Changelog

Notable changes to Utangard. Format follows Keep a Changelog, and the mod uses semantic versioning.

[1.0.0] - 2026-08-16

First release. Played, not merely built.

Core is optional

Utangard installs and runs on its own. Core is a soft dependency: present, it is used exactly as before; absent, the mod is fully functional without it.

Nothing about the gameplay needed Core. The drain, the refusal and Sapped are local patches, and the group gate travels over vanilla global keys, which every client replicates already. Singleplayer is unaffected in every respect.

What Core buys is enforcement, and that is the whole of what standalone gives up. Core is what refuses a client that does not have Utangard; without it, a player who skips the mod is not gated at all and walks into the Ashlands on day one while everyone else waits on the roster. The gate becomes an agreement between players rather than a rule of the server.

That is a real trade and it belongs to whoever runs the server, so the mod logs it rather than refusing to run, and it says so loudly, once, on spawn, when it finds the group gate enabled in a multiplayer session with no Core. That combination is the one that looks like it is working and is not, and failing silently there is the worst of the options.

Mechanically: [BepInDependency] is SoftDependency, every Suite call sits behind a Chainloader.PluginInfos check inside a [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoInlining)] method, and the project reference to Core is compile-time only. The no-inlining is load-bearing rather than decorative. The JIT resolves the assemblies a method needs when it first compiles that method, so a Suite call sitting directly in Awake would drag Ezomic.Core in before the check could prevent it, and the missing-assembly exception would land during plugin load.

Core is not listed in manifest.json, so installing Utangard does not install Core with it. Confirmed in game: Utangard loads alone, logs that it is running standalone, and the whole gate works without Core present.

The group gate, finished

0.2.0 shipped the idea; this is the version where it holds up.

• Credit is earned at the kill, by everyone present. The owning client credits every player within CreditRadius (100 m) of the corpse. It had to be done that way: Character.OnDeath looks like it runs on every client that had the boss loaded, since it pushes vanilla's key above an IsOwner early-return. But that guard is unreachable, because CheckDeath is its only caller and sits inside if (zDO.IsOwner()). Crediting "the local player" would have credited exactly one member of a group that killed a boss together, and the gate would then have jammed shut while looking like it worked.
• Credit is per world. A character that cleared a solo world no longer arrives pre-credited. BackfillFromCharacter still allows the migration case, and only for a boss this world has already seen die.
• Progress never regresses. Once the group clears a boss the biome latches open, so a newcomer gates only what has not been cleared rather than revoking what has.
• A catch-up deadline, defaulting to a ladder of one day for Eikthyr and one more per boss after. Without it a single person who stops logging in holds a biome shut for everyone until RosterDays finally drops them. A biome the deadline opens latches too.
• Per-boss roster windows via RosterDaysPerBoss, for when one boss deserves a shorter leash than another.
• The blocker line names other people, never you, and shows how long is left.

Fixed

• A refused meal or potion is no longer destroyed. Player.ConsumeItem removes the item regardless of what EatFood returns, so the refusal had to move to CanConsumeItem, the gate that path actually respects.
• Refusing a guardian power no longer burns its cooldown; StartGuardianPower sets the cooldown before applying the effect.
• Rested can no longer be topped up past the drain. SEMan refreshes a running effect through Internal_AddStatusEffect without ever reaching the public overload.
• Puke is no longer treated as a buff. An item applies it on consume, so the potion rule swept up a debuff, which would have made a gated biome the one place bad food cannot hurt you.

Played, not merely built

On a local world and on a real dedicated server: refused meals and potions keep their items, both HUD icons render, food and buff timers burn at 5×, Sapped accumulates and follows you out and cripples stamina regeneration, a guardian power is refused without burning its cooldown, gates open and close at borders, credit is granted at the kill and survives a reload, the latch fires, a two-character roster names both debtors, and the catch-up deadline opens a biome for a group that had not all earned it. No exceptions in a long session.

Known limits

• Attendee credit has never run with more than one player. Solo, you own the boss and credit yourself either way, and two characters taken in turns only credits whoever is logged in. The loop is the same for one player or five; what is unproven is whether other players' objects are instantiated on the owner's client at fight range.
• defeated_queen and defeated_fader are taken from prefab data rather than the game's GlobalKeys enum. A wrong key fails closed, which is indistinguishable from a working gate. LogGlobalKeys prints what your world actually has.

[0.2.0] - 2026-08-15

Written and building. Never run in game.

The line this sits on

A biome you have not earned will not feed you. It never stops you walking in.

Valheim gates its biomes with damage, which is a soft gate: out-geared, out-run or out-healed, which is why the Plains stops being frightening ten minutes after it starts. The usual mod answer is a hard boss gate that refuses to let you across the border, which fixes the pacing by deleting the thing worth having: the walk into somewhere you should not be.

Utangard sits between them. You can go anywhere, immediately, and nothing stops you at the edge. The land just will not sustain you while you are there.

The three parts

Three parts rather than one number, because they do different jobs:

• The drain. Food and buffs burn down five times faster in an unearned biome. This sets the clock, and it is the part you feel while things are going well.
• The refusal. You cannot eat or drink anything at all while you are there. Without it the drain is simply beaten by a bigger pack, and the mod becomes an inventory tax rather than a time limit.
• Sapped. Seventy-five percent less stamina regeneration, one second per second spent in the biome up to thirty, and it keeps ticking after you leave. Without it the optimal play is to sprint in, grab and sprint out at no cost, and a penalty you can dodge by being quick is a penalty for slow players only.

The gate is on the group, not the world

By default a biome opens when every member of the roster has personally killed the boss, not when the boss has died in this world. Kill Moder yourself and the Plains stays shut until the friend who was offline that night has killed it too.

This rides on Character.OnDeath pushing m_defeatSetGlobalKey into Player.m_addUniqueKeyQueue, which is how the game records a boss kill against a character rather than a world.

Known limits

• Never played. None of the three parts has been felt in a session, and the numbers are therefore first guesses rather than tuned values.
• The per-character kill record is only refreshed when a player loads in, so a boss killed during the current session is not visible until then unless the kill itself is hooked.