Utangard

A biome you have not earned will not feed you.

Utangards is Old Norse for "outside the enclosure". The Norse divided the world into the fenced and settled ground, where a person has protection and hospitality, and everything beyond it. This mod puts every biome your group has not earned on the far side of that fence.

Nothing stops you walking into the Swamp on day two. But while you are there, food burns down five times faster, you cannot eat or drink at all, your wounds do not close, and you leave Sapped: three quarters of your stamina regeneration gone, for up to half a minute. An early run for barley is still your call. It is just a raid now rather than an errand.

A biome counts as earned when every member of your group has personally been at that boss's death, not when the boss has died in the world. Kill Moder yourself and the Plains stays shut until the friend who was offline that night has killed it too.

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How it works

Biome pressure

While you are standing in a gated biome:

• Food burns 5× faster. A 1600-second meal becomes a 320-second one. Your existing food is not deleted, it just runs out fast.
• You cannot eat or drink. Meals, mead and potions are all refused, with "The land will not feed you here" on screen. Nothing is consumed or destroyed. The item stays in your inventory.
• Running buffs burn 5× faster, and new ones are refused. Guardian powers are refused without burning the cooldown, so you can use yours the moment you leave.
• Rested and Resting count as buffs, so a fire and a roof buy you nothing inside. This is the harshest single rule in the mod and it has its own switch.
• Wounds do not close. Food is Valheim's only passive healing, so the land that will not feed you does not mend you either: the regeneration your meals would have given is set to zero. Damage taken in a gated biome is damage you carry home.
• Harmful effects are never touched. Wet, Cold, Freezing, Burning, Poison and the rest run exactly as normal. Speeding up Poison would be a mercy, not a penalty.
• The border is a band, not a line. The gate reaches 5 m past the edge of a gated biome. Without that, every one of these rules is escapable by taking three steps out of the Swamp, eating, and stepping back in, which makes it a rule about where you may chew rather than where you may live.

And on the way out:

• Sapped gives you 75% less stamina regeneration. One second in the biome banks one second of it, up to 30 seconds, and it only spends itself once you are somewhere the land tolerates you. A dash in and out still costs you; living there is a flat tax rather than an escalating one. It stacks with food and Rested rather than replacing them, so a sapped player with good food still regenerates faster than a sapped player without, just badly.

You get a HUD icon while you are inside, a second one for Sapped, and a message on the way in and out that names who the biome is still waiting on.

And you can read the whole gate at any time. The compendium - the texts screen, beside Logs and Active Effects - carries a Utangard page listing every biome, whether it is open, who still owes it, and how long until the deadline opens it anyway. It is the same report the log prints on spawn, which is the point: nobody should have to read a log file to find out why their food vanished.

When a biome opens you are told, wherever you are. Including when it was not your kill, and including when nothing died at all - a catch-up deadline expiring opens biomes too. The person the news matters most to is usually the one who was at home.

The gate is the same for everybody. It is one answer about the group, not a per-player one. If the roster has not all cleared Moder, the Plains withers you too, even if you personally landed the kill. That is the point rather than a side effect. See below.

Two things worth knowing. Dungeons inherit the biome above them, so a Swamp crypt withers you exactly like the Swamp. And a player without the mod installed is not gated at all. This is a rule for a group that all runs it, not an anti-cheat. If you want that enforced, see Installation.

Group progression

• Everyone on the roster has to have done the boss personally. The world key the game sets when a boss dies is not enough on its own.
• Credit is earned by being there. When a boss dies, everyone within 100 m of the body is credited. You do not have to land the killing blow, and you do not have to be the host.
• Joining late does not undo anything. Once the group has cleared a boss, that biome is open permanently. A friend arriving with a fresh character gates only what the group has not yet cleared.
• A deadline opens the biome anyway. Once the first person clears a boss, the rest of the group has a set number of days before it opens regardless: one day for Eikthyr, and one more for each boss after. This is what stops one person who vanishes holding a biome shut, and it is usually what unblocks you.
• The roster forgets people who stop playing. A character stops counting for a boss after 14 days without logging in. This is what decides who "everyone" means, so a friend who visited for one evening, or an alt made once, cannot hold the gate forever. No admin command and no list to maintain. With the default deadlines above this rarely decides anything on its own, but it is the only backstop if you clear the deadlines or point a biome at a boss that has none.
• Existing worlds and characters are handled. Installing on a long-running save does not re-lock everything: a character is credited for a boss its own file says it attended, as long as that boss has already died in this world.

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At a glance

Every value here is the shipped default and every one is configurable.

Mechanic	Default
Food drain in a gated biome	5×
Buff drain in a gated biome	5×
Eating and drinking	refused
Health regeneration in a gated biome	none
New buffs	refused
Rested / Resting	treated as buffs
Stamina regeneration while Sapped	25% of normal (a 75% penalty)
Sapped banked per second inside	1 second
Sapped maximum	30 seconds
Reach past the biome border	5 m
Boss credit radius	100 m
Roster absence before you stop counting	14 real days
Catch-up deadline	1 day for Eikthyr, +1 per boss after
Gate basis	the whole group, not the world
Already-earned biomes	never re-lock

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Biome progression

The defaults are the vanilla progression offset by one: the boss of the previous biome opens the next.

Biome	Opened by	Global key
Meadows	nothing	ungated
Black Forest	Eikthyr	defeated_eikthyr
Swamp	The Elder	defeated_gdking
Mountain	Bonemass	defeated_bonemass
Plains	Moder	defeated_dragon
Mistlands	Yagluth	defeated_goblinking
Ashlands	The Queen	defeated_queen
Deep North	Fader	defeated_fader
Ocean	nothing	ungated

It is a table, not a hardcoded progression, so the interesting variations are all edits to it. Blank a row and that biome is never gated. Point every row at one key and you have a single-boss gate. Point a row at a key some other mod sets and it gates on that instead.

The Black Forest row is the one to look at first. Gating it on Eikthyr walls off the copper run most people do before touching him. That is the intended shape, and it is also a real change to the opening hour.

Two key names could not be verified from the game's code. defeated_queen and defeated_fader are set from prefab data rather than named in Valheim's GlobalKeys enum, so they could only ever be read off a running game. A wrong key fails closed, which looks exactly like a working gate. Both are now confirmed correct, by the check below rather than by guessing.

The mod reads them off the running game. On spawn it walks the world's creature prefabs, collects every key any of them sets on death - vanilla's and any other mod's - and warns if a gate row names a key nothing here can set, listing the ones that exist. You do not need a save with those bosses down: the prefab is enough.

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Installation

Single DLL, no asset bundle. Built for BepInEx 5.4.23.3 on net462.

1. Install BepInExPack Valheim 5.4.2333. It is the only required dependency.
2. Drop Utangard.dll into BepInEx/plugins/.
3. Launch once. The config file is written to BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.utangard.cfg.

Everyone should install it, including the server. The gate is enforced by each client on itself, so a player without the plugin is not gated by it.

Longhouse Core is optional. Install it and the server refuses a client that does not have Utangard at a matching version, and the host's gate settings are pushed to every client so nobody can disagree about the rules. Without Core, Utangard is fully functional (solo you need nothing else at all), but the gate becomes an agreement between players rather than a rule of the server. Utangard says so loudly, once, in the log if it finds the group gate running in multiplayer with no Core.

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Why Utangard exists

A particular kind of evening. Somebody has not killed The Elder yet and the Swamp trip is already being planned. Somebody else has been up a Mountain and come back with onion seeds, so the whole server is eating onion soup in the Black Forest.

Nobody cheated. Valheim's gates are made of damage, and damage is a soft gate: it can be out-geared, out-run or simply out-healed, which is why the Plains stops being frightening about ten minutes after it starts. A careful player with a decent shield walks through any of them hours early, and the food, the gear and the map all come back with them.

What that does is not "harder" or "easier" in the abstract. It makes the game easy early and empty later. The opening hours are trivialised by food nobody should have yet, and the biomes those things came from have nothing left to give when the group finally arrives properly. Progression stops being a sequence of places you earn and turns into a shopping list you can run in any order.

The usual mod answer is the opposite extreme: a hard boss gate that refuses to let you across the border at all. That fixes the pacing by deleting the thing worth having, which is 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.

Read on

The rest of the argument, and the technical notes on how Valheim actually records boss attendance, are in DESIGN.md.

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Multiplayer and persistence

• Progress belongs to the world, and is saved with it. A gate that forgot people the moment they logged off would not be a group gate at all.
• Credit is per world, not per character. A character that cleared a solo world does not arrive on your server pre-credited. Imported credit is only honoured for a boss this world has already seen die, so it can never open a biome on its own.
• Nothing about your character is modified. Vanilla's own record of which bosses you have attended is read, never written.
• The mod is client-side in what it does to you. Food timers and status effects belong to the owning client; nothing here reaches into another player's character.

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Configuration

BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.utangard.cfg. Every entry has a comment in the file explaining the reasoning, not just the units.

BepInEx writes this file on first run, and the saved value beats any new default in code. If a change appears to do nothing, check the cfg before reading anything else.

With Longhouse Core installed, every setting that decides a rule is synced from the host: all of Gate including the biome keys and the border margin, the drains and blocks under Food and Buffs including the healing multiplier, and both Sapped values. Anything that decides wording stays yours: the two blocked messages, all of Presentation, and all of Diagnostics. The host sets the rules of the gate; it does not get to pick your phrasing or your log level.

Gate

Setting	Default	What it does
Enabled	true	Master switch. Off leaves the game completely untouched.
GateOnGroup	true	Gate on whether everyone has personally done the boss. Off restores "one kill opens it for all".
GateNeverRegresses	true	Once the group clears a boss, that biome stays open forever. Off makes the gate strictly weakest-link at all times.
RosterDays	14	Real days a character counts for after it was last seen.
RosterDaysPerBoss	(empty)	Per-boss overrides, as key:days pairs. E.g. defeated_eikthyr:7, defeated_fader:60
BackfillFromCharacter	true	Credit a character from its own file, for a boss this world has already seen die. The migration path for existing worlds.
CatchUpDays	0	Fallback deadline for any boss not named below. 0 means none.
CatchUpDaysPerBoss	eikthyr:1 … fader:7	Days the group has to catch up once the first player clears a boss.
CreditRadius	100	Metres from a dying boss to be credited.
BorderMargin	5	Metres the gate reaches past the edge of a gated biome. 0 puts it exactly on the border.
ExcludePlayerIds	(empty)	Character IDs that never count towards the gate. IDs, not names.
Key_<Biome>	see table above	The global key that opens each biome. Blank means never gated.

Food

Setting	Default	What it does
FoodDrainMultiplier	5	How much faster food burns. 1 disables the drain and leaves only the refusal.
BlockEating	true	Refuse to eat or drink anything at all.
EatBlockedMessage	The land will not feed you here	Shown when a bite is refused.
HealthRegenMultiplier	0	Health regeneration in a gated biome, as a fraction of normal. 1 leaves healing alone.

Buffs

Setting	Default	What it does
BuffDrainMultiplier	5	How much faster a running buff burns.
BlockNewBuffs	true	Refuse to apply any new buff.
BlockRested	true	Treat Rested and Resting as buffs. Off, a well-built camp becomes a real answer to the biome.
AlsoBlock	(empty)	Extra status effect names to treat as buffs.
NeverBlock	Puke	Names to leave alone even if the rules caught them. Wins over AlsoBlock.
BuffBlockedMessage	The land turns your power aside	Shown when a potion or guardian power is refused.

Sapped

Setting	Default	What it does
StaminaRegenMultiplier	0.25	Stamina regeneration while Sapped, as a fraction of normal.
MaxSeconds	30	Ceiling on how much Sapped you can bank. Also how long you must stand there to reach full penalty.

Presentation

Setting	Default	What it does
ShowStatusEffects	true	Show the two effects on the HUD.
MarkIconFrom	Poison	Vanilla effect whose icon the in-biome marker borrows.
SappedIconFrom	Encumbered	Vanilla effect whose icon Sapped borrows.
EnterMessage	Something here refuses you	Shown once on entering. Blank to say nothing.
LeaveMessage	The land loosens its grip	Shown once on leaving.
NameTheBlockers	true	Name the characters the biome is still waiting on.
BlockedByPrefix	Still owed by:	Prefix for that list.
AnnounceOpenings	true	Say so, wherever you are, when a biome opens.
OpenedMessage	{biome} opens to you	That message. {biome} becomes the biome's name.
ShowCompendiumPage	true	Add the Utangard page to the compendium's text list.
CompendiumTopic	Utangard	What that page is called in the list.

Diagnostics

Setting	Default	What it does
Verbose	false	Log every gate transition and blocked effect.
LogGlobalKeys	true	Log the world's keys and the whole gate table on spawn. Leave this on. It is how you catch a wrong key name.
LogBlockedEffects	false	Log the full list of effects the mod decided are buffs.
LogDefeatKeys	false	Log every key a creature in this world sets on death, and what sets it.

Status

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 visibly burn at 5×, Sapped accumulates and follows you out, a guardian power is refused without burning its cooldown, gates open and close at borders in both directions, credit is granted at the kill and survives a world 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. Running standalone with no Core has been confirmed in game.

Played since, on 2026-08-19: the 5 m border margin refusing a player standing three metres outside a gated biome, the healing block, the compendium page naming each boss, the biome-opened announcement firing on the transition, and the defeat-key check - which verified all nine gate rows against the world's own creature prefabs.

What has not been tested, and only this:

• Attendee credit with more than one player. Solo you own the boss ZDO and credit yourself either way. The loop is identical for one player or five; what is unproven is whether other players' objects are instantiated on the owning client at fight range.
• Nothing else. Everything added on 2026-08-19 has been played, including the healing block with ShowStatusEffects = false - the path where a presentation toggle could have switched off a rule.

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MIT licensed. Part of a suite of mods written to be played with rather than published from; Longhouse Core is the optional shared library.

Reporting bugs

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

Bring BepInEx\LogOutput.log if you can, and say whether you were on a server or your own world. The log is most of the difference between a fix and a guess, and it is written every session whether or not anything went wrong.

Part of the Longhouse pack

This is one of the Longhouse pack, a pinned set of my mods that installs in one click and is what the Longhouse server runs. You do not need the pack to use this on its own, and nothing here behaves differently outside it.

The Discord is where the server lives if you want to play on it: small, EU, hard combat difficulty and everything else vanilla.