Skald

The title screen for the Guys Being Vikings server. Skald puts our logo where Valheim's goes and plays our music behind it.

A skáld was the court poet, the one who announced a hall by name: in words, and in song. This mod has the same two jobs.

Read This First

This is one server's nameplate, not a general-purpose mod. It ships Guys Being Vikings branding, and that is exactly what you get the moment you install it: our logo and our music on your title screen.

If you are not playing on our server, you probably do not want this.

There is one reason you might anyway. Everything here is driven by two ordinary files sitting next to the plugin, so you can point it at your own logo and your own track and have it announce whatever you like. If that is what you came for, skip to Using your own logo and music. It works just as well for somebody else's server as it does for ours.

Why This Exists

A server with its own mods, its own rules and its own people still opens on somebody else's title screen. That is the first thing anyone sees when they sit down to play, and it is the one part of the game that says nothing about where they are about to go.

Skald is not a feature. It is a nameplate on the front door.

What It Does

• Replaces the title logo with the Guys Being Vikings wordmark, or any image you point it at.
• Replaces the main menu music with our track, looping, on the title screen only.
• Leaves the rest of the menu exactly as it was. The background scene, the fire, the wind through the firs and the menu buttons are all untouched.
• Falls back to vanilla whenever anything is missing. No image, no music file, or a logo the game has renamed out from under us, and you get Valheim's own title screen with nothing broken.

Both the logo and the track are ordinary files sitting next to the plugin, and either can be replaced with one of your own without rebuilding anything.

Install

Client only, and purely cosmetic. It touches the start scene and nothing else: no world data, no character data, nothing sent over the network. A dedicated server has neither a title screen nor a menu, so installing it there does nothing at all.

Other players do not need it, and nobody can tell whether you have it. Installing it does not connect you to anything, join you to our server, or announce you to anyone. It changes two things on your own title screen and stops mattering the moment you load a world.

Compatibility

Skald will fight any other mod that replaces the menu logo or the menu music, and there are very few of those.

It is happy alongside mods that add to the main menu rather than replace it, and alongside anything at all in-game, because it stops existing the moment you load a world.

Menu ambience, the wind and the forest, is a separate sound in the scene and is left alone, so it plays over your music exactly as it does over Valheim's.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/gbv.valheim.skald.cfg

Section	Setting	Default	What it does
[General]	Logo	true	Replace the title logo. Off keeps Valheim's and leaves only the music.
[General]	Music	true	Replace the menu track. Off keeps Valheim's own.
[Logo]	File	gbv_logo.png	Which image to use. See below.
[Music]	File	gbv_menu.ogg	Which track to play. See below.
[Music]	Volume	1.0	Scales the music, where 1 matches the level Valheim plays its own track at. This is on top of your music slider, not instead of it. Note that Unity caps the final volume, so values above 1 do nothing once your music slider is near maximum. To make a track genuinely louder, raise the level of the file itself.

Using your own logo and music

Put your file in BepInEx/config/Skald/ and name it in the config. That folder is checked before the one the mod ships with, so your file wins without you having to touch the installed package, and it survives updating the mod.

The logo wants a PNG with a transparent background. It is fitted inside the space Valheim's own logo occupies rather than stretched to fill it, so any proportions work; exporting around 1600px wide is plenty for any monitor. Transparency matters more than it sounds: the logo sits over a forest at dusk with a fire burning in it, and anything with a flat backdrop reads as a sticker pasted onto the scene.

The music takes .ogg, .wav or .mp3. Ogg is the sensible choice: a wav of the same track is roughly ten times the size for no audible gain.

How It Works

For anyone reading the source, or wondering whether this is safe.

There is no logo field in the game. FejdStartup has no m_logo or m_title; the string "logo" does not appear anywhere in assembly_valheim except inside "Logout". The title art is a plain scene object under FejdStartup.m_mainMenu, with each past expansion's logo sitting beside it switched off. Which one shows is baked into the scene by hand. So Skald walks the menu's hierarchy, finds the one that is on, and assigns a new sprite to it. If you want to know what size your own image is being fitted into, the log says so the first time it runs.

It assigns the sprite and nothing else, deliberately. The menu animator drives colour and visibility over the title block every frame during the fade-in, so anything set through .color, .enabled or SetActive is overwritten on the next frame. Sprite references are not animated. That is also why the vanilla glow overlay is hidden with a transparent sprite rather than being switched off.

The music is a clip swap. MusicMan.m_music is a public list and the menu entry is simply called "menu", so no reflection is involved. Two details matter: MusicMan is rebuilt from scratch every time a scene loads, so the swap re-runs on every Awake rather than once at startup; and the entry's m_resume flag is turned off, because it restores a saved playback position that means nothing on a clip of a different length.

Every patch in the mod is wrapped so that a failure costs you the custom logo or the custom music and leaves the vanilla title screen working.

Credits

The menu track is original music, written for Guys Being Vikings and owned by us. It ships with the mod so the title screen works out of the box; it is not released for reuse. Point the File setting at something of your own if you want a different track.

Everything about the game's own menu was derived by decompiling assembly_valheim.dll.

The asynchronous audio loading approach is the one Viking Shanties uses, which was a useful confirmation that UnityWebRequestMultimedia behaves in this game.