Gjallarhorn

A server-side Viking kill feed. Player deaths land in the top-left message feed and the chat window; boss defeats get the centre-screen banner.

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.

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.
• 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 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	UseTopLeftFeed	true	Deaths go to the top-left message feed.
Channels	UseChatLine	true	Deaths 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.
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".
Messages	14 pools	—	Semicolon-separated; one picked at random. Tokens {victim} {killer} {biome} {boss}.

Compatibility

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

Safe to add or remove

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