Rotheart

The swamp takes its tithe. Carry a living ooze heart in a rusted iron cage: resist poison, then spend adrenaline to unleash a miasma that hurts nearby creatures much more than it hurts you.

Rotheart adds one original swamp-tier trinket, with a Blender-made model, inventory icon, visible hip attachment and sparse green aura particles.

Tested in a disposable native Linux client. Remote multiplayer and dedicated servers are unverified. Use a separate profile and back up your saves before adding custom items.

Crafting and use

Craft one Rotheart at a level-one forge after discovering its ingredients:

Material	Amount
Ooze	10
Guck	5
Entrails	5
Iron	5

Equip it in the native trinket slot. It weighs 2, has one quality level and does not drain durability. Valheim currently labels this category “Utility item” in the tooltip; Rotheart does not occupy a weapon slot.

Effect	Behavior
Passive protection	50% less poison damage while equipped
Activation	Native combat actions fill a 10-adrenaline meter; reaching full automatically consumes it
Active miasma	Lasts 10 seconds, with a 6-metre radius
Every two seconds	Lose 1 health, and deal 12 base blunt damage to each eligible nearby creature
Health floor	Rotheart's health cost cannot reduce you below 1 HP

A complete activation gives five pulses: 5 wearer health versus 60 base damage per target. Native creature resistances and world difficulty still apply. The green miasma deals blunt, not poison, so it remains useful against poison-immune swamp creatures.

• Other players, tamed creatures, friendly factions, structures and terrain are excluded, even with PvP enabled. Native hostile factions and wild animals can be hit.
• The radius is spherical and does not require line of sight.
• No extra hotkey or separate charge resource. Adrenaline capacity returns to normal when unequipped.
• Filling adrenaline again refreshes the duration and restarts the pulse timer; it does not stack another aura.
• Unequipping or dying stops the active aura. Unequipping also removes the passive resistance. Teleport/cutscene frames do not deal aura damage.
• Stronger native poison-resistance mead keeps its stronger protection; reductions do not multiply.

Requirements and installation

Built and tested against Valheim l-1.0.20, Unity 6000.0.75f1. Older versions without native trinket/adrenaline APIs are unsupported.

Required dependencies:

• denikson-BepInExPack_Valheim 5.4.2351
• ValheimModding-Jotunn 2.30.2

Mod manager: install Jarki-Rotheart into a separate Valheim profile and accept both dependencies. Launch modded through your normal OS-appropriate loader route.

Manual: close Valheim, install the required dependencies, then copy this archive's plugins/Rotheart/ directory into BepInEx/plugins/. The resulting plugin path is BepInEx/plugins/Rotheart/Rotheart.dll. Keep LICENSE and remove duplicate Rotheart DLLs. Model, icon and effects are embedded; no additional asset downloads are needed. Native Linux uses Linux Doorstop, not Proton DLL overrides.

The mod declares matching installations on the server and every client because it adds a networked item. This requirement is not a claim of verified remote-multiplayer compatibility. Windows, controllers, unrelated-mod combinations and every armor outfit have not been tested.

There are no gameplay configuration options in this release. Stable plugin ID: jarki.rotheart; item prefab: Rotheart.

Uninstall and troubleshooting

Back up first. Remove Rotheart items from characters, chests, drops and displays before disabling or uninstalling the mod. Loading a save without its custom prefab definition can lose those items. Then close Valheim and remove BepInEx/plugins/Rotheart/Rotheart.dll. Uninstall/reinstall has not been runtime-tested.

If the item is missing, confirm that both dependencies loaded and that your game supports native trinkets. Learn all four ingredients and use a sheltered level-one forge. For errors, report your game/mod/dependency versions, reproduction steps and relevant redacted BepInEx/LogOutput.log entries. Never publish saves, account identifiers, passwords or tokens.

Verification and credits

The exact gameplay DLL completed 65 in-game assertions, including fixture prerequisites: real forge crafting and ingredient consumption, native equipping, poison resistance and stronger-mead precedence, 9-versus-10 adrenaline activation, meter consumption, five timed pulses, actual hostile health loss, draugr/blob damage, exclusions, the nonlethal floor, refresh, unequip/death cleanup and actual character-file save/load into a fresh Player. Final scenario: zero Unity errors or exceptions. Inventory/tooltip, hip attachment, colored world drop and aura-combat screenshots were inspected.

Release packaging verifies that the ZIP contains the same runtime-tested DLL. This is not a fresh mod-manager ZIP-import test, a two-client network test or a dedicated-server test. Release builds retain two existing MSB3277 framework-reference warnings; they are not suppressed.

Original code, Blender model, icon and effects are MIT licensed, copyright 2026 Jarki; see LICENSE. Developed and packaged with OpenAI Codex (gpt-6-astra) assistance and categorized AI Generated. No fal-generated assets, third-party recordings, extracted game assets, game assemblies or loader/dependency binaries are included. Valheim, BepInEx, Harmony and Jotunn belong to their respective owners.

Project repository · Report issues

Rotheart source has not been pushed to the public repository as part of this release preparation.