SeedsHow to find your world seed
Ten characters, one world · open it in the seed mapThe seed is the ten-character code the world was generated from. Same seed, same world, so once you have it you can open the whole map in the seed map and see every altar, trader and dungeon before you have sailed anywhere.
Start the game, pick your character and open the world list. Each world shows its seed under the name. That list is the one place the game prints it without any tricks, and it is also where you type a seed of your own when you create a new world.
You do not need admin rights. Join the server and press F2. The overlay that appears lists the world name and its seed alongside the frame rate and ping. Anyone in the world can read it, so this is the answer for a friend's server or a public one.
The console has no command that prints the seed, and the seed is not in any log you can reach as a player, so F2 is the whole trick.
A world is two files, name.fwl and name.db. The small .fwl one holds the name and the seed. On Windows they live in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\worlds_local, on Linux in ~/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/worlds_local, and a dedicated server keeps them next to its start script. Drop the file below to read the seed without opening the game.
The world file holds the seed and nothing else. What you have explored, and every pin you placed, lives in your character file, name.fch, one file per character across every world it has played. With Steam cloud saves on, which is the default, it sits in Steam's own folder: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\<your Steam ID>\892970\remote\characters. With cloud saves off it is in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\characters_local. Since 1.0 a world is a folder in the matching worlds directory, and its metadata file is _main.<number>.fwl2 inside it.
On the seed map, the "Your explored map" button next to Random takes either the two files or the whole remote folder. From the folder it finds your newest character and the world it last saved, opens that seed, and draws the ground you have explored with the rest under the game's own fog, plus your in-game pins, your bed, your last logout and where you last died. Everything is read in your browser; the explored map is kept in the browser for that seed and the pins go with your other pins.
Paste it into the seed map for the full world, or run it through the seed finder to compare it with a hundred thousand others. A seed is at most ten characters: anything longer is cut by the game itself, so a longer string is not a world that can exist.