Can You Dismantle or Destroy Items in Valheim?

As someone with an extremely cluttered desk, I can say with confidence that sometimes you need to get rid of your old stuff to make way for your new stuff. The same is undoubtedly true for Valheim; old huts need to make way for new buildings, beginner-level gear gets binned in favor of sharper stuff. But recycling is still important, even in Norse fantasy land, so we have to try and make use of everything we can and safely dispose of everything we can’t. But that begs the question, can you dismantle or destroy items in Valheim?

Let me answer my own question with a noncommittal “eh… sort of?” Some things can be dismantled into their component parts, while others cannot. Specifically, constructs like fences, walls, benches, or anything else you craft with the express purpose of putting it on the ground can be dismantled. Just equip your crafting hammer and middle-click on the construct in question, and it’ll be immediately dismantled, leaving its components on the ground for you to collect and use elsewhere. On the other hand, equipment and items like weapons and armor cannot be dismantled. Once you craft them, the materials that went into them are gone for good, so make sure you don’t craft any gear that you don’t plan on actually using.

Can You Dismantle or Destroy Items in Valheim?

So if you can’t dismantle old gear, what are you supposed to do with it? You could just leave it on the ground or in a box somewhere, but then it’s just taking up unnecessary space. Littering is bad, dude, dispose of your trash properly. Luckily, while there is no explicit “destroy” function for items, there are ways to permanently remove them from your world.

If you just leave an item on the ground, it’ll stay there, even after you leave. To ensure items disappear from your world completely, you need to drop them in a body of water. Whether it’s a big lake or the ocean, any items dropped in large bodies of water disappear instantly, and are (presumably) destroyed. If you have any old gear you are 100% sure you don’t need anymore, just row a raft out onto the water and start dumping. Yeah, I know I said littering is bad, but technically it’s not littering if the stuff vanishes from existence.

If you don’t mind a spot of cheating, you can also remove items from your world using console commands. Just drop everything you don’t want nearby, press F5 to bring up the console, type “imacheater” to enable cheats, then type “removedrops” to banish the items to nonexistence. Just be careful you don’t drop or stand near anything you actually want, because whether you drop it in the water or delete it with console commands, once it’s gone, you can’t get it back.