I went on a ride-along with Valheim's Body Recovery Squad

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about Valheim’s Body Recovery Squad – a group of players who risk virtual life and limb to help players get their items back, no matter the difficulty, and do it all for free. It’s a wonderful community effort, but something you might not expect is that the BRS is also a well-oiled machine, with lots of work going on in the background to keep the wheels turning. Members file paperwork, take part in training exercises, and even carry out industrial-scale farming to keep operators stocked and fed.

I discovered all this for myself when invited on a “ride-along” with BRS founding members Lucas (RimJaynor), Brendan (Spanky), Jonny (Small_T2) and Gareth (Rolivend), who took me on several missions and even gave me a tour of their warehouse. In total we went on four recoveries – some tougher than others – and on at least two occasions the team also had to recover me, too. I guess I could have done with a spear-proof vest. So here’s an overview of what happened that evening, complete with footage from our dramatic first and fourth missions, and an MTV Cribs-style tour of the BRS warehouse.

To kick things off, you can find the video of our first mission below – featuring a very rough landing in the swamps. Discord and Steam overlays have been edited out to protect player information, so stick around a few minutes before we dive into gameplay:

So, what does a BRS recovery mission look like? If you’re familiar with the BRS, you’ll know that the community Discord serves as the centre of all their operations. Deathsquito victims can head into the assistance application channel to hit an SOS button, which opens a ticket and requests information from the user (such as which biome they died in). It then creates a private channel in which the client and recovery operators can chat. Clients can even share a screenshot of their game map to help operators plan a recovery route.