Rist

Rist adds a character level beside Valheim's skills. Every level gives you a pick, and a pick carves one more rank into a runestone you choose. Vanilla skills are read and never written, rescaled or reskinned.

Built against Valheim 1.0.7, Unity 6000.0.75, BepInEx 5.4.23.5, Harmony 2.9. One DLL plus one text file, no asset bundle.

Features

• A character level with its own curve, fed by skill level-ups.
• One pick per level. Picks bank; nothing expires.
• Runestones raise a stat by a fixed amount per rank, to rank 5 by default. Every fifth rank grants a capstone, a second and different effect.
• No runestone carries a drawback.
• A panel on the compendium bar showing every runestone, what it is worth now, what the next rank adds, and which character level bought each rank.
• An experience bar on the HUD, cloned from one of the game's own bars, that flashes while a pick is unspent.
• A line above other players' heads: level, total XP, days since their last death.
• Dying no longer costs skill progress. On by default, and switchable.
• The catalogue is a plain text file. Adding a runestone is one line and no rebuild.
• On a server, progress is kept in the server's own ledger rather than in the character file.

How it works

XP and levels

XP comes from skill level-ups and from nothing else. Almost everything in Valheim raises some skill, so building, sneaking, sailing, cooking and fishing all pay in without Rist keeping a list of what counts.

A level-up is worth the skill level it reached, not a flat amount, multiplied by that skill's weight. Vanilla's own skill cost curve is pow(level+1, 1.5), so early levels are nearly free; a flat rate would hand out runestones in the first hours and dry up when the deep ranks start to matter.

The weight is what stops one activity carrying the level. On the live server, a character at Rist level 12 held 1346 XP of which WoodCutting alone was 666, against 293 for everything earned in a fight. Default weights:

Weight	Skills
1	Swords, Knives, Clubs, Polearms, Spears, Axes, Bows, Crossbows, Unarmed, Blocking, ElementalMagic, BloodMagic
0.5	Dodge, Sneak, Swim
0.25	WoodCutting, Pickaxes, Crafting, Farming, Cooking, Fishing, Run, Jump, Ride

Full price for a skill raised by something that can kill you, a fraction for repetition that cannot. The same character comes out at level 6 under this table, with over half of it earned fighting. SkillWeights is meant to be edited, and on a server the host's table applies to everyone.

Cumulative XP for level N is LevelBaseXp * N^LevelExponent, which is 40 * N^1.4 by default.

Changing the weights affects new XP only. To re-price characters that already exist, change WeightGeneration to any different text: every character is then recomputed once, on its next login, from the skill levels the server has watched it reach. Runestones already taken are kept, so a character re-priced from level 12 to level 6 still holds all twelve ranks and earns no new pick until it passes level 12 again.

Spending picks

The panel is a fifth tab on the compendium bar, beside the raven and the trophy. There is no keybind; the tab is the only way in.

Each runestone carries its own outline, rock and runes, seeded off its id, so it looks the same in every session and on every machine. A rank cuts one more rune into the rim. The column beside the field follows the cursor and says what the stone is worth now, what the next rank would make it, what sits at the bottom of its track, and the character level that bought each rank.

The stones stand in five ættir, Combat, Survival, Endurance, Stealth and Utility: towers two stones wide and up to four tall, each under its name and a count of how many in it are carved. A new theme adds a tower to the right rather than a row at the bottom, so the panel grows into the width a wide screen has spare. It used to be one field a fixed number of columns across, and at twenty-one runestones it ran off the bottom of a short window.

The panel works out from the screen how to fit. On a wide or 1920x1080 screen the towers stand with full-size stones and every tile shows its value. On a smaller one it tries smaller stones, then lays each ætt down four wide, and only after that drops the value line from the tiles (it stays in the column beside). It never scrolls. If a taskbar covers the bottom of the game window, PanelBottomInset keeps that strip clear, and it stays your own setting on a server.

Death

RemoveDeathSkillLoss skips Skills.OnDeath entirely. Valheim's own world modifier is not the same thing: Skills.OnDeath calls LowerAllSkills(m_DeathLowerFactor * Game.m_skillReductionRate), and inside that method only the level loss is scaled by the factor.

m_level -= m_level * factor;   // scaled: a zero factor means no loss
m_accumulator = 0f;            // not scaled: always wiped
// ...and "$msg_skills_lowered" is shown regardless

So setting the world's skill reduction to zero still discards partial progress toward the next level in every skill, and still announces that skills were lowered. Skipping the method removes all three.

The bar and the plate

The experience bar is a clone of one of the game's own upright bars, so it carries the real frame, track and fill sprites at whatever HUD scale you run. It drains rather than snapping to empty on a level-up, and flashes while a pick is waiting. If the clone ever fails against a game update it falls back to a plain drawn bar.

The plate writes level, total XP and days since the last death into the game's own nameplate, so it inherits the plate's font, fade and distance rules. Each client publishes its own three numbers onto its own character's network object; the server cannot write them, because a write to a network object you do not own is discarded. A player without Rist shows a plain name.

Days alive counts from the day the plate first saw the character, not from the day it was created. The game keeps no creation date, so every existing character reads 0 when this first runs and grows from there. It resets on death and is counted in world days.

PlateFormat is the whole of the presentation: the fields, their order, their colours and whether it wraps to a second line. It is a TextMeshPro label, so rich text works.

Installation

1. Install BepInEx 5.4.2350. Rist uses the BepInEx 5 API and does not run on BepInEx 6.
2. Install Rist from Thunderstore or with a mod manager, or drop Rist.dll and cards.txt into BepInEx\plugins\Rist.

cards.txt must sit beside the DLL. It ships with the mod and is not optional: without it no runestone can be taken, and the startup log says NOT READY rather than ready.

Install it on the client and on the server. The server decides every number, the client reports skill-ups and applies the effects, and neither half does anything useful alone.

Longhouse Core is an optional soft dependency. See Multiplayer for what Rist gives up without it.

The catalogue

cards.txt is read once at load. Edit it and restart the game; there is no reload.

One runestone per line, eight pipe-separated fields:

id | Name | flavour text | effect | value-per-rank | capstone effect | capstone value | sigil

The last three are optional. A line with five fields is still a valid runestone.

• id is the key the ledger stores. It is permanent: change it and every rank anyone bought in that runestone is a rank in a runestone that no longer exists.
• effect is the literal name of a public float field on the game's own SE_Stats, or one of the specials below. Valheim already sums about forty-five of these across active status effects (carry weight, armour, the six stamina costs, stealth, fall damage, regen rates, skill gain), so naming one turns it into a runestone with no code change.
• value-per-rank accumulates: rank 3 of a 15-per-rank line gives 45.
• capstone effect and capstone value are granted once per BonusEvery ranks, which at the default MaxRank 5 means once, on the final rank. A capstone can name anything an effect can, including a special.
• sigil is the rune cut into the middle of the stone, written as a Latin letter. The game's rune font is a Latin-mapped decorative face, so a real runic code point renders as an empty box. Omit it and the first letter of the id is used.

Specials are effects with no SE_Stats field behind them, handled in code:

Special	Effect
*stamina:move	Run, jump, dodge, swim and sneak all cost less
*stamina:fight	Attacking and blocking both cost less
*attackspeed:melee	Faster swings with a weapon
*attackspeed:tools	Faster swings with a pickaxe, axe, hammer, hoe or cultivator
*attackspeed:ranged	A bow reaches full draw sooner, a crossbow reloads sooner, and both fire faster
*attackspeed:magic	A staff casts faster. A staff firing several projectiles per cast has its burst timing sped to match; a looping staff that pays eitr once per hold stays at vanilla speed
*damage:ranged	More damage from bows and crossbows only. A fraction: 0.05 is 5%
*unbroken	A hit cannot stagger you out of a staff cast before the spell fires. A flag: write 1
*answer	A perfect dodge arms your next hit on an enemy within 4 seconds. A fraction of that hit's damage
*answer:stagger	Chance that the answering blow staggers anything a parry would, never a boss. A fraction: 0.30 is 30%
*lowdraw	Seconds of a bow draw from a crouch that still count as sneaking, and the shot that ends such a draw. The character still rises to draw
*lowdraw:silent	Arrows loosed from a crouch make no noise where they land, so a miss does not alert the animals around it. A creature the arrow hits is still alerted by the hit. A flag: write 1
*sneakattack	Raises a weapon's own sneak attack multiplier. A fraction: 0.10 is 10% more. Weapons with no sneak attack gain none
*sneakattack:stagger	A sneak attack on an unalerted, non-boss creature staggers it, at most once per creature per 300 seconds. A flag: write 1
*mead:duration	Buff meads last longer. A fraction. Every mead except the ones that restore health, stamina or eitr, so the Lingering meads, Tonic of Ratatosk and Lightfoot Mead are included
*mead:fullcask	Chance a buff mead is not used up when drunk, rolled per drink. A fraction: 0.25 is 25%
*power:cooldown	Shortens the forsaken power's cooldown. Negative is shorter, and it cannot go below half
*power:duration	Seconds added to the forsaken power for every player it reaches when you cast it. A power cast by someone without it lasts the normal time for everyone. Applies to every forsaken power
*exploreradius	The map reveals a wider circle as you walk. A fraction: 0.05 is 5% further
*windcone	Narrows the sailing dead zone and turns the sail's push toward the bow inside the arc it opens, so you can sail closer to the wind. Sailing dead upwind still stalls. A fraction of the zone, capped at 0.8. Only applies to a ship you are steering, and the wind ring's dead zone narrows to match
*rowspeed	Rows faster, forward and back. A fraction of top rowing speed: 0.20 is 20% faster. Only applies to a ship you are steering
*inventoryrow	Adds rows to the player inventory grid. Not used by the default catalogue, since Valheim 1.0 sells rows from the trader, but still recognised for custom ones

The header comment in cards.txt carries the sign conventions, which are the game's rather than Rist's. The stamina-use modifiers are fractions where negative means cheaper, so -0.05 is a 5% discount per rank. Four fields count from 1 rather than 0 (the three regen multipliers and m_damageModifier); write the plain fraction and Rist adds the 1. Which fields those are is read off a fresh SE_Stats at load rather than hardcoded, and any disagreement with the four Rist was written against is logged.

An unknown field name or unknown special is logged and the line skipped, so a typo costs one runestone rather than the catalogue. A blank id, a duplicate id or an unparseable number is skipped the same way. An effect with no readable display name still works, and is named in the log at load so it can be added to the label table.

Configuration

BepInEx\config\ezomic.valheim.rist.cfg

BepInEx writes every entry to disk on first run and the saved value beats a new default in code. If a change appears to do nothing, check the file.

General

Key	Default	Effect
Enabled	true	Off leaves levels and runestones recorded but stops granting and applying them
Verbose	false	Log every XP grant, rejection and runestone applied, plus a dump of the vanilla UI this mod clones
ShowInfoTab	true	Add the runestone tab to the compendium bar. There is no keybind, so off means no way in

Levelling

Key	Default	Effect
XpPerSkillLevel	1	XP per skill level-up, multiplied by the level reached and the skill's weight
LevelBaseXp	40	Cumulative XP for character level 1
LevelExponent	1.4	Cumulative XP for level N is LevelBaseXp * N^LevelExponent
SkillWeights	see table above	Skill=multiplier pairs, comma separated. Names are Skills.SkillType names and are case-insensitive; a raw type number also works. Negatives are clamped to zero
DefaultSkillWeight	1	What a skill not named in SkillWeights is worth
WeightGeneration	1	Change to any different text to recompute every character once, on its next login

Cards

Key	Default	Effect
MaxRank	5	How deep one runestone goes, and how many slots its track shows
BonusEvery	5	Ranks between capstones
PanelBottomInset	0	Pixels at the bottom of the screen the panel keeps clear, for a taskbar over the game window. About 48 clears a Windows taskbar. Stays local on a server
AttackSpeedMax	1	Ceiling on the attack-speed specials, as a fraction. 1 means a swing or cast can at most run at double speed, and a bow draw or crossbow reload can at most take half its time
ReconcileMaxLoss	0.34	How much of the ledger's runestone history may vanish from cards.txt in one go before the server refuses to reconcile at all, as a fraction of the distinct ids players hold. Server-side only

ReconcileMaxLoss is worth understanding before you edit the catalogue. Removing a runestone from cards.txt hands its picks back and drops the ranks bought in it, which is correct when it was meant and is a permanent wipe when the catalogue merely failed to load. Over the threshold, nothing is returned and nothing is removed; the server logs why on every login and leaves every record alone until you fix the catalogue or raise this and restart. A catalogue that is missing, unreadable or empty is refused whatever this is set to.

Death

Key	Default	Effect
RemoveDeathSkillLoss	true	Skip Skills.OnDeath, which removes the level loss, the accumulator wipe and the message together

Gate

These bound what a client's skill-up report can be worth. Skills live on the client, so a report cannot be verified, only bounded. None of them detects a cheat, none disconnects anyone, and nothing is ever taken away. They are inert in single player.

Key	Default	Effect
CheckSkillBaseline	true	On login, take the character's skill list as the baseline this server pays from. Off also turns off MaxSkillLevelJump
CreditExistingSkills	true	Pay a joining character for the skills it already has, so it arrives at the level those skills are worth with the picks to spend. Off counts only level-ups watched on this server
MaxSkillUpsPerMinute	30	Ceiling on accepted skill-up reports per player
MaxSkillLevelJump	1	Levels above the baseline a single report may claim. Raise it only if you run a mod that grants skill levels in bulk
MaxXpPerMinute	600	XP paid per player per minute of connected time. 0 or less turns it off
XpBurst	1800	How much unspent allowance banks, so an honest burst is still paid in full
CappedMessage	see cfg	Shown once per session, centre screen, when the earning cap withholds XP

Crediting a joining character has a cost: a maxed vanilla character walks in at Rist level 219 with the picks to take most of the catalogue. If that matters on your server, restrict who can join rather than withholding XP. Dyrr does that.

Plate

Key	Default	Effect
ShowPlate	true	The Rist line above other players' heads. Off also stops this character publishing its own numbers
PlateFormat	see cfg	Tokens {lvl} {xp} {days} {name}, rich text, \n for a second line. Drop a token to drop that field

Bar

Key	Default	Effect
ShowXpBar	true	Show the experience bar. It hides with the rest of the interface
VanillaBar	true	Clone one of the game's own bars. Off draws a plain rectangle, which is also the automatic fallback if the clone fails
BarUpright	false	Stand the bar on end like stamina and eitr. Off lays it flat, which is what a long bar needs
BarFollowStamina	true	Place the bar relative to the stamina bar. Off falls back to BarPosX / BarPosY, as does a stamina bar that cannot be found
BarOffsetX / BarOffsetY	0 / 70	Pixels right of and below the stamina bar's centre, when following it
BarPosX / BarPosY	172 / 105	Pixels from the left edge and the bottom to the bar's centre, when not following
BarSize	240	Length in canvas units, the units vanilla sizes its own bars in. 64 is a starting stamina bar. Thickness comes from the borrowed sprite and is not settable
BarBuildRaise	155	Pixels to lift the bar while the build or ship panel is open
BarColour	4FB3A5	RRGGBB. The trailing fill is the same hue held back. E4DCC4 for bone. An unparseable value falls back to gold
BarFlashSeconds	4	How often the cloned bar pulses while a pick is waiting
BarNoteGap	6	Gap between the top of the bar and the "rist waiting" note above it
BarX / BarBottom / BarThickness / BarLength	168 / 75 / 10 / 60	Place the fallback bar only

Every pixel number in the [Bar] block is multiplied by your HUD's canvas scale, so one value is the same visual position on every screen. BarSize is in canvas units and is already scaled by the game.

Multiplayer

Progress is kept on the server, in BepInEx\config\rist-ledger.txt, keyed by the platform identity of the connection and the character being played. Valheim character files live on the player's own disk, so nothing that decides rewards can be stored there. The client reports only that a skill went up; every number is derived server-side.

Single player takes the same path with no special casing, and the throttles are inert there.

With Longhouse Core

Core is a soft dependency. With it installed on both ends:

• Client mod versions and build ids are checked on connect, and mismatches are rejected.
• A hash of cards.txt travels with that check, so two ends running the same build over different catalogues are reported.
• The host's Rist config is applied on connected clients, in memory only. Your own config file is not modified, and your values come back when you disconnect.
• Inventory row claims are arbitrated, so Rist and any other row-granting mod stack instead of overwriting each other.

Without Core

Rist installs and runs on its own, and solo you give up nothing. On a server you give up three things:

The catalogue is no longer checked. cards.txt names what every rank is worth, effects are applied client-side from it, and the server only ever verifies the rank. A client that edits its own catalogue gets whatever it wrote.

The host's curve is not applied. A client with a different LevelBaseXp reads a different level out of the same XP, and every number on its screen disagrees with the server deciding them. The .cfg files have to be matched by hand.

Inventory rows are claimed without an arbiter. Inventory.m_height is a single private int with no owner, so two mods that both want rows each write it and the last writer wins. Rist's standalone owner is correct on its own and conflicts with any other mod that grants rows, with the winner decided by frame ordering. Install Core if you run one.

Rist logs a warning at startup when it starts without Core, naming all three.

Compatibility

• Requires BepInEx 5. Not compatible with BepInEx 6.
• 1.2.0 and later require Valheim 1.0. Earlier versions do not run on 1.0, and this one does not run on pre-1.0 Valheim.
• Conflicts with other mods that add player inventory rows unless Longhouse Core is installed. With Core, they stack.
• Vanilla skills are read and never written, so mods that change skill gain, add skills or rebalance the skill curve work alongside this. A mod that grants skill levels in bulk will trip MaxSkillLevelJump on a server; raise it.
• The three attack-speed specials patch Attack.Start and set the animator speed through CharacterAnimEvent.Speed. Another mod driving the same number will fight over it.

Updating a server

The ledger format is v4 as of Rist 1.1.0. A v4 line does not parse on 1.0.1 or earlier and is dropped rather than erroring, so copy rist-ledger.txt aside before updating a server you care about. v1 to v3 lines are still read and come back as never re-priced.

Troubleshooting

A config change did nothing. BepInEx writes the whole file on first run and the saved value wins over a new default. Edit BepInEx\config\ezomic.valheim.rist.cfg. On a server with Core installed, the host's values are applied over yours while you are connected.

An edit to cards.txt did nothing. It is read once at load. Restart the game.

The startup log says NOT READY. cards.txt is missing, unreadable, or every line was rejected. The warnings above that line name each rejected line. Reinstall if the file is gone: it ships with the mod.

There is no tab on the compendium bar. Check ShowInfoTab, then look for "No compendium tab to clone" in the log. There is no keybind, so that message means the panel has no way in and is a bug worth reporting.

Level is 0 on a server. Check Rist is installed on the server as well as the client, and check CreditExistingSkills.

"You are earning faster than this world will pay for." The server's earning cap is withholding XP. MaxXpPerMinute and XpBurst control it.

The server log says it is refusing to reconcile. More of the runestone history than ReconcileMaxLoss allows is missing from cards.txt. Nothing has been lost; fix the catalogue or raise the setting and restart.

Known limitations

• Nothing in the runestone catalogue has been tuned against anything but reasoning and a small amount of live play. The curve has been retuned twice off real ledger data; the per-rank values have not.
• With a free choice the strongest runestone is always available, so balance rests on the per-rank values and on MaxRank.
• The plate is published by each client onto its own character, so a modded client can put whatever it likes there. The server's ledger is still the only thing that grants a pick.
• Ranks taken before ledger v3 have no recorded level and show a dash permanently. Everything taken since is exact.
• SE_Stats has no max health, stamina or eitr field, since those come from food in Valheim, so no max-pool runestone is possible without a different mechanism.

Design notes

Why picks are chosen rather than dealt, why a capstone sits at the end of a track, how the bar is built out of a vanilla one, and why the ledger lives where it does: DESIGN.md.

Bug reports

The Discord is the fastest route, and the right one if you are not sure whether what you are seeing is a bug. Issues on the repo suit anything long.

Attach BepInEx\LogOutput.log, and say whether you were on a server or in single player. For a runestone behaving wrongly, include the line from cards.txt. If a vanilla mechanic broke, AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\Player.log is where gameplay exceptions land, and it is a different file from the one BepInEx writes.

Bugs and ideas

Both go to the site. longhouse.thijssensoftware.nl/bugs is for anything broken, and longhouse.thijssensoftware.nl/ideas is for what a mod should do next. You can vote on other people's ideas there as well.

Signing in takes a Steam or Discord account. I work from that list, so the votes decide what I pick up next.

Discord

discord.gg/hJzAVaZ5wb is where mod information, updates, support and bug reports go.

Server

There is a small EU server running the pack if you want somewhere to play: hard combat difficulty, resources at 1x, everything else vanilla, no application and no activity requirements. Connection details are in the Discord.

Part of Longhouse

Rist is part of Longhouse, a pinned set of the Ezomic mods that installs in one click. You do not need the pack to use Rist, and it behaves the same on its own.

Credits

Rist is an original mod by Robbin Thijssen (Thijssen Software). Copyright (c) 2026 Robbin Thijssen. MIT licensed. See LICENSE.