Changelog

1.0.0

First public release. It launches the complete Mage and Berserker roster and makes every previous beta client and server incompatible.

• Retired the experimental Archer before public release. Beta characters that had selected it are returned to mandatory class selection, while their old Archer save keys remain reserved and inert instead of being reused.
• Removed every developer diagnostic hotkey from the runtime. F7 remains the intentional player-facing editor for the ability bar and its bindings.
• Fixed false damage interruptions shared by Rage Unbound and every channelled ability. Channels now react only when owner-authoritative RPC_Damage causes actual health loss; food decay and maximum-health adjustments are ignored.
• Renamed Emberbolt to Fireball. It now has a 1.15-second interruptible staff cast with synchronized charge/cancel cues before releasing its authored spherical inferno projectile; damage, cooldown, cost and arrival timing are otherwise unchanged.
• Rebuilt Frost Nova as an authored eight-metre glacial fracture: a central snowflake knot, low radial ice lances, a broken damage front, perimeter splinters, cold mist and settling rime replace the stacked vanilla rings.
• Rebuilt Blood Harvest as an authored sanguine rite. A hand-bound cast flows into twelve dark, fixed terrain-projected blood patches, an icon-derived central sigil, five synchronized inward heartbeats and brief target tethers; the oversized procedural neon pool, rotating ground disc, vertical walls and primitive heart orb are fallback only. Static blood uses a dedicated bundled ground shader so its organic silhouette and restrained wet edge remain readable without neon. A broad original RGBA puddle now owns the central silhouette through twelve terrain-normal mesh lobes in three organic variants; connector lobes, a softer wet rim and heartbeat-synchronized sheen remove separated repeated islands and the graphic red outline. Twelve edge patches and the sigil remain subordinate.
• Replaced the Dark Mage's Army of the Dead with Dread Veil, reserving all undead summoning for the future Necromancer. The 12-second personal veil grants 25% more Norns spell damage and 25% incoming damage reduction. Its original icon and authored 13-layer black-indigo mantle are replicated as one semantic trigger and rendered locally without networked particles or summon entities.
• Completed the Berserker's visual language: War Cry, Bloodstorm, Bearskin, Rage Unbound, Executioner's Wake, Earthshatter and Warband's Oath are now authored Unity prefabs built from dust, earth, stone, blood, hide and ember instead of runtime lines, rings and cubes. Damage, cooldowns, radii, resources and network authority are unchanged, and the previous effects remain as fallback.
• War Cry now reads as a detonation: a compact flash opens into a pressure wave that crosses the full eight-metre radius, throwing earth and debris, with dust as the consequence rather than the effect itself.
• Bloodstorm is now a continuous blade vortex around the character, dense for the whole spin, with its three gameplay pulses widening the disc.
• Bearskin is a heavy pelt worn on the shoulders instead of stacked rings, and Rage Unbound is wrath rising off the body with a slow heartbeat and scorched footing.
• Earthshatter separates dive and impact: compressed air and a landing omen during the plunge, then a dome of dust and stone with ground fractures, debris and settling haze on landing.
• Warband's Oath passes once across the field, then leaves a discreet golden guard on each protected player, decided locally by every client.
• Each Berserker ability now has its own synthesized audio signature instead of a single shared tone: a shout, three weapon passes, a falling pelt, an eruption with heartbeat, a metallic cut, a rock impact and a low oath horn.
• Rebuilt Uruz Cleaver as a Unity-authored model matching its item icon: a dark double-bit head with two unequal bright edges, a crimson rune set in a diamond socket, cord wrapping along nearly the whole haft, a pronounced butt and a swinging bone charm. The blade has real wedge thickness and knapped flat-shaded facets. Stats, recipe, attacks and networking are unchanged.
• Fixed the Uruz Cleaver being held the wrong way round when equipped.
• Fixed Bearskin covering the character: its pelt layers were large enough and opaque enough to hide armour and body, and its warm haze rose above the head.
• Rebuilt Apprentice, Runic and Seidr Staff as three Unity-authored equipment prefabs instead of recolors of one procedural cage. They now use an ember reliquary, asymmetric frost antler and black-metal fate loom silhouette, original lit materials and restrained elemental idle layers without changing item stats, recipes, attacks or networking. The first equipped-client review led to a restrained polish pass: readable non-white core facets, a bronze ember vein, a much more asymmetric side-tined Runic antler with non-emissive rime, and old-gold Seidr runes with less neon fog.

0.4.0

Development build. The minor bump makes previous beta clients and servers incompatible with this version.

• Added the Berserker as a second complete class, with a permanent level-one passive, five core abilities at levels 10/20/30/40/50 and three level-50 specializations selected or changed only at the Shrine.
• Added the dedicated Fury bar. Effective melee damage dealt and hostile damage received build Fury, which increases physical melee damage and fuels every Berserker ability. Fury fades after five seconds outside combat and resets on death, relog or character change. The HUD bar now uses a high-contrast 16-pixel body, quarter marks and an explicit current/maximum value for combat readability.
• Fury from dealt damage is owner-authoritative in multiplayer: the single peer that owns the target measures post-resistance health loss and credits the attacking Player through a compact routed RPC. Immune hits and duplicate witnesses cannot generate Fury.
• Added Rending Blow, War Cry, Bloodstorm, Bearskin and Rage Unbound. Rending Blow now raises the weapon into a crimson beam from the sky before empowering the next strike. Bloodstorm performs three real character rotations using the equipped weapon's primary animation while a blood vortex follows the hand. Bearskin replaces the old lethal-save design with 40% damage reduction for twelve seconds. Rage Unbound remains the full-Fury capstone with doubled passive power and healing based on actual melee health loss.
• Added Ravager with Executioner's Wake, Jötunn with Earthshatter, and Warlord with Warband's Oath. The Warlord protection is applied locally by each nearby player, preserving multiplayer ownership while reducing incoming damage.
• Executioner's Wake now turns toward the aim, plays the equipped weapon's primary attack animation and reveals three frontal crimson crescents before its delayed cleave damage lands.
• Earthshatter now follows a guided 15-metre-high arc toward the cursor, then accelerates into the selected point as a crimson meteor. Only landing resolves the ability, using Yagluth's original meteor impact over terrain-following cracks, a shockwave and ballistic stone fragments; the spell cancels only its own fall damage.
• Executioner's Wake and Bloodstorm now start a genuine vanilla weapon attack state for animation. Norns suppresses its native melee/area damage and refunds animation-only stamina, leaving only the authored ability damage.
• Fixed Fury not increasing from hostile damage received. The local owner now measures effective health loss once around the authoritative RPC_Damage, after armor, resistances, Bearskin and Warband mitigation.
• Berserker abilities now require a two-handed melee weapon and spend Fury instead of Eitr. The semantic gate accepts compatible modded weapons and dual-wield sets while excluding one-handed, ranged and magical equipment.
• Added Uruz Cleaver, an early two-handed flint great axe crafted at a level-one Workbench. It uses Battleaxe only as a technical animation/network skeleton; its restrained stats, painted icon and flint/wood/bone 3D model are original.
• Refined Uruz Cleaver after its first in-game pass: the oversized flat-black blades are now smaller and jagged, with real thickness, chipped raised edges, contrasting flint facets, cracks, visible leather/bone bindings and a proper Uruz rune engraved on both faces instead of the placeholder Y-shaped mark.
• Rebuilt its proportions after the second visual test: the shaft is roughly one third as thick, torus-like bands are now tight leather spirals, the head is shorter and narrower, bone wedges radiate from the socket, and independent lit procedural textures keep wood, flint, leather and bone readable outside direct light.
• Added Berserker integration to mandatory class selection, the Class Codex, specialization controls, the six-slot HUD and the persistent shared cooldown of the final slot.
• Added a painted Berserker portrait and eight original painted ability icons, plus class-specific crimson, stone-blue and oath-gold runtime effects and layered spatial audio.
• Added confirmed class changing at the Shrine. XP, levels, milestones and specializations are stored independently per class; returning resumes the saved thread, while a new class starts at level 1. Slot cooldowns remain shared.
• Added a one-time migration that assigns legacy global XP and milestones only to the character's current class, preventing accidental duplication.
• Rebuilt the Shrine as a 5.2 by 4.1 metre monument with a two-tier foundation, a 5.7 metre arched loom, enlarged Elder monolith, buttressed posts, stronger grounded torches and collision fitted to the new silhouette. Its recipe is now 60 Stone and 30 Wood.
• Added painted vanilla status indicators and countdowns for Rending Blow while armed, Bearskin, Rage Unbound, Warband's Oath, Runic Ward, Fall of Ragnarok, Black Hole, Blood Harvest and Dread Veil. Instant attacks remain outside the status list.

0.2.0

Development build. The minor bump makes 0.1.x clients incompatible in multiplayer.

• Added three level-50 Mage specializations chosen at the Shrine: Void Mage with Black Hole, Blood Mage with Blood Harvest, and Dark Mage with Army of the Dead.
• Mage spells now require an equipped Elemental Magic or Blood Magic staff, including compatible modded staves. Removing it interrupts a channel without consuming Eitr or starting the cooldown.
• Added Apprentice, Runic and Seidr Staves to carry Mage weapon progression through the Black Forest, Mountains and Plains. Each has a biome-appropriate recipe, four upgrades, a restrained elemental attack, an original painted icon and a fully custom procedural 3D model instead of a recolored vanilla staff.
• Refined the first in-game staff pass with much slimmer shafts, narrower crowns, finer runes and a full-length Seidr silhouette. Removed inherited particle billboards and fixed console errors from sampling non-readable vanilla meshes.
• Black Hole creates a six-second singularity that repeatedly damages enemies and pulls them inward with owner-authoritative multiplayer physics.
• Blood Harvest drains nearby enemies in five pulses and restores part of the life taken to the caster.
• Army of the Dead summons five networked allied skeletons that follow the caster for sixty seconds, scale with world progress and retain a networked expiry even when ownership changes. Their damage now contributes kill XP to the summoning Mage through the summon owner stored in the ZDO.
• Rebuilt progression around a deterministic vanilla enemy catalogue. Rewards now scale with native tier, health and stars, while dangerous glass cannons receive explicit threat values and obsolete tiers fade more quickly.
• Excluded training dummies, summons, boss appendages, neutral Dvergr and bred juveniles from XP. Multiplayer credit now requires 2% effective damage or the killing blow; every valid participant still receives the full cooperative reward.
• Reduced the level-50 curve to 97,943 XP and redistributed boss and exploration milestones across the campaign so the midgame is less grindy without skipping Mistlands and Ashlands combat. Kill and milestone rates are separately configurable.
• Fixed pure fire, spirit and poison damage losing kill attribution when Valheim converts the original hit into damage-over-time ticks. XP rewards now rise and fade above the character in grey, green or gold based on their amount, merging rapid multi-kill rewards into one readable popup.
• Cooldowns now persist on the character across relogs and world changes.
• Blood Harvest heals from health actually lost and exposes its per-pulse cap; Runic Ward no longer grants an undocumented health-regeneration multiplier.
• Added a sixth independently rebindable ability slot, defaulting to Left Alt + 6, plus specialization status and selection controls in the Codex.
• Added three hand-painted specialization icons, dedicated effects, staff animations and layered spatial sounds.
• Refined the Codex layout, reshaped Black Hole into a ground-bound gravitational well, and replaced Blood Harvest's boundary ring with a terrain-conforming, dark-crimson blood pool.
• Rebuilt the Class Codex as a rune-book spread: identity and specialization are isolated on the left, while all six spell threads remain visible in a 2x3 card grid with no scrollbar. The unchosen specialization keeps a dedicated Final Thread card instead of disappearing.
• Increased Runic Ward's visual and owner-authoritative repulsion radius from three to 3.8 metres. Both now use the same value, keeping the visible shell and physical boundary aligned while leaving the Ward damage-free.
• Simplified the Shrine to three fate strands braided around the Elder monolith, added two physical torches and increased their night-time illumination.

0.1.0

First development version. Not released.

• Mandatory class selection on first entering the world; the panel blocks input until a class is chosen and the choice is permanent.
• Level system up to 50. Experience from kills (broadcast so every nearby player in a multiplayer session is credited) and from milestones: seven bosses and nine biomes, each claimable once per character.
• The Mage: the Seidr Blood passive from level 1 — a personal Eitr reserve that grows with level, no Mistlands food required — and five spells at levels 10 (Fireball), 20 (Frost Nova), 30 (Arc Lightning), 40 (Runic Ward) and 50 (Fall of Ragnarok).
• HUD showing class, level, experience, five ability slots and a cast bar.
• Added an in-game HUD editor: press F7, drag the ability bar, resize it with the mouse wheel, rebind each of the five complete shortcuts or reset everything. Position, scale and bindings persist locally.
• Hand-painted icons for every Mage spell, shared by the HUD, class choice and Codex, plus a new official Norns package icon.
• Layered spatial audio for every spell: verified Valheim casting and impact sounds over a quieter procedural Norns signature, including separate launch and impact beats for Fireball and every stage of Fall of Ragnarok.
• Each Mage spell now uses a fitting native staff animation. Channeled spells hold the staff charging pose, release on completion and abort when interrupted.
• Spell effects now combine Norns' rune geometry with verified local Valheim particles for fireball impacts, frost nova, lightning, ward and fire rain.
• Frost Nova is now a single ice detonation instead of layered procedural rings, and Arc Lightning no longer plays a redundant charging pose before release.
• Runic Ward is now a single iridescent protective bubble: a bright aurora rim, a glass-like membrane, drifting motes, crystal accents and sparse engraved runes. It physically repels enemies crossing its three-metre boundary, using Valheim's native pushback, owner-authoritative in multiplayer and without adding damage.
• Fall of Ragnarok now opens the sky over a ten-metre area and rains down twenty overlapping firebolts, each with its own warning, trajectory, local explosion and damage, replacing the former single meteor.
• Added the buildable Shrine of the Norns for 20 Stone and 12 Wood. Its layered stone plinth, arched darkwood loom and Elder monolith form a ritual structure with a painted hammer icon and a Class Codex interaction.
• Server-enforced balance settings: separate kill and milestone experience multipliers, damage multiplier and a switch for milestone experience.