How to Unlock the Camera in Valheim

Today we are going to teach you how to take beautiful screenshots and thumbnail images in Valheim. Many players haven’t realized that the camera can be unlocked and that you can have a free-flying camera which can go wherever you want. This is going to be helpful for those wanting to show off a video tour of their base, get a birds-eye shot of their village or even take great images to use as thumbnails for YouTube videos. Valheim creators, stay tuned!


Enabling Cheats Before Enabling the Free Camera

Before you can enable the free camera you are going to have to first be allowed to do so. To be able to cheat and thus, use the freefly camera you must be an admin of the server you are playing in your session of Valheim. You will automatically be the admin if you have created the server so if you are playing single player do not worry about that. If yo are not the server admin but still want to use the unlocked camera mode then the admin of the server will have to give you administrate powers through the command console.

Enabling Cheats

As of patch 0.148.4 you will need to enable the command console from the launch options for the game. For a guide on how to do this, click here.

To use the unlocked flying camera you will have to enable cheats for your character first. To enable cheats open up the console with the F5 key on your keyboard. You should have a grey console box open up from the top half of your screen. To enable cheats in Valheim you will have to type in the command “devcommands” into the console and press enter. (Without quotation marks). You will then see a message printed underneath your command which states “Cheats: True”. You are now ready to input the command/cheat which enables you to unlock the camera.

If you wish to turn cheats off you can once again type in “imacheater” and this will be toggled back off.

how to enable the unlocked free camera in Valheim using the console

Command to Unlock the Camera

Once you have cheats enabled in your version of Valheim you are now ready to use a command to unlock the camera. To unlock the camera, once again open up the console with the F5 key if it isn’t already still there and type the code ‘freefly’.

This will enable the free-flying camera and will help you get your creative juices flowing in Valheim. You will immediately be detached from your character and your controls will now directly affect the camera and no longer your player. You can still use the in-game chat.

Be aware that whilst you no longer control your character enemies may still spawn and your character can still take damage. If you want to make sure that your character will not be defeated whilst you are in the ‘freefly’ camera mode one would have to enable the god mode cheat before or after enabling the unlocked camera. You could, alternatively just put your character in a safe, hard to reach place.

An In-game shot taken by using the unlocked freefly camera in Valheim
A shot from above

The camera can fly wherever it wants across the map. If you travel too far with it however you will see the world starts to degenerate. The game will only load certain models and textures as far as the player can see. After you leave the small radius around the player you will see that most of the world there hasn’t loaded at all. If the game were to process and render the while map at the same time the game would be unplayable on basically all PC’s.

If you wish to fly around a certain area for exploration purposes then you will have to have your character relatively close.

How to Disable the Freefly Camera in Valheim

You may now be done with flying around with the camera and want to return back to your character. If you wish to turn off the camera and regain control of your character then simply open up the console and once again repeat the cheat code ‘freefly’. This will disable the flying camera and give you control over your character.


Unlocked Camera Controls

There are a few controls specific to using the freefly camera. Moving around with the camera remains relatively the same as moving around with the character. Your general movement controls will be W,A,S,D for your forward, left, back and right. There are a few advanced controls however that we will show below.

  • Move Forward: W
  • Move Back: S
  • Move Left: A
  • Move Right: D
  • Snap to Character/Point: Left Click
  • Move Camera Up: Space
  • Move Camera Down: CTRL
  • Change Camera Speed: Mouse Scroll Wheel

As stated above the, using the scroll wheel of the mouse you can control the speed at which the camera flies. Scrolling up with the mouse will make the camera fly faster, with a downwards scroll decreasing the speed.

By utilizing the left click of the mouse you can lock on to a character or object. If this object moves the camera will follow them around. To unlock the camera from something, simply left-click again.


Smoothness Settings

The camera camera movement can also be changed with using console commands. Making the camera smoother will cause it do look more organic and sweeping. To enable the smoothness of the camera type into the console ‘ffsmooth’ followed by a number. For example in the image below I changed the camera to smoothness level 8 and then back to 0. I personally noticed very little, if any difference between camera smooth level 1 and 8. To disable the smooth camera type into the console; “ffsmooth 0”. This must be typed without the quotation marks and with a space in between the word and the value.

changing the unlocked freefly camera smoothness in valheim

How to Disable the HUD for better screenshots

You can also disable the HUD in Valheim. HUD stands for heads-up display and includes the quick bar slots, health and stamina values and other parts of the screen that aren’t modelled into the actual game world. To disable the HUD hold the CTRL key and press the F3 key. You can turn the HUD back on using the same hotkeys. These controls represent the default controls for hiding the HUD. If these controls aren’t working consult the in-game control settings and see if they have been changed from an update or changed by mistake.


Related: How to Use Chat and Emotes in Valheim | How to Anchor your Boat in Valheim

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