two new platforms at the same time: PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 join PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, with crossplay between all of them.

The studio has been quiet in the way small teams get quiet before a launch. Its last post on August 20 said the team was fixing final bugs and getting everything ready, pointed everyone to a 1.0 FAQ, and promised a new trailer at gamescom. That trailer, an animated short set in the Deep North, is the one below.

Video: Iron Gate on YouTube

What 1.0 actually changes

The headline is the Deep North. Iron Gate describes 1.0 as focused on that biome, with new enemies to kill, bases to build and weapons to craft, plus some additional content elsewhere in the world. One thing the FAQ is upfront about: the Ocean biome is not getting a rework with this release, so if you were hoping the seas would finally get the Mistlands treatment, that is not part of the plan.

Your existing worlds are safe. The FAQ says old saves remain playable and that the new biome content generates only in areas you have not explored yet. The recommendation is still to start fresh, and honestly that is how we would play it: a fresh seed with the full world in place is the version of the game the studio has spent five years building toward.

Achievements are new too. They start tracking as soon as you have the 1.0 update installed, and using cheats permanently locks a world out of achievement eligibility, with a few dev commands like the free camera excluded. There is no official mod support at launch.

Platforms, crossplay and the price

This is the first time Valheim has launched on PlayStation or Nintendo hardware. The full launch list from the FAQ is Steam on Windows, Linux and Mac, the Mac App Store, Humble Store, Microsoft Store, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2. Crossplay works across all of those, so a PS5 player can join a Switch 2 host or a Steam friend without anyone changing storefronts. Cross-platform save sync is narrower: it only works between Xbox and PC through the Microsoft Store version.

The price is going up with 1.0, and it looks like that has already happened. The FAQ lists the new price as $29.99 with regional variations, and Steam is already showing $29.99 in the US and 29.99 euros in Europe as we write this. If you own the game from Early Access you do not buy anything again: your copy updates automatically. Iron Gate has confirmed bugfixes and quality of life work after launch but has not announced any further content or a timeline for it, so 1.0 should be read as the finished game rather than the start of another roadmap.

Our take

Valheim's Steam reviews still sit at Very Positive across more than 258,000 of them, so the 1.0 label is mostly a formality for PC players. The real story is the audience it picks up on Tuesday: PS5 and Switch 2 owners get a complete, five-year-polished survival game with the full biome ladder in place, and thanks to crossplay they can drop straight into a friend's long-running server. This summer already saw Palworld make the same jump from Early Access to 1.0, and Valheim closing out its own roadmap the same season feels like a tidy end to the era of survival games that shipped unfinished and earned their way to done.