How to Destroy and Delete Items in Valheim

To survive in Valheim, you’ll need to collect crafting resources to expand your base or forge new tools, weapons, and armor. Of course, you’ll need the inventory space to carry everything around. But what if you don’t have any room left? How do you destroy and delete items to add new ones? 

This guide will tell you “how to break things down,” but it’s not as straightforward as pressing a key or choosing a specific menu option.

Understanding Your Inventory

In the game’s current Early Access build, there are 32 item slots available in your character’s pouch.

The eight boxes in the top row are technically reserved for tools and weapons since they correspond to hotkeys 1-8. The other 24 spaces below those are meant for your armor and anything you’ve picked up in your world seed.

When you’re out exploring, mining for resources such as tin ore and copper ore, or gathering wood, you can leave all of your tools and weapons (except those you need) behind at your base to create more room. You can also put anything into the hotkey areas if you’re in desperate need of space.

But that won’t always work. Perhaps you’ve made multiple flint axes or wooden clubs and want to rid yourself of them after upgrading to better variants.

How to Get Rid of Items in Valheim

The only ways to dismantle objects right now is to:  

1. Store items in chests
2. Drop items on the ground/in the water
3. Use console commands

Use Chests

Putting all of your loot in chests will work for a while, but you can quickly get overwhelmed with a plethora of containers. Each chest only holds 10 distinct item groups. 

If you have a large base, you could build a storehouse for all of your receptacles, making management a bit easier. You can also split stacks to spread objects around, which also works for your next option. 

Drop Items on the Ground or In the Water

Alternatively, leaving materials and equipment on the ground or dropping them in the water works in a pinch.

To drop something, open your inventory and select it with the left mouse button. Then without closing your inventory, hover your cursor anywhere that’s not a menu. Press the left mouse button again, and your character will dump it in the world. 

Things you put on the ground or in the water don’t dismantle or disappear immediately, however. I dropped one log on the ground and one in the water and watched them for three in-game days (even through a storm), and they never disappeared. I logged out and back in, and I quit the game and restarted it.

They will eventually disappear — as I have dropped rocks while mining that I could no longer find. It seems to take a few in-game days for things to vanish. 

Consequently, it isn’t a recommended method for areas in or around your base since it creates a lot of clutter (unless you don’t care about that type of thing). But out in the wilderness of the Black Forest or in the peat bog of the Swamp? It’s no big deal. 

I’ve read reports on Reddit and Steam forums of players digging large garbage pits with the pickaxe, bordering it with a fence, and throwing everything inside. Some players have also created separate world seeds they use for dumping grounds. 

Use Console Commands

We have a complete list of every Valheim console command, but this is what you’ll want to do to permanently remove items: 

• Press F5 to open the dev console
• Type “imacheater”
• Hit “Enter”
• Type “removedrops”
• Hit “Enter”

This command will make any nearby drops break down and disappear. Just type “imacheater” in the console again to disable cheats. 

As you can see in the picture of the map above, which shows my character’s location and an item’s location when using the command, you’re able to remove objects from a seed across a relatively great distance. However, the distance shown above seems to be the maxmium. 

Currently, that’s all you need to know about how to destroy and delete items in Valheim. The developer, Iron Gate AB, is likely to implement more substantial ways to deconstruct later in the game’s development cycle, so we’ll make changes to this guide in the future as needed. For more, consider checking out our tips articles on how to build a raft and how to place map markers.