Adaptive Creature Scaling

Adaptive Creature Scaling fixes Valheim enemies at the difficulty intended for maximum-upgrade equipment. It does not reduce enemy scaling for lower-geared players; those players must improve their equipment before fighting the same enemies comfortably.

Default behavior

• Every hostile creature permanently uses the detected maximum-upgrade difficulty tier.
• Creatures have 3x maximum health and deal 2x damage by default.
• Scaling does not change when stronger or weaker players approach or leave.
• A monster keeps the same health percentage when its scaled maximum is initialized or recalculated after a server configuration change.
• Bosses scale by default. Tamed creatures and players never scale.
• Vanilla star-level and multiplayer difficulty modifiers remain active; this mod adds its fixed maximum-equipment scaling on top of them.

When Potential Draught is installed, the mod automatically reads its live Forge upgrade cap. The maximumitemquality <quality> command therefore changes both the upgrade ceiling and creature tier without rebuilding either mod. If Potential Draught is absent or automatic detection is disabled, MaximumItemQuality is used as the fallback.

The default 3x-health and 2x-damage values are calibrated at reference quality 25. A cap above 25 extrapolates that same per-level curve instead of keeping the old fixed multipliers. For example, with baseline quality 4, a cap of 50 produces about 5.38x health and 3.19x damage. Player equipment quality is deliberately not inspected.

Starred bosses

Every naturally spawned unstarred boss receives one persistent roll:

• 10% chance to become a one-star boss
• 2% chance to become a two-star boss
• 88% chance to remain unstarred

The two-star roll is evaluated first. Boss levels already assigned by developer commands, another mod, or saved data are preserved. Vanilla star bonuses stack with this mod's fixed creature multipliers, so starred bosses are substantially more dangerous.

Server-synchronized configuration

• BaselineItemQuality = 4
• AutoDetectUpgradeCap = true
• MaximumItemQuality = 25 (fallback)
• ReferenceItemQuality = 25
• MaximumHealthMultiplier = 3
• MaximumDamageMultiplier = 2
• ScaleBosses = true
• Boss Stars.Enabled = true
• Boss Stars.OneStarChancePercent = 10
• Boss Stars.TwoStarChancePercent = 2

Jotunn synchronizes these values from the server. Install the same mod version on the server and every client.

Installation

1. Install BepInExPack Valheim 5.4.2350 or newer.
2. Install Jotunn 2.30.0 on the server and every client.
3. Put AdaptiveCreatureScaling.dll in BepInEx/plugins/AdaptiveCreatureScaling/ everywhere.