No, birds are not flying away with boats in Valheim
The rumor is a fun one, but according to developer Iron Gate Studios, it's not true.
There are plenty of strange sights in Valheim, from the mysterious shadowy stranger to the occasional Millennium Falcon. But there's recently been a new sighting in the sky, and it definitely shouldn't be there.
Some players have reported (and recorded) ships flying around in the air, which isn't typically a thing ships should be doing. We're not talking about the ships being deliberately launched by sliding them down mountainsides and off ramps. We mean boats simply just taking off and zipping around in the sky like airplanes:
The Flying Dutchman - an absolute staple of Norse mythology. from r/valheim
Rumors quickly spread that the reason the boat was flying was because a bird had landed on it, and that somehow transferred ownership of the boat to the feathered creature. When the boat-owning bird took off, it carried the boat with it. At least that's what some players said.
But that's apparently not the case. We emailed Iron Gate Studios about the rumor, and their PR representative told us the bird isn't actually picking up the boat and taking it for a spin.
"Haha," reads the email response. "We’ve had a few queries on this. Nope, I’m afraid it’s not real."
No suggestion was given as to why boats might be flying around, however. In fact, you can actually see a bird in the boat at one point in the clip above, though Iron Gate didn't comment specifically on why that might be the case. All we know is, an AI-controlled bird isn't controlling the ship.
So, what's happening? I tried using Valheim's debug mode, a cheat which lets you fly, but I still couldn't carry my ship along with me. Is a player using some sort of flying mod on a server? It wouldn't be the first game where a mod could be used to inhabit the body of an animal in an open world game. We'll update this story if we learn more.