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 configured quality-25 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.

The reference quality is 25 by default to match the Forge of Potential upgrade ceiling. 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
MaximumItemQuality = 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

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