Gjallarhorn

A server-side Viking kill feed and roster. Player deaths land in the top-left message feed and the chat window; boss defeats get the centre-screen banner; players arriving and leaving are announced in the same voice.

Named for Heimdall's horn — the one sounded to announce across all nine realms.

Who needs to install this

The server needs it. Every client is optional, and the mod is not version-enforced.

• On the server it does all the work — detection, wording, and broadcasting. It reaches players over ShowMessage and ChatMessage, two RPCs vanilla Valheim already registers, so a server full of unmodded players still sees the whole feed.
• On a client it is purely additive. Installed, that player's deaths are reported with the real cause and the real killer. Absent, their deaths still announce, but the killer is a proximity guess and non-combat causes read as generic.

Mixed populations are fine and expected. Nobody is refused at connect.

Why clients change the quality of the feed

Everything specific about a death — who swung, what kind of damage, whether another player did it — lives in Character.m_lastHit, set in Character.Damage. That runs on whichever peer owns the dying character's ZDO, which is the victim's own machine. A dedicated server never instantiates a Player component for a remote client and can never read it.

So the server falls back to what it can see: the dead flag on each connected player's replicated character ZDO, and whatever hostile creatures are standing near the corpse. That gets the ordinary case right — you died to the thing that was hitting you, and it is still there — and gets ranged kills, deaths on a fleeing mob, and every non-combat cause wrong.

	Vanilla client	Client with Gjallarhorn
Death announced	yes	yes
Victim, position, biome	exact	exact
Killer creature	nearest hostile within 20m, a guess	exact
Star rank	from the guessed creature	exact
PvP kills	never identified	exact, with the killer named
Fall, drowning, fire, freezing, poison, falling trees	read as generic	each has its own message
Carts, boats, structures, turrets, the edge of the world	read as generic	grouped as environmental

Boss defeats are exact either way. The server sees them through ZoneSystem.RPC_SetGlobalKey, which is registered server-side only.

Joins and leaves

Vanilla announces arrivals but never departures, and the asymmetry is not an oversight. The arrival line is a chat shout the joining client sends itself, from Game.SpawnPlayer the first time it spawns. A client that is leaving cannot shout, so there is nothing to mirror it with. Both halves have to be observed server-side instead.

Departures are caught at ZNet.Disconnect, the single funnel a clean quit, a dropped connection and a kick all pass through. Arrivals come from a diff over the peer list on the server tick, gated on the player actually having a character in the world, so someone who backs out at character select is never announced. That same diff backs up the departure hook: if a game update ever moves Disconnect, leaves announce a tick late instead of silently stopping.

Leaves come in three wordings, because a crash should not read as a cheerful farewell:

How they left	Pool
Quit to menu or desktop	LeaveMessages
Crash, alt-F4, network loss	LeaveTimeoutMessages
Kicked, banned, not on the permitted list	LeaveKickedMessages

RejoinQuietPeriod keeps a flapping connection from filling the feed: a player who rejoins inside the window is not announced, and the leave that follows is suppressed too — unless the session outlasted the window, in which case it was a real visit and its ending is reported. Identity is the peer's platform id, so it survives reconnects and does not collide when two players pick the same name.

Leaves are announced by default. Arrivals are not: vanilla already covers them, so AnnounceJoins starts off, and turning it on adds a second line rather than replacing vanilla's. Stopping the server is silent either way — no wall of departures nobody is online to read.

Known limits

• Repeat boss kills only announce for clients with the mod. The global key a boss sets on death is added once per world; a second Bonemass changes nothing the server can observe. A client running Gjallarhorn reports every kill, including repeats.
• The killer guess is a guess. It is labelled as such in the logs ([guess] versus [exact]) so you can tell at a glance which path produced a line.
• Chat lines also appear as floating text at the death site for players standing nearby, or with the map open. That is vanilla Chat.AddInworldText behaviour and cannot be suppressed from the server. Turn off UseChatLine if it bothers you.
• Arrivals are left to vanilla by default. Valheim's own "I have arrived!" is a shout sent by the joining client, so a server cannot suppress a message it did not originate. AnnounceJoins is therefore false out of the box — turning it on adds Gjallarhorn's wording on top of vanilla's rather than replacing it. Leaves have no vanilla equivalent and are on by default.
• A listen server's host announces neither their own join nor their own leave. The host is not a network peer, so there is nothing to observe — and when the host leaves, the server goes with them. Dedicated servers are unaffected.
• Modded creatures read as their prefab name. The display-name table covers vanilla only; anything else falls back to a cleaned-up prefab name.
• English only. Creature and biome names come from a built-in table rather than Valheim's Localization, whose singleton is set up by the client-side startup path and is not dependable on a headless server.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/com.ragemedia.gjallarhorn.cfg, generated on first run. Everything except VerboseLogging and DiscordScreenshots is admin-only and synced from the server, so clients cannot give themselves a different feed.

Section	Setting	Default	What it does
Channels	AnnounceDeaths	true	Announce player deaths.
Channels	AnnounceBossDefeats	true	Announce boss defeats.
Channels	AnnounceJoins	false	Announce arrivals in Gjallarhorn's voice. Off by default: vanilla already announces them. See Known limits.
Channels	AnnounceLeaves	true	Announce departures. Vanilla has no equivalent.
Channels	UseTopLeftFeed	true	Announcements go to the top-left message feed.
Channels	UseChatLine	true	Announcements also post as a chat line.
Channels	BossUsesCenterBanner	true	Boss defeats use the centre banner. Player deaths never do.
Channels	ChatSenderName	Gjallarhorn	Speaker name on chat lines.
Content	IncludeBiome	true	Resolve {biome}.
Content	IncludeStarRank	true	Render 2-star Greydwarf.
Content	LogToConsole	true	Write announcements to the server log.
Content	IncludeSessionDuration	true	Append how long the player was online to leave lines.
Content	SessionDurationSuffix	after {duration} in the realm	What gets appended. Blank it and use {duration} in a pool to place it yourself.
Detection	PollInterval	1.0	Seconds between death-flag checks. Vanilla clients only.
Detection	ExactReportGrace	1.5	How long to wait for a client's exact report before guessing.
Detection	KillerSearchRadius	20	Radius searched when guessing a killer.
Detection	SwarmRadius / SwarmThreshold	6 / 4	When a death reads as "overwhelmed by a horde".
Detection	RejoinQuietPeriod	60	Seconds after a departure in which a rejoin is not announced. 0 announces every reconnect.
Messages	18 pools	—	Semicolon-separated; one picked at random. Death and boss tokens {victim} {killer} {boss} {biome}; presence tokens {player} {duration} {online} {biome}. Pools still on an older release's stock text move to the new defaults on startup; edited pools are left alone.
Integrations	DiscordScreenshots	true	Client-side. Rewrites Discord Screenshots' death caption, see Compatibility.

Compatibility

Discord Screenshots (warpalicious). When both mods are installed on a client, that player's death screenshots are posted with a Gjallarhorn line, such as "Astrid was felled by 2-star Troll in the Black Forest", instead of the generic caption. The line is rolled separately from the in-game one, so the wording can differ, but the killer, stars and biome are the same. Players without Gjallarhorn keep Discord Screenshots' own caption. F12 screenshots are never touched. If a Discord Screenshots update moves the method this hooks, the log says so and its default caption returns.

Do not run this alongside another kill-feed, death-announcement, or join/leave-announcement mod. Nothing stops BepInEx loading both, and every event will simply be announced twice.

Safe to add or remove

Nothing is written to the world save. Announcements are in-memory only.