A 'Valheim' player recreated the famous USS Iowa battleship

A player of the recently released game Valheim has created an in-game replica of the Navy’s USS Iowa battleship (BB-61). Decommissioned in 1990, the ship now rests at the USS Iowa Museum in Los Angeles.

Viking survival — Valheim, which saw its initial release just last month, is a survival Viking game akin to Runescape. Players are dropped in a large field and start by foraging for basic items before working their way towards building an entire civilization. It can be soothing to collect the materials necessary to create weapons like swords and armor, but also challenging to defeat enemies as you try and build an empire.

Understandably Valheim has been dominating the Steam charts as people look for an escape from our current pandemic-plagued reality — a new place they can actually control.

Sandboxing — Even though the point of Valheim is not to build random stuff, its sandboxing nature begs for people to zen out and start creating replicas that they couldn’t in the real world. The Redditor /u/wjdql6434 probably started out playing the game normally and eventually their creative side got the better of them and they created the battleship.

Valheim is actually only in its Early Access state right now, which means the team behind it is still releasing updates in preparation for an “official” launch. That might explain why the USS Iowa seen here isn’t exactly high-resolution. A future update on Valheim’s roadmap titled “Ships and Sea” suggests that real boat-building options may be on the way so that the USS Iowa doesn’t have to look like a crude wood replica.

Building replicas of real-world artifacts inside sandbox games has become something of a past-time for many gamers. In the most popular of them all, Minecraft, players have created everything from a replica of San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood to a full scale replica of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.