How to Enable Cheats in Valheim

Valheim ships with cheats disabled by default. To use commands like spawn, god, fly, or any of the other world-changing ones, you have to enable cheats in two separate steps: turn on the console at the Steam level, and then enable developer commands inside the game. This guide walks through both.

Step 1 — Enable the console in Steam

Valheim's console only appears if you launch the game with a specific flag. Set it once in Steam and you're done:

Open Steam and go to your Library.
Right-click Valheim → Properties.
On the General tab, scroll to Launch Options.
Paste this into the field and close the window:

Launch Valheim normally afterwards. You only need to set this once — Steam keeps the flag across launches. The longer breakdown lives in our how to open the console guide.

Step 2 — Enable developer commands in-game

The Steam flag opens the console, but most of the powerful commands are gated behind a second toggle: devcommands. Without it, you can use a small set of player commands (info, fps, ping) but nothing that changes the world.

Load into a world, press F5 to open the console, and type:

You'll see a confirmation that dev commands are enabled. From this point on, every cheat in the command reference works.

What "cheats enabled" unlocks

Enabling devcommands unlocks the entire "Cheat" category — roughly:

spawn — items, creatures, bosses, anything with an ID. See all item IDs and all character IDs.
god, fly, ghost — invulnerability, flight, and aggro avoidance.
goto, tod, skiptime — world position and time control.
env, wind — weather and sailing conditions. See all environment codes.
raiseskill, setkey, addstatus — skills, progression keys, and status effects.

Cheats persist for the session only

devcommands resets every time the world reloads. If you log out and back in, or your game crashes, you have to re-run the command. The Steam launch flag persists, but the in-game toggle does not.

A small workaround: bind the toggle to a key with bind, so you can re-enable cheats with a single press after every reload:

What if "devcommands" doesn't work?

Two common reasons:

The console isn't actually open. If F5 doesn't bring up a text input at the bottom of the screen, the -console launch flag isn't applied. Recheck the Steam properties.
You're on a server you don't admin. Cheats only affect your local client; on someone else's dedicated server, server-side enforcement may still kick in. Dedicated-server admins should also read the server admin commands guide.

Cheats and achievements

Valheim does not disable Steam achievements when you use cheats — this is a long-standing exception compared to most survival games. You can spawn yourself a Yagluth trophy and the achievement still triggers when you kill the boss. (Iron Gate has not stated this is permanent, so don't rely on it for hardcore runs.)