Arvakr

A loading bar for Valheim's startup.

With a big modlist the game sits white and frozen for a minute, then sits on the logo screen and does it again, telling you nothing. Arvakr puts a bar across the bottom of the window and names what it is waiting on.

Árvakr is the horse that drags the sun up each morning. The early waker.

It Does Not Make Loading Faster

Worth saying plainly, because a loading bar tends to suggest otherwise.

That wait is your mods starting up, one after another. It is not Valheim being slow and it is not something any mod can speed up. Arvakr does not shorten it by a second.

What it does is show you it is working, and tell you afterwards which mods took the time.

What It Does

• Shows a bar from the first mod through to the main menu.
• Counts your mods as they start, and names the one starting now.
• Keeps going through the logo screen, naming whatever is working.
• Stops Windows greying the game out and calling it "Not Responding".
• Hides the BepInEx console while it is up, and brings it back if anything errors.
• Tells you on the bar when something goes wrong.
• Lists the slowest mods in the log once you reach the menu.
• Disappears on its own when the menu is ready.

The Two Halves

Your mods starting. A real count, because Valheim's mod loader says how many there are and names each one. The bar fills.

Valheim starting. The black logo screen. Nothing says how much is left, so the bar slides instead of lying about a percentage, and names whoever is working. If everything goes quiet it starts counting the seconds, so you can see it is still alive.

On a heavy modlist the second half can take as long as the first.

The Grey "Not Responding" Screen

That was never Valheim breaking. When a program stops answering Windows for about five seconds, Windows covers it with a dead grey copy captioned "Not Responding". Your loading screen was fine underneath it the whole time.

Arvakr turns that off, so the logo screen stays the logo screen. The game is still busy and still will not respond to clicks until it finishes; it just stops being labelled broken.

While this is on you cannot drag or close the window until loading finishes. Turn off KeepWindowAlive if you would rather have the grey screen back.

Which Mods Are Slowing You Down

Once you reach the menu, open BepInEx/LogOutput.log and search for Arvakr:

Mods loaded in 65.8s: 62 of 62.
Slowest mods to start:
     9.4s  Warfare 1.9.4
     7.3s  SouthsilArmor 3.1.9
     6.4s  Monstrum 1.6.0
Game started in a further 39.4s. Total wait 105.2s.
Longest pauses after the mods loaded:
    17.1s  after Valheim: Render threading mode:LegacyJobified

If startup has got painful, the top of that list is where it went, and it is usually two or three mods rather than all of them.

Slowest mods is exact. Longest pauses is a hint: nothing announces itself before doing the slow thing in the second half, so all it can say is that things went quiet and what was said last. Treat it as a pointer, not an accusation.

A slow mod is not a broken mod, and it is not a reason to uninstall anything. Some of them simply have a lot to build before the game starts. The list just tells you what you are paying for.

If the count is lower than the total, some mods did not start at all. Search the log for Skipping to find out why, which is nearly always a missing dependency.

Settings

BepInEx/config/gbv.valheim.arvakr.cfg, written the first time you run the game with Arvakr installed.

Section	Setting	Default	What It Does
[General]	Enabled	true	Show the bar. Off means startup looks exactly as it did before.
[General]	TimeoutSeconds	600	Give up and close the bar after this long, whatever happens.
[General]	AlwaysOnTop	true	Keep the bar in front of the game.
[General]	DockToGame	true	Sit the bar in Valheim's window. Off centres it on the screen.
[General]	KeepWindowAlive	true	Stop Windows greying the game out while it loads.
[Report]	SlowestCount	10	How many entries in each log list. 0 for the totals only.
[Console]	HideWhileLoading	true	Hide the BepInEx console while the bar is up.
[Console]	ShowOnError	true	Bring the console back if anything errors.
[Console]	RestoreWhenDone	false	Show the console again at the menu even if nothing went wrong.

Install

Client only. There is nothing to put on a server, and a server has no loading screen.

It installs to BepInEx/patchers/, not BepInEx/plugins/. Your mod manager handles that. If you are installing by hand the file goes in BepInEx/patchers/Arvakr/Arvakr.dll.

If Something Looks Wrong

No bar at all. Check BepInEx/LogOutput.log for Arvakr 0.1.0 preloader entry. If that line is missing, the file is in the wrong folder. If it is there, try AlwaysOnTop = false.

The bar is in the wrong place. Set DockToGame to false to centre it on your main screen instead.

The game changes resolution on startup. Set AlwaysOnTop to false, then Enabled to false if that does not settle it.

The bar stays after the menu appears. It should go within a second or two. Failing that it closes after TimeoutSeconds. Please report it.

The console has gone. It is hidden, not closed, so nothing was lost. Set RestoreWhenDone to true to have it back at the menu, or HideWhileLoading to false to leave it alone.

Is It Safe?

Yes, and it is unusually easy to be sure of. Arvakr changes nothing about the game. It does not patch Valheim, it does not patch any other mod, and it is built without any reference to Valheim at all, so it has no way to reach your world or your character.

All it does is read the loading messages your mod loader already writes, and draw a bar from them. If any part of it fails you lose the bar and the game carries on exactly as it would have.

Nobody else can tell whether you have it. It connects to nothing and sends nothing anywhere.