Staffs of Fracturing

Contains Ashlands equipment and material spoilers.

Staffs of Fracturing adds three Ashlands-tier variants of the Staff of Fracturing. Each keeps the familiar twelve-projectile fracture pattern, then gives every fractured ball a distinct gemstone effect.

The three staffs

Iolite Staff of Fracturing

• Fractured balls deal lightning damage.
• Their natural flight lifetime is doubled from the vanilla fracture-ball lifetime. Impacts can still end a ball earlier.
• On an enemy hit, each ball has a 25% chance to arc once to the nearest other enemy within 8 metres.
• Every unordered pair of balls from the same shot independently has a 25% chance to form a brief lightning link, limited to 24 links per shot and bounded by range.
• Enemies crossing a link take lightning damage, with a per-shot hit cooldown to prevent overlapping links from multiplying damage uncontrollably.

Jade Staff of Fracturing

• Every fractured ball bursts for blunt and native poison damage in a 3.5-metre radius.
• Each detonation leaves a networked poison-control haze for 5 seconds.
• Once per second, every affected enemy receives one independent 20% immobilization roll, even where multiple hazes overlap.
• Immobilization uses Valheim's native Immobilized status effect.

Bloodstone Staff of Fracturing

• Every fractured ball detonates on its first terrain or enemy impact for blunt damage in a 2.25-metre radius.
• Each detonation launches 5 fast, piercing blood-shard projectiles—60 shards if all twelve balls detonate. The shards have compact red visuals and short trails.
• Shrapnel launches twice as fast by default: 56 metres per second instead of 28. Its flight lifetime remains 1.6 seconds by default, allowing it to travel farther before expiring.
• Shrapnel is a real, blockable and dodgeable projectile and cannot fracture recursively.

Core damage scales by 25% of its configured base value per item-quality level above quality 1.

Staff-top appearance

Version 1.0.4 gives each crown its own color and restrained decoration: blue-white Iolite arcs and sparks, Jade haze, and Bloodstone drips with floating pointed particles. The shaft, grip, bottom and small lower gemstones retain their vanilla material. Decorative Bloodstone particles do not deal damage.

The effects are attached for held, sheathed and dropped items. Their final appearance in-game still needs verification.

Crafting and upgrading

Craft all variants at a level 2 Galdr table.

Staff	Base staff	Metal	Gemstone
Iolite	1 Staff of Fracturing	5 Flametal	1 Iolite
Jade	1 Staff of Fracturing	5 Flametal	1 Jade
Bloodstone	1 Staff of Fracturing	5 Flametal	1 Bloodstone

Upgrades consume additional Flametal and matching gemstones through Valheim's normal increasing recipe-upgrade flow.

Configuration

The generated BepInEx configuration file exposes bounded settings for:

• Lightning enemy-chain chance, ball-link chance, damage, range, link damage and hit cooldown
• Poison radius, blunt damage, poison damage, duration, immobilization chance and check interval
• Blood explosion radius and damage, shrapnel count, damage, base speed, speed multiplier and lifetime

Configuration is server-authoritative and synchronized through Jotunn. Only server administrators may change synchronized values.

Bloodstone launch speed is ShrapnelVelocity × ShrapnelSpeedMultiplier. The new multiplier defaults to 2, so existing configurations also receive the speed increase without resetting their base velocity. Set the multiplier to 1.5 for a 50% increase instead. Visual motion stretch and wake duration are compensated to retain the compact shard appearance.

Installation

Requires:

• BepInExPack Valheim 5.4.2350 or newer
• Jotunn 2.30.0 or newer

With a mod manager, install the package and its dependencies normally. For a manual installation, install BepInEx and Jotunn, then place StaffsOfFracturing.dll in BepInEx/plugins/.

This mod is required on the server and on every connecting client. Version matching is strict at the patch level.

When updating, replace the old mod DLL on the server and all clients. If upgrading from 1.0.0, also update both dependencies. Keep only one installed copy of StaffsOfFracturing.dll. Existing configuration keys and item prefab identifiers are retained.

Compatibility

Version 1.0.4 targets Valheim 1.0.12 (network version 40), with native assets inspected from Unity 6000.0.75f1. It retains all 1.0.3 gameplay, including doubled Bloodstone shrapnel speed and Iolite secondary natural lifetime, compact red fragments, first-contact Bloodstone detonations, damage settings, recipes and package artwork.

Validation includes compilation/API checks, offline native mesh/material inspection and a numerical audit that preserves all original vertex bytes and triangles. See VALIDATION.md for the final build results and remaining limits.

In-game visual validation is pending. Build and API checks passed. Final effects, animation, held/dropped appearance and multiplayer visuals have not been tested in-game.

The mod uses a single Harmony postfix pinned to the six-argument Projectile.Setup method; all content registration, recipes, networking and configuration synchronization are handled through Jotunn.

Source and license

Source is included in the separate source-project archive. See BUILDING.md there for build instructions. Staffs of Fracturing is distributed under the MIT License.