Skald

The title screen for the Guys Being Vikings server. Our logo where Valheim's goes, our music behind it, and a crowd of vikings having a party around the campfire.

A skáld was the court poet, the one who announced a hall by name: in words, and in song.

Is this for you?

Probably not, unless you play with us. Skald ships Guys Being Vikings branding and puts it on your title screen the moment you install it.

There is one good reason to take it anyway: the logo and the music are just files. Point the settings at your own and it will announce whatever you like, which works as well for your server as it does for ours.

What it does

• Puts a logo of your choosing where Valheim's title art sits.
• Plays a track of your choosing on the main menu, on loop.
• Fills the camp with randomly generated vikings who dance, sit around, and pass a smoke between them.
• Stands a hot tub off to one side, with two of them in it.
• Leaves everything else alone. The scene, the fire, the wind in the trees and the menu buttons are all untouched, and the whole thing stops existing the moment you load a world.

Your own character keeps standing where it always has.

The crowd

The vikings are rolled fresh every time the menu loads. Different hair, beards, colouring and armour each time, and nothing about them is saved.

They keep out of the way: clear of the fire, clear of the rocks, clear of your character, and out of the line between it and the camera, so nothing blocks the view.

Weedheim is optional. Install it and they pick up its bongs and joints and blow smoke. Skip it and they turn up empty handed and carry on dancing. It is not a dependency of this mod and installing Skald will never pull it in.

Not interested? Set Enabled to false under [Revel] and the camp stays empty.

Install

Client only. Every player installs their own; there is nothing to put on a server, and a dedicated server has no title screen to change.

Nobody else can tell whether you have it. It does not connect you to anything, join you to our server, or announce you to anyone.

Compatibility

It will fight any other mod that replaces the menu logo or the menu music, and there are very few of those. Anything that only adds to the main menu is fine, and nothing in-game is affected at all.

The menu ambience, the wind and the forest, is left alone, so it plays over your music the same way it played over Valheim's.

Using your own logo and music

Drop your file into BepInEx/config/Skald/ and put its name in the settings. That folder wins over the one the mod ships with, so you never have to touch the installed package and your choice survives an update.

The logo wants a PNG with a transparent background, around 1600px wide. It is fitted into the space Valheim's logo occupies rather than stretched, so any shape works. The transparency matters: the logo sits over a forest at dusk with a fire burning behind it, and a flat backdrop reads as a sticker stuck on the screen.

The music takes .ogg, .wav or .mp3. Use ogg; the same track as a wav is about ten times the size for no audible gain.

Settings

BepInEx/config/gbv.valheim.skald.cfg

Section	Setting	Default	What it does
[General]	Logo	true	Replace the title logo.
[General]	Music	true	Replace the menu music.
[Logo]	File	gbv_logo.png	Which image to use.
[Music]	File	gbv_menu.ogg	Which track to play.
[Music]	Volume	1.0	Music level, on top of your in-game music slider. Turning it above 1 does nothing if that slider is already near maximum.
[Revel]	Enabled	true	The crowd at the campfire.
[Revel]	Count	6	How many vikings.
[Revel]	Radius	3.0	How far out from your character they stand, in metres.
[Revel]	HotTub	true	The hot tub and the two sitting in it.
[Revel]	Props	true	Give them Weedheim's bongs and joints. Does nothing without Weedheim.
[Revel]	Bongs	2	How many carry a bong instead of a joint.
[Revel]	Smokers	2	How many of them blow smoke.
[Revel]	SmokeInterval	30	Seconds between smoke clouds. They take turns, so two never do it at once.

There is one console command, skald_props, which reports what the crowd managed to find. Run it on the main menu if something is missing and you want to know why.

Is it safe?

Yes, and it is easy to check: it only touches the title screen. No world data, no character data, nothing sent over the network, nothing that survives into a game.

The vikings are the same thing Valheim already puts on that screen to show you your character, so they have no AI, no physics and nothing to collide with. If any part of it fails you lose that part and keep an ordinary working title screen.

Credits

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