In February, Valheim developer Iron Gate released a roadmap for four updates during 2021. Today, however, the company withdrew that plan, announcing that the first planned update, Hearth and Home, will not be released until the third quarter of this year.

"We did not anticipate such a large influx of players and highlighted a thousand new issues and bugs that urgently need to be fixed," said Iron Gate. Our priority is to stabilize the current experience as much as possible, which means new content has taken a backseat." To be clear, we were not able to focus all of our resources on Hearth & Home until May.

The current roadmap has been removed (though it remains accessible for now) and a new roadmap, "much smaller" than the one posted in February, is in the works; after Hearth and Home is finished, Iron Gate will be the fourth and final update to the roadmap. It will move on to the planned Mistlands update. The planned smaller updates will be set aside "for now."

Iron Gate introduced some of the new content coming with the Hearth and Home update. These include building components for dark wood roofs and window hatches; expanded cooking stations, including spice racks, butcher blocks, and pots; more than 10 new recipes; and plantable onions. Also added is a new "food system" that alters the effects of what you eat on your strength and stamina, which directly affects combat. For example, increased stamina increases the ability to deflect attacks and absorb damage.

"We are quite flexible when it comes to what we want to add to the game and are often inspired by great comments from meetings and the community. Valheim is also a game of exploration, and we don't want to spoil the feeling of discovery for our players," said Iron Gate.

"That said, we want to be more open about what we are currently working on. Even if it is a piece of content that our artist, Robin, enjoys working on, it may not be a game. It's a difficult balance to strike between being transparent about what we're working on and at the same time not spoiling it for everyone who wants to discover it for themselves, but as an Early Access game, we think it's important to be more informal and open."

To that end, Iron Gate will be hosting an AMA tomorrow, June 11 at 5am PT/8am ET/2pm CEST on the Valheim subreddit.