There have been a lot of impressive Valheim builds shared on the internet, but the one thing most of them have in common is that they were clearly made by players who were cheating by using console commands. There is absolutely nothing wrong with cheating in Valheim or any other game - as long as doing so doesn't hurt or hinder the gameplay of others. Cheating in Valheim (unless specifically done to gain an advantage in PvP) hurts no one, but it does make those giant builds slightly less mind-blowing.
Like nearly all survival games, Valheim requires players to gather crafting materials before they can construct any sort of item or building. While this does begin with the survival game trope of having the player repeatedly punch trees and pick up rocks until they gain enough items to create a proper axe, Valheim players will quickly find all sorts of interesting things to craft, from windmills to beehives to trophy walls for displaying the severed heads of Valheim's bosses.
All this crafting requires even more materials, and (especially as the game progresses) some of the needed items are much harder to find than others. While players can load up all the copper they can carry into a cart and make the trek from the Black Forest to their home base in the Meadows with relative ease, it becomes a much more arduous and dangerous journey with the required material to continue a new Valheim structure is something like iron, which could be located far away or even on the other side of an ocean. Setting up portals in Valheim helps to ease travel time to an extent, but the most important items - ore and ingots - crucially can't be carried though them.
Valheim Building Is Too Satisfying To Refrain From Cheating
A quick glance at the Valheim subreddit will show hundreds of examples of different types of Valheim builds, and some of them are clearly larger and more immediately eye-catching than others. However, it's the slightly smaller ones which are more impressive on a granular level, because it's likely those are the Valheim builds players made without cheating.
Although the process has changed somewhat over time since Valheim's early access launch, gaining access to console commands and making it so building and crafting costs no resources is still a relatively simple task, and because the game's base building aspects are so addictive and engaging, it's easy to want to continue building long after running out of available resources. While venturing out into the unknown to gather more materials is definitely a core part of Valheim's gameplay loop, it's understandable that some players would rather just stay in their base and continue to refine and modify it without restrictions.
Creating one's own space in a video game can be an engrossing experience, and it's one of the reasons why games like Minecraft have become so popular in the last decade. Cheating in Valheim allows players to build whatever they want with the game's available items and assets, and lets them create the home (or Viking settlement) of their dreams. However, those homes which are built without the use of cheats will always be more impressive because of the amount of time and dedication their creators put into them - not just in creating the specific Valheim build itself, but in going out and braving the dangers of the game's world to gather the items necessary to bring their idea to life in the first place.
