Runic World Engine 1.1.0

Runic World Engine is a standalone, conservative world-state observatory and save smoother for Valheim 0.221.12. It measures aggregate ZDO population, peer count, create/destroy intervals, send/receive rates, and save/load call duration at a hard maximum of one aggregate sample per second. Its only runtime requirement is BepInExPack Valheim 5.4.2333.

Authority and performance bounds

World-data handling remains conservative:

it never deletes, rewrites, compacts, quarantines, reprioritizes, or force-sends a ZDO;
unknown third-party data is always preserved;
it creates no persistent world keys of its own;
it publishes no registry, capability, protocol, ownership declaration, or cross-mod service;
it has no client UI or asset load, so dedicated servers use the same small runtime;
optional summaries are off by default and rate-limited to 5–600 seconds.

The observatory uses constant-time collection counts and event counters. It does not perform a base scan, sector walk, prefab enumeration, heat-map build, or save clone on the game thread. Save/load completion cannot force an extra sample through the one-second ceiling. A failed sample is discarded without changing world state or blocking any gameplay mod.

Save smoothing

Asynchronous periodic saves are coalesced while an earlier save is still active and their main-thread preparation is deferred briefly when the previous frame exceeded the configured frame budget. The deferral is bounded (five seconds by default), so a persistently busy server still saves. Synchronous shutdown saves are never deferred. The smoother never touches Unity objects from a worker thread; Valheim retains ownership of both snapshot preparation and its normal disk writer. This reduces avoidable save-time spikes, but no mod can promise a literally zero-frame hitch for every world size and storage device.

Configuration

Setting	Default	Meaning
`General.Enabled`	`true`	Enables aggregate observation; false creates no patches or observatory state.
`Diagnostics.LogPeriodicSummary`	`false`	Writes bounded aggregate summaries.
`Diagnostics.SummaryIntervalSeconds`	`30`	Summary cadence, clamped to 5–600 seconds.
`Save Smoothing.Enabled`	`true`	Coalesces overlapping asynchronous save requests and waits for a stable frame.
`Save Smoothing.FrameBudgetMilliseconds`	`24`	Preferred maximum previous-frame duration before save preparation starts.
`Save Smoothing.MaximumDeferralSeconds`	`5`	Hard maximum delay before a pending save must start.

Planned later work—world heat maps, compaction, and synchronization scheduling experiments—is not claimed by 1.1.0 and remains disabled until separately designed and tested.