How to Raise Skills in Valheim

Skills in Valheim level up the slow way: swing a sword to grow Swords, sneak past a deer to grow Sneak. If you'd rather skip the grind — for a new character on an existing world, a fresh loadout test, or because you died and lost half your levels — the raiseskill and resetskill commands do it directly.

Both are cheats. Enable them first via how to enable cheats in Valheim.

The raiseskill syntax

Skill ID — case-sensitive identifier (full list below). Most are just the skill name in PascalCase.
Amount — how many levels to add. Negative values subtract. The maximum any skill can reach is 100.

Cap a skill instantly:

Add 10 levels:

Drop a skill by 25 levels:

See the full raiseskill reference for argument details.

Every skill ID

Skill IDs match the in-game skill names exactly, in PascalCase with a space removed for multi-word skills (so it's "Blood magic" with the space, not BloodMagic — those with spaces need quotes):

Weapon skills

Swords — see Swords skill
Axes — affects axe damage and tree-chopping
Clubs
Knives
Polearms
Spears
Bows
Crossbows
Fists — unarmed and Flesh Rippers
"Blood magic" — needs quotes (has a space)
"Elemental magic" — needs quotes

Defense and utility

Blocking
Sneak
Run
Jump
Swim
Riding

Gathering

"Wood Cutting" — needs quotes
Pickaxes — mining
Fishing

Full set with effect descriptions on the all skills reference.

Examples for common goals

New character, existing world

If you've made a new character to join a friend's endgame world, catch up your combat skills so you're not one-shotted:

Test a weapon at max skill

Want to know what a fully-leveled Frostner feels like before committing to 40 hours of grinding?

Restore lost levels after death

Valheim drops 5% of every skill on death. After a bad corpse run, top them back up:

Resetting a skill to zero

resetskill wipes a single skill back to level 0. Useful if you accidentally raised the wrong one, or want to respec without raising-then-lowering.

Example:

Full resetskill reference.

Avoiding skill drain instead of raising

If you don't want to use cheats but also don't want to lose skill XP on death, two non-cheat options exist:

Rested buff. Sleeping or sitting near a fire gives Rested, which boosts XP gain by 50%. Cheaper way to level fast without commands.
No skill drain via mead. The "No skill drain" status (see the No skill drain reference) prevents XP loss on death. World-modifier worlds can also toggle this globally.

Gotchas

The cap is 100, not 99 or 101. raiseskill Swords 200 on a level-30 character just leaves you at 100 — extra is discarded.
Negative amounts can go below zero. raiseskill Swords -200 when you're at level 50 will park you at 0, not -150.
Skill IDs are case-sensitive. raiseskill swords 10 fails silently. Capital S.
Multi-word skills need quotes. raiseskill Blood magic 50 tries to raise a skill named "Blood" by some number "magic" — the console doesn't know what to do with that. Use raiseskill "Blood magic" 50.