Elite Creatures Reborn

Creatures spawn with mutations — named, visible traits that change how a fight goes. A Mad greydwarf comes at you twice as fast on half the health. A Bloated draugr takes twice the killing and then explodes in your face. A Devouring wolf eats the boars around it and grows on what it eats until it comes looking for you.

Bosses take an aspect instead: one modifier, shown at the altar before you summon, that changes what kind of fight it is. A Twin Bonemass comes as two sharing one health pool; a Reflective Moder hurts you with every hit you land.

Rebuilt from scratch. This release covers mutations, stars, loot and boss aspects; the rest returns over the next releases.

Mutations

Ten, one per creature by default, each with its own colour and its own name on the nameplate.

Mutation	What it does
Mad	Far faster, half health
Bloated	Double health, explodes a second after it dies
Cloaked	Invisible beyond 6 metres
Splintering	Splits into two weaker copies when killed, which can split again
Leeching	Regenerates, and heals from the damage it deals
Warding	Reflects damage and knocks you back
Plated	Armoured while healthy, hits harder as that armour goes
Miasmic	Trails poison clouds; poisons players, never creatures
Devouring	Kills creatures in one bite and keeps their health and damage, until it is big enough to hunt you
Thieving	Steals an item on its first landed hit and carries it on its nameplate; kill it to get everything back

Mutation power fields

mutation power in the rule file sets how strong each mutation is, in named fields rather than positional numbers. A field marked (enhanced) is multiplied by large star power on a large star; a cost field never is. Any mutation can also be switched off entirely with mutations enabled, regardless of its chance curves.

Mad - move/attack speed multipliers (enhanced); health multiplier, its cost
Bloated - health multiplier (enhanced); delay seconds from death to the blast, which goes off at the corpse's resting place; damage (enhanced) and radius (enhanced) of the blast; blast effect/warning effect vanilla prefabs for the explosion and the pre-blast warning
Cloaked - reveal distance metres to become visible (enhanced); fade time seconds to phase, 0 snaps; fade margin extra metres before fading back out, to stop strobing
Splintering - damage multiplier per split; max generations cascade-depth cap, 0 = unlimited; max descendants live-descendant cap, 0 = unlimited
Leeching - regen percent max health per second, never enhanced; regen cap hard HP/s ceiling on a single tick, so a huge-health creature cannot out-heal a fight; combat cooldown seconds since its last damage taken before regen resumes; lifesteal percent of damage dealt returned as health (enhanced)
Warding - reflect percent of incoming damage returned (enhanced); knockback force on a melee attacker (enhanced)
Plated - armour percent of incoming damage cut at full health, to 0 hurt (enhanced); max reduction hard ceiling on that percent, so enhancement cannot approach invulnerability; damage percent bonus at zero health, to 0 full (enhanced)
Miasmic - cloud life seconds a dropped cloud lasts; cloud damage strength of the vanilla Poison a cloud or hit applies, not direct damage (enhanced); clouds per second while moving (enhanced); cloud radius metres; cloud effect/body effect vanilla prefabs for the trail cloud and the permanent worn poison look (cosmetic)
Devouring - absorb health/absorb damage percent kept permanently from a victim (enhanced; an instant kill always lands the killing blow, so the full amount is kept); slow per 100 health, its cost; move base speed multiplier before the slow (0.5 halves it; not enhanced); player threshold fraction of a player's max health a hit must pass before it hunts players for good; devour cooldown seconds after a meal before it can eat again
Thieving - max items the most it will ever hold (enhanced), hard-capped at 8; never takes equipped gear or more than one item per landed hit, and gives back everything it holds when it is killed

Stars

Beyond vanilla's two, counted in fives on the nameplate: a small star is one, a large star is five. A mutation on a large star is stronger. Star chances and mutation chances are set per biome, so the Meadows stay the Meadows.

Bosses have their own star table, the same for the whole world, and nine in ten stay plain by default. A boss's stars are drawn under its health bar at the top of the screen.

Boss aspects

A boss never takes a mutation. It takes an aspect, which is in its name - "Enraged Eikthyr" - and on its altar before you commit: hover the offering bowl to see the current aspect, what it does, what it pays, and how long until it shifts. Every altar shifts to a different aspect each in-game hour (75 real seconds), so a group can wait for the fight it wants. The aspect on the bowl when you make the offering is the one you fight. A boss with no altar - the Queen, or a console spawn - rolls its aspect when it first appears.

Aspect	What it does	Loot
none	The fight as the game ships it (one in five)	x1
Reflective	15% of each hit you land comes back to you as true damage	x1.4
Shielded	30% less damage from arrows and bolts	x1.1
Mending	Regenerates 0.3% of its health every second, in combat too	x1.3
Summoner	Calls two 2-star creatures of its own biome each time it loses 33% of its health	x1.5
Elementalist	20% more fire, frost, lightning, poison and spirit damage	x1.2
Enraged	20% more physical damage	x1.2
Twin	A second copy of the boss; the two share one health pool, 25% less health and damage each, and both drop full loot	x1 each
Phantom	Four copies with 100 health and half its damage; they drop nothing, leave no body, and vanish when the boss dies	x1.3

Everything is in the aspects: block under bosses: in the rule file: the off switch, the shift interval (0 fixes each altar), the chance of each outcome, the loot multiplier, every aspect's numbers, and per boss the creatures Summoner calls and, optionally, which aspects that boss may roll.

Loot

What a kill drops is governed by a loot: block in the rule file. Four modes, chosen for the whole world: Vanilla (drops untouched), Scaled (quantities raised by the per-star drops line), Rolled (the creature's own drop table rolled once more per star, each roll independent — the default, so a hard fight has a real chance at the rare thing), and Curated (per-creature rules decide everything). An extra roll chance line and a max extra rolls cap tune Rolled; a global multiplier and a separate boss multiplier scale everything after the mode, and a boss's aspect multiplies its drops on top - even in Vanilla mode, where it is the only thing that does. Trophies are never multiplied unless you switch that on — one kill, one trophy.

Per-creature rules in the same file, matched by prefab name, override any of it: a creature's own drops line, adjusted or removed rows of its drop table, extra drops with their own chance and amounts. elite reference writes creature_reference.yml with every creature the game knows — modded ones included — under its exact prefab name with its vanilla drop table; paste it and creature_rules.yml at an AI assistant, describe the economy you want, and drop the rules it writes back into the file.

Configuration

Two files, both written and documented on first run, both hot-reloaded while you play:

BepInEx/config/gglasgow.elitecreaturesreborn.cfg — the settings: star chances, mutation chances and mutation strength per biome, colours, nameplate distance, and an off switch for everything.
BepInEx/config/creature_rules.yml — the rule file, for anything too structured for a flat settings file, including a mutations enabled switch that turns any mutation off everywhere.

A server binds connected players to its own rules. Display preferences — colours, tint strength, nameplate distance, whether trait names show at all — stay with each player and are never locked.

Console commands

Command	Does
`elite spawn <prefab> <stars> [mutation...]`	Spawns exactly that creature, bypassing every roll, for testing. A boss takes one aspect instead: `elite spawn Bonemass 2 Twin`
`elite inspect`	Prints the resolved stars, mutations or aspect, and numbers for the creature under your crosshair
`elite purge`	Removes the loaded creatures this mod has marked, with no drops (a Thieving creature's stolen goods drop first)
`elite effects <text>`	Lists loaded effect prefabs matching the text and plays one, for building visuals
`elite reference`	Writes `creature_reference.yml`: every creature the game knows, by biome, with its drop table

Install

With a mod manager, install it. By hand, drop EliteCreaturesReborn.dll into BepInEx/plugins. Requires BepInEx. On a server, install it on the server and on every client.

Multiplayer

Creature state travels in the world data the game already shares, so every player sees the same creature with the same traits. Install it on the dedicated server as well as the clients.

Files

plugins/EliteCreaturesReborn.dll — the mod, a single merged assembly
config/gglasgow.elitecreaturesreborn.cfg — settings
config/creature_rules.yml — creature rules

Building

.NET SDK 8, with Valheim installed:

dotnet build EliteCreaturesReborn/EliteCreaturesReborn.csproj -c Release

Override -p:GamePath=..., -p:BepInExCore=... or -p:ModLibsPath=... if your layout differs. The build merges the shared libraries into one DLL and writes it to dist/.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0). You are free to use, study, share and modify it, and anything you distribute that is built from it must carry the same freedoms and be released under the same licence, with source. See the LICENSE file for the full terms.