Valheim celebrates the launch of ‘hard mode’ by offering up a custom-made viking tankard for the fastest and hardest speedrunner

A patch for the open world survival game Valheim went live on the public test server back in June that, among other things, added world modifiers that enable players to change the game’s difficulty in various ways. With that update, called Hildir’s Request, now fully live, developer Iron Gate is celebrating in an appropriately viking-ish fashion with the Trial of Tyr, a speedrun competition that challenges players to race through the entire game—in hard mode—on their own.

Details on the competition are available in the full rules, but the basics are pretty simple:

• You play the full game, by yourself, from start to finish without dying.
• No dev commands or other forms of “external help” allowed.
• You must play in the official Trial of Tyr world seed: MX7L9GYcf2
• “Hard” preset in the world modifier settings must be used.
• Runs must be either livestreamed on Twitch or YouTube, or recorded “without splits in footage”
• The run ends when you defeat the final Mistlands boss The Queen and mount her head at the Ancient Stone Circle. Or when you die horribly at the hands of some grotesque, otherworldly horror, as the case may be.