Sarkastic.gg Resource Regrowth

Source code · Report a bug · Changelog · Dedicated Simulation

A server-side BepInEx plugin for Valheim 1.0 dedicated servers. It brings one-time world content back once an area has been left alone for a while:

• Surtling core stands get their core back.
• Treasure chests (never player-built ones) are restocked with fresh loot: what was left of the old loot is replaced, and what a player left in them stays, the loot taking the free slots. So are the other containers the world comes with a loot table of their own for: a shipwreck's chest, the granaries and timber halls of the Deep North, the ancient chests of Morkhalla.
• One-time creature spawners (dungeons, camps, caves) spawn their creature again.
• A location regrows as a whole: a dungeon with its entrance, a camp, a village or a ruin comes back all at once -- every core, every creature, every chest and every location object in it, and the doors close.
• Terrain that players dug, raised, levelled or paved slowly returns to the land's own shape, except around player bases and wards.
• Location objects (off by default): destroyed objects a location or village generated -- wild beehives in abandoned houses, for example -- are put back exactly where they stood. A muddy scrap pile in a sunken crypt (mudpile2, add it to Prefabs) is one too: the iron comes back with the crypt's chests and creatures, and what is left of the pile that was hit goes with it. So are the jewels and coins lying on the ground in crypts and caves (see What lies on the ground).
• Zones (off by default): a zone players have been in is generated again by the game itself once nobody has been near it for three days -- trees, rocks and ore deposits, bushes, pickables, the location with its buildings, chests, creatures and dungeon, and the ground -- as if no player had ever been there. Never at a base (a workbench); players' things stay as they are.

Players need nothing: vanilla clients work. The plugin depends on BepInEx and nothing else. It patches three game methods, each only with its part switched on (Zones; Location objects; copper deposits and silver veins raised as a zone is generated).

Recommended with Dedicated Simulation (Sarkastic_gg/Dedicated_Simulation, GitHub), a fork of Serverside Simulations by ddormer that keeps the world simulated on the server. This plugin works on its own, but the two are made to run together: the zone reset generates a zone the way Dedicated Simulation does.

How it works

Everything handled here stays in the world when it is used up, so regrowing it only changes the object's data. The plugin deletes and creates no objects.

What	Depleted when	Regrown by
Surtling core stand	the core was taken (picked)	setting picked back to false
Treasure chest	vanilla filled it once, and it is now empty or a player has been near it since it was last restocked	replacing what is left of its loot with fresh loot from the chest's own loot table, as vanilla fills it when the chest is first generated; what has been in a player's bag stays in its slot
One-time spawner	its creature is gone	clearing the spawned link; vanilla spawns again the next time a player loads the area
Terrain (a zone's _TerrainCompiler)	any vertex of the zone's heightmap is modified or painted	a step every StepHours: every height change outside a protected area is divided by Divider (1.7) and dropped once below MinDelta; paint goes back to nothing once the height under it is back, except paved and cultivated ground. The data is written in the game's own format; loaded terrain reloads it and every client rebuilds the ground.

Location objects are the one exception to "no object is created": a destroyed beehive is gone from the world, so it is created again. Where it stood is known exactly, not guessed:

• every location the world generated keeps a record of its position, rotation and seed, and every village or camp keeps the position and rotation of each of its buildings;
• the object's place follows from the location's or building's layout, the way the game placed it;
• objects that only spawn by chance are decided by replaying the game's own roll from that seed, so only places that really had one count.

Checked on a live world: of 169 beehive places the replay said 47 had a hive, and all 29 hives still standing were on exactly those places (same height to the centimetre), none anywhere else. An object is put back only while something breakable the location built around it still stands (within 3 m, at most 0.5 m above it), so nothing floats in the air: a hive hangs under the roof of its house, and when players have pulled the house down, it is not put back. One of them standing is enough, and the same test (WearNTear) picks them from the layout and finds them in the world, so a dungeon's bench or training dummy beside a fire pit counts too. Objects of the list itself do not -- two fire pits side by side, both broken, would wait for each other. An object that waits is logged once, with what held it: Not putting back Morkhalla_firepit of morkhalla_endcap01 at -1352,5001,8263: what held it is gone (Morkhalla_Trainingdummy1 at -1351.0,5001.5,8260.8).

More objects of the list on one spot (within 5 cm) than the location's layout has there are put right: the extra ones go -- one not picked stays -- where putting back could happen too. Up to 0.8.5 a pickable that is also in [SurtlingCores] Prefabs (hanging_hairstrands) never counted as standing, so every place of it got one more each time its hours were up: on the live world of 17 October 2026, 513 of them stood on 149 spots, up to six on one.

A pile or rock that is hit does not vanish at once: the game replaces it with its fractured remains (<name>_frac), which are what is mined. So when an object is put back, the remains of it within 1.5 m go (ClearRemains), or it would stand twice. Checked on a live world copy: a sunken crypt had 301 pile places, the replay said 174 had a pile, 162 stood whole, 12 were gone -- and there were exactly 12 fractured remains; 11 were put back at their own places (the twelfth had lost a gate that held it) and 11 remains went, none of the new piles on another. A base on the surface does not hold back what comes back inside a dungeon (5000 m up), nor does a tombstone down there hold back the surface above it.

Whether a player took everything from a chest, some of it or nothing cannot be told from the chest, so a chest counts as used once a player has been near it, or with nothing left in it but what a player put there; when its time comes its loot is replaced, partly looted or not. What a player left in it (an item remembers having been in a bag) stays where it is, and the new loot goes in the slots that are free, never onto their stack: a stone left in a crypt's chest neither keeps the chest from being restocked nor is lost, and a chest full of a player's things stays as it is. What a player puts on a stack of the loot (dragged onto it, or with "place stacks") stays the world's in the game; a stack holding more than the loot can roll (at the world's resource rate) counts as theirs, and a few put on one, up to that, go with the loot. [TreasureChests] KeepPlayersItems = false replaces those too.

A location regrows as a whole ([Locations] Together). Every object belongs to the location the world generated it with: inside a dungeon (5000 m up) to the location of its zone, as the rooms of a dungeon lie within the zone of the generator that built them and a cave comes whole with its location, so a burial chamber's interior and its entrance are one; on the surface to the location whose ground it stands on, or the camp or village whose room it stands by. Each used-up or missing object keeps its own clock, and as soon as one of them has waited its category's AfterHours, everything used up or missing in the location comes back together: the cores, the creatures, the location objects, and every chest in it restocked. The doors in it that a player can close by hand close (not those with a key, and not those that stay open once opened, which nobody could open again). A burial chamber whose cores were taken 10 hours ago returns whole, chests, draugr and scrap piles included. With Together = false each object regrows on its own.

Every CheckIntervalMinutes the plugin scans the world. A location (or a lone object) regrows only when all of these hold:

• one of its objects has been used up or missing for its category's AfterHours;
• no player has been near any of it for IdleHours;
• none of it lies within PlayerBuildRadius of a player-built piece or tombstone;
• none of it is in use: no connected player owns it, and the server does not have it loaded. Dedicated Simulation, for example, loads the zones around players on the server.

Whatever holds a location back holds all of it: nothing comes back while the rest does not, and the log says what holds it, once a run (Held:). Only a dungeon has two sides. A build by its entrance on the surface, a portal or a ladder, keeps back what is on the surface there, which then has no say in when the interior comes back; the interior comes back whole. A build or a tombstone inside holds everything. A piece that fell after being put back and an object whose holder is gone stay away by themselves: they neither make the location due nor hold it back.

The decisions run over frames, as the scan does: on a world of 864,000 objects and a Ryzen 9 7900X3D a scan takes 570-830 ms of work over about 320 frames, the worst of them 9-23 ms (35-40 ms in the first pass after a start, which also reads the layouts). The same decisions taken in one frame cost 430-500 ms on that world. On a live server, a Windows VM on an EPYC host, the same world takes about three times as long: 2.0-2.1 s of work over 530 frames, the worst 23-40 ms. A location's layout is read over frames too: each place is rolled, read and put back within one frame, the rest a few milliseconds a frame. With every location listed (Locations = *) CharredRuins1, 6 places on that world, takes 68-116 ms of work over 10-13 frames, the worst 9-17 ms, and the first pass 1.2 s of work with its worst frame 26-27 ms.

Boss items

What bosses are summoned with must not run out on a world that is played for years. Most of it comes from creatures, which keep spawning (deer trophies, ancient seeds, Seeker brute trophies), or comes back by itself (a dragon egg, 8 hours after it was taken); withered bones come from the scrap piles of sunken crypts (mudpile2, above) and their chests. What the world placed only once comes back with these entries (Valheim 1.0.20):

For	Comes from	Entry
Yagluth: 3 Fuling totems (GoblinTotem)	the totem on a pole in Fuling villages and stone towers (goblin_totempole); Fuling berserkers drop one now and then	[SurtlingCores] Prefabs: goblin_totempole:24 -- taken from its pole, it is back with the village's creatures and chests
Fader: 3 bells, made of fragments (BellFragment)	the altars of a Charred fortress (Charred_altar_bellfragment), the only source	[LocationObjects] Prefabs: Charred_altar_bellfragment
the Seeker Queen's door: the key, made of fragments (DvergrKeyFragment)	the crystal altars of infested mines (blackmarble_altar_crystal)	[LocationObjects] Prefabs: blackmarble_altar_crystal
the memorial (NorthMemorialPlace): 3 memorial coal (MemorialCoal)	coal piles and fire pits in the Morkhalla dungeons of MorkBorg (Morkhalla_coal_pile_memorial, Morkhalla_firepit); JotunWarrior drops one now and then	[LocationObjects] Prefabs: both

Hateful blood (HatefulBlood, three for FrozenKing) comes only from BlackIce_Core, which only FimbulLocation01 has, and the game does not generate that location in 1.0.20; there is nothing to regrow yet.

For players who come later

On a world that new players keep joining, what the game placed once and what only the zone reset brings back is not enough where the zone reset does not go: places the game makes only once (PlaceofMystery, traders, the Ancient upgrade station), Hildir's dungeons and boss arenas ([Zones] ProtectedLocations), and anything within 48 m of a workbench. Valheim 1.0.20 has these, scarce and needed, that no hourly list covers by default:

What	Where	Entry
Dyrnwyn: blade and tip fragments (DyrnwynBladeFragment, DyrnwynTipFragment)	the three PlaceofMystery places of the Ashlands, placed once per world (the hilt, Pickable_Swordpiece1, is put by no place or room the scan of 1.0.20 found)	[LocationObjects] Prefabs: Pickable_Swordpiece1,Pickable_Swordpiece2,Pickable_Swordpiece3
Molten cores (MoltenCore)	the stands of PlaceofMystery, CharredFortress and MorgenHole (picked, they vanish)	[LocationObjects] Prefabs: Pickable_MoltenCoreStand
Black cores (BlackCore)	the stands in the Dvergr towns under the Mistlands	[SurtlingCores] Prefabs: Pickable_BlackCoreStand (they stay in place when taken, like surtling cores)
Frost cores (FrostCore)	the hangers in the Hole of the Deep North	[SurtlingCores] Prefabs: Pickable_FrostCoreHanger
Tar (Tar)	the blobs of tar pits; picked, they vanish and vanilla never puts them back (the creatures of a pit come back with [DungeonMonsters])	[LocationObjects] Prefabs: Pickable_Tar,Pickable_TarBig
Black Metal and Black Marble idols (Upgrader4*, Upgrader5*, the tokens of the Ancient upgrade station) in Hildir's Sealed Tower	the trash piles of the dungeon (goblin_trashpile), which the zone reset skips	[LocationObjects] Prefabs: goblin_trashpile

The Morkhalla eyes (Morkhalla_Eye1 to Morkhalla_Eye7_gemstone: gemstones, hundreds in one hall) are no entry here: listed in [SurtlingCores] they would bring a gem hoard back on every visit.

What lies on the ground

The jewels, coins and bones lying about in crypts and caves are objects the world placed once, and nothing in the game brings them back. Listed in [LocationObjects] Prefabs they come back with the rest of their location, each rolling anew what it is, as it does when the game first places it: a ruby this time can be amber the next.

Lies in	Prefab	What it can be
burial chambers, Hildir's crypt, troll caves	Pickable_ForestCryptRandom	jewels and coins
sunken crypts	Pickable_SunkenCryptRandom	jewels, coins, withered bones
mountain caves, Hildir's cave	Pickable_MountainCaveRandom, Pickable_Item	jewellery and wolf parts
dolmens, ShipSetting01	Pickable_DolmenTreasure	a small treasure
burial chambers, caves, ruins, the Deep North	Pickable_ForestCryptRemains01 to 04	bone fragments
mountain caves, MorgenHole	Pickable_MeatPile	entrails
mountain caves with a lake	Pickable_Fishingrod	a fishing rod

Stones, flint and branches lying on the land belong to the land, not to a location: those come back with [Zones], and not in a zone it protects.

Copper deposits

A copper deposit is an iceberg. The game puts it 2 m under the ground, and its 130 pieces reach 13 m down from there and only 4 m up, with one copper ore in a piece on average. On a world with 427 untouched deposits, all of them stood at that height within 4 cm, and how many pieces reached over the ground went by the lie of the land:

RaiseMeters	Pieces over the ground, median	The worst deposit	Rock on level ground
0 (the game)	46	18	2 m tall
2	69	46	4 m
4	88	62	6 m
6	104	78	8 m, its underside showing

The rest has to be dug for, and a pit goes 8 m down at most. Raised, the deposits of zones still to be generated stand higher, and so do those standing, once, within a pass of the setting changing. One a player has broken open stays where it is, with their pit around it, and so does one within 20 m of a player's building: the rock is 28 m across and must not come up through a floor. Players need nothing; a client reads the height from the object, so one standing by a deposit as it moves sees it where it was until the zone loads again (change the setting while the server is down to avoid that). The world is saved as soon as deposits move. The ore in a deposit stays the same.

OverDeepestHole makes sure the rest can be dug for. A pickaxe takes 0.5 m a hit, and the game keeps the ground within 8 m of the height it generated (after a location has levelled its own ground). A swing breaks rock only if the rock is the first thing it meets, so a piece wholly under that floor can never be reached. Raised 4 m, 262 of the 427 deposits on the live world still had such pieces, most of them on slopes. With OverDeepestHole = 0.5, every deposit is raised by what it needs itself, for each of its 130 pieces to reach 0.5 m over the deepest pit: measured from the pieces and the ground under each of them as the game generates it, levelled by the locations around in every way they can stand (each turn one not placed yet can get, each part they may or may not spawn; where too many turns would have to be paired, the highest ground each can leave), with the deposit turned as it is and as the world's save brings it back (to the half degree). Zones generated later get the same, as they are generated. On a copy of the live world:

	Raised further	Pieces nobody can mine
RaiseMeters = 4		521, in 262 of 427 deposits
and OverDeepestHole = 0.5	a median 1.4 m, at most 8 m; 36 deposits needed nothing	15, all in the one deposit kept by a player's building

Checked against the floor the game builds itself (its own heightmap code, every location around spawned as a client spawns it; 3.8 million vertices, none different), with 52 more deposits in zones generated during the check: none is short of 0.5 m, before or after the save is loaded back (most are at 0.5, the rest up to 0.08 m over, for another way the deposit or the ground around can lie), and mining them through the game's own physics leaves no piece. The one exception is the deposit by a player's building, which stays where it was with 15 pieces under the floor. Measuring costs little: the deposits a pass finds are done in the frames after it, a few milliseconds a frame (on that copy 0.9 s of work in all, over 167 frames, the worst 7.7 ms), and those of a zone generated now take about 3 ms in the zone's own frame. The prefabs of the world's locations are read once, in the background, after the server starts.

A deposit broken open is raised too, its pieces coming up out of the player's pit. None is moved while a player's game may have it loaded (the zones a client loads its objects from, one zone wider): it waits for a later pass. One within 20 m of a player's building stays where it is, whatever the setting. The setting is read at every pass; zones generated later need it on when the server starts. Back at -1, each deposit goes down by what this raised it, to the height RaiseMeters gives it; one broken open since stays where it is.

FollowSlope (with OverDeepestHole on) lays a deposit along the slope it stands on. The game stands copper upright, on slopes of 5 to 45 degrees, so its top is level: on a slope the uphill side sinks into the ground and the downhill side stands tall, its underside bare. With FollowSlope = 30, each deposit is tilted until its up is the ground's (a plane fitted to the ground under it, as the deposit's floor is measured), at most 30 degrees, keeping the few degrees the game tilted it itself on top, and then raised by what it needs as above. On ground flatter than 2 degrees it stays as the game turned it, and so does one broken open. On a copy of the live world, the 170 deposits on slopes of 20 to 32 degrees:

	Tallest pieces over the ground, uphill third / downhill third (median)
upright, OverDeepestHole = 0.5	4.4 m / 8.7 m
and FollowSlope = 30	5.7 m / 7.4 m

Of 481 deposits, 474 were tilted (2.5 to 30 degrees, a median 14), and needing less once tilted, 201 went down by a median 0.5 m while 267 went up by as much; 30 zones generated during the test got their deposits tilted as they were generated. Checked against the floor the game builds itself as above, none was short, before or after the save was loaded back, and mining them through the game's physics left no piece. It took 1.3 s of work over 243 frames, the worst 12 ms. Back at 0, every deposit stands again as the game turned it, within 0.07 m of its old height. The turn is stored to the half degree, as the game's save keeps it.

Silver veins

A silver vein is made like a copper deposit: a rock that the first hit swaps for its pieces, with silver in them. The game puts its root 4 m under the ground in the Mountains, always upright, on slopes of up to 30 degrees, and as for copper a pit goes 8 m down at most around it. On a copy of the live world, 23 of 117 veins had pieces less than 0.5 m over that deepest pit, most on slopes, and 18 already stuck out of the ground somewhere. Silver is meant to be found with the wishbone, not seen, so a vein must not be brought up into sight.

[SilverVeins] OverDeepestHole raises a vein by what it needs for every piece to reach that far over the deepest pit, measured as for copper, but never so far that any part of it comes nearer the ground than UnderGround (0.5 m): every vertex of the pieces still to be mined (the corners of their meshes) stays at least that deep. The ground counted for this is the lowest any location nearby can leave it, however that location turns out to be placed. A vein that needs nothing stays as the game made it, and one the game left out of the ground, or nearer it than that, is not raised. With FollowSlope, a vein that still has pieces out of reach is tilted to lie along its slope, at most this many degrees (not on ground flatter than 2 degrees), when that leaves fewer of them out of reach and none of it nearer the ground than UnderGround, and then raised as far as that allows; one the game left nearer than that may be tilted as long as no part of it comes nearer than it stood upright. On the copy, with OverDeepestHole = 0.5, UnderGround = 0.5 and FollowSlope = 30:

	Veins with pieces short of 0.5 m over the deepest pit	Veins with a vertex out of the ground	The others with a vertex less than 0.5 m under it
as the game makes them	23 of 117	18	16
and the three settings	0	13	10

23 veins were moved. 7 were raised by 0.2 to 0.8 m and stayed upright. The other 16 could not have risen far enough upright without some part coming nearer the ground than 0.5 m, so they were tilted along their slopes instead, by 19 to 30 degrees (a median 26), and one of them was raised 0.2 m as well. None had to stop short of what it needs, and every vertex of each lies at least 0.64 m under the game's own ground. The five the game had left sticking out were among the tilted ones: they lie under the ground now. Checked against the floor the game builds itself, as for copper: none is short, and mining them through the game's own physics leaves no piece. The 13 veins still showing and the 10 near the surface need nothing and stay as the game made them. 40 Mountain zones generated during the test got the same as they were generated (17 veins, one of them tilted, about 2 ms a zone); the rest took 0.16 s of work over 37 frames, the worst 6 ms.

As for copper, none is moved while a player's game may have it loaded (it waits for a later pass), one within 20 m of a player's building stays where it is whatever the setting, one broken open is raised but never turned, and zones generated later need the setting on when the server starts. Back at -1, every vein goes back to the height and the turn the game gave it; one broken open since stays where it is.

Buildings of a camp or village

The walls, poles, roofs and stairs of a Fuling village, camp or stone tower are location objects too. Listed in Prefabs, a building players pulled down comes back after the section's AfterHours (48 by default; 24 brings it back with the place's creatures and chests) instead of only when [Zones] generates its zone again after three idle days -- and in a protected location too, which the zone reset never generates again. The Fuling pieces of Valheim 1.0.20:

goblin_woodwall_1m,goblin_woodwall_2m,goblin_woodwall_2m_ribs,goblin_pole,goblin_pole_small,goblin_roof_45d,goblin_roof_45d_corner,goblin_roof_cap,goblin_stairs,goblin_stepladder,goblin_fence,goblin_banner,goblin_bed,stone_wall_2x1,wood_wall_log,wood_stepladder

A piece (anything of the list the game treats as breakable, WearNTear: walls, but the cloth hangings and braziers of the default list too) counts as standing only on its own place: within 10 cm, at the same height -- one the game settles on the ground after placing it (SnapToGround, the log benches) at any height. So of two walls stacked one on the other, the lower one no longer stands in for the upper one.

Pieces of the list do not hold each other up for the rule above, so all of a building's missing pieces come back in the same pass, and the game's own support test decides what stands: once a player comes near, a piece with nothing under it falls, as a player's would. Such a piece is not put back again -- it would come back every AfterHours and fall at every visit, its wood dropped each time -- until one the game made stands in its place once more, which in practice is when [Zones] generates its zone again; from then on it is put back as before. Both are logged:

goblin_banner at -5053,41,1197, put back 0.07 h ago, fell for lack of support: not put back again before something stands in its place once more (its zone generated again).

goblin_banner of gobvill_hut03 at -5053,41,1197, which fell after being put back, stands in its place again; it is put back as before from now on.

The fall is seen only where the server runs the piece -- with Dedicated Simulation, which simulates what is near players; without it a player's game runs the fall, and such a piece comes back every AfterHours. Where its zone is never generated again (a protected location, [Zones] off), a piece that fell stays out. So does one that fell because players broke what held it, until the zone is generated again, even once what held it is back. A piece put back before 0.8.9 carries no sign of it: if it falls, it comes back once more and is told the next time. The state file keeps these as fell lines, also while [LocationObjects] is off.

Tested on a copy of the live world (23 October 2026) with these 16 prefabs added to the default list and the clocks run down: of 272 missing pieces 185 were put back (stone towers, villages, camps), 83 waited near players' builds and 3 for a totem pole that had held them. Each of the 177 in the 10 zones then generated again by the game itself stood where the game puts its own, to the millimetre, and none beside one standing. With a simulated player near a village for two minutes, one banner fell, was not put back again, and stood again when [Zones] generated the village.

Whole locations

[LocationObjects] Locations takes location names instead of prefabs: every breakable part of them comes back with the rest of the location, without listing it: building pieces, treasure chests, props, torches, roots, rocks and nests, also in the rooms of their dungeon or village. A chest that was broken comes back with the rest, filled (not one in [TreasureChests] ExcludePrefabs, which the game would fill). The doors in the doorways of a dungeon, which its generator draws as it goes and no layout knows, come back too once the plugin has seen them go; one that went before 0.9.0 waits for [Zones]. * matches any run of characters (Crypt*, Mistlands_*). LocationsExclude names prefabs this never puts back. Creature spawners and what is picked have their own entries, and what comes and goes by itself (a bird, a fire that burns out) is never put back.

Zones

Vanilla never brings back a felled tree, a mined copper or tin deposit, a stone tower or a house players pulled down. With [Zones] Enabled, a zone (64 m square) that a player has been in or next to is, once nobody has been near it (PresenceRadiusZones) for IdleHours (72), generated again by the game's own zone generation, the way Dedicated Simulation generates the zones around players (ZoneSystem.SpawnZone, ghost mode). Every object the game makes takes the place of the old one of its kind standing there (the nearest, so of a stack of walls each takes its own), which goes; what is left over of what only the zone itself makes -- vegetation, stumps and logs, wild creatures, items lying about, the record of what was done to the ground -- goes too. So trees, rocks and ore deposits, bushes, pickables, the location with its buildings, chests, spawners and dungeon come back. Measured on a copy of a live world against a fresh world with the same seed: 860 of 916 zones without a location came out exactly as first generated, the rest with a few trees or rocks elsewhere (the game decides placement partly by what colliders are around at that moment).

A location comes back the way round it was: the game draws its rotation from an unseeded random number when it first places it, so the rotation is read from the location's own record before the zone is cleared and given back when it is placed again (a patch of ZoneSystem.SpawnLocation). With the same rotation its dungeon gets the same seed and the same rooms. Because old objects are matched to what the game made object by object, a location or dungeon that reaches over the zone's edge (a boar runestone's spawners, a crypt's rooms) is replaced there too, and a neighbour's objects reaching into the zone stay.

Players' things stay exactly where they are: pieces they built (also portals, beds, crops), tombstones, ships and carts, items a player has carried (an item remembers having been in a bag), tamed creatures, and the world's chests, barrels and stands holding something of theirs (the old one stays, the game's new copy goes). Beside a piece they built or a tombstone nothing changes -- within 4 m for trees, rocks, buildings and chests, 2 m for smaller things, and wherever the colliders of a big rock, deposit or tree reach within 2 m of one, the game's new copies go and the old ones stay -- so no tree grows through a wall, nothing they kept by their walls goes, and a mountain rock (its stone covers the ground up to 23 m from its centre) does not come back over a chest built where it was mined out. A zone with their pieces in it keeps its ground record (Terrain regrowth deals with it, with its own protections).

Never generated again:

• a zone with a workbench in it or within PlayerBuildRadius (48 m) of it: someone's base. Of players' things only a workbench keeps a zone as it is;
• a protected location (ProtectedLocations: the start temple with the guardian stones, boss altars, traders, Hildir's dungeons) and every location the game places only once; nothing left over within a protected location's reach in a neighbouring zone goes, and no trader;
• a zone the server has loaded or next to one it has, or anything in it a connected player owns;
• anything in the first GraceMinutes (30) after a start: who was near while the server was off is not known.

Fields, paved roads, dirt paths, dug and raised ground and the trees players planted go with the reset unless a workbench is near: whoever wants a road or a field kept puts a workbench by it. A zone with players' pieces in it (crops are pieces) keeps its ground record, so a field with crops on it stays a field.

If the game cannot generate the zone now, or throws while doing it, nothing old has been deleted yet: whatever the attempt made is removed, the zone is marked generated and its location placed again, and after an exception zone resets stop until the next start.

At its first run every zone generated so far counts as visited -- what players did there before cannot be told -- and no zone is generated again before IdleHours from then. Presence is kept for the longer of the two idle times, also while Zones are off, and a zone without a record counts as seen at the time from which presence is known completely, so switching Zones on later or raising IdleHours never makes a recently visited zone due. At most PerPass zones per pass, longest idle first, one per frame (each a few milliseconds to a few tens); a zone that cannot be done now waits an hour. DryRun (on by default) only logs which zones would be generated again and what they hold.

Terrain protection

Ground within the radius of a player base object -- anything the game itself treats as a base when it decides where creatures may not spawn (a PlayerBase effect area: workbench, forge, stonecutter, beds, fires ...) -- or of a ward is left as it is; the radius is the object's own (ProtectMultiplier scales it), except that a workbench keeps the ground within WorkbenchRadius (48 m, the distance that keeps a zone from being generated again), because a workbench is what a base is built around and its own radius is only 10 m: a moat or a levelled yard dug around a house lies mostly outside that. A base that is gone, say a workbench broken by creatures, protects nothing any more, and the land returns. ProtectPiecesRadius (0) adds a radius around every player-built piece and tombstone for those who want roads and fields kept whole; paved and cultivated paint is kept anyway (KeepPaved, KeepCultivated), only its height returns. The log lists the protecting kinds and their radii at start.

Time

All times are real hours (wall clock, UTC). They keep counting while nobody is online and while the server is stopped. The world clock would not work here: on a dedicated server it only runs while a player is online.

The plugin cannot know what happened before it was installed. Both clocks start at its first run on a world, so nothing regrows until IdleHours and AfterHours have passed since then.

After a pass that regrew anything the world is saved right away (the same call as the autosave), so a crash cannot lose the regrowth while keeping the reset clocks.

What it remembers is kept in <world>.regrowth.txt next to the world save. That file records when players were last near each zone, since when each object has been depleted, and which pieces it put back fell.

Objects are identified by prefab and position, because the game hands out new object ids on every world load.

Limitations

• On a server where players own the objects around them (no server-side simulation), a spawner reset may not reach a player who stays connected the whole time and already had that area loaded in the same session. The game only sends a link, never its removal, so that player's game still thinks the creature exists. The creature appears once they reconnect. With Dedicated Simulation the server owns these objects, so this does not happen there.
• A core stand or chest that some machine currently has loaded is left for a later pass.
• Location objects: the first scan after a start reads the layouts of the locations and village buildings the world has (a few hundred prefabs, loaded in the background through the game's own loader, and read over frames: with every location listed, 1.2 s of work in that pass, no frame over 27 ms on a Ryzen 9 7900X3D); later scans only read new ones. A location object's own zone must not be loaded, like everything else.

Install

Copy SarkasticGG_Resource_Regrowth.dll to BepInEx/plugins/ on the server and start it once. That creates BepInEx/config/sarkasticeu.resource_regrowth.cfg.

It starts in dry run: it only logs what it would regrow. Watch the log for a few passes, then set DryRun = false. The config file is re-read before every pass, so DryRun, the delays, the logging amount, [SurtlingCores] Prefabs, the exclusions and [Zones] ProtectedLocations change without a restart (a list read again is said in the log); Enabled, the switches of the parts and [LocationObjects] Prefabs are applied at startup.

Configuration

Section	Key	Default	Meaning
General	Enabled	true
General	DryRun	true	only log, change nothing
General	CheckIntervalMinutes	10	real minutes between scans
General	LogDetailsPerPass	20	objects logged individually per category and scan
Safety	IdleHours	5	real hours since a player was near the zone
Safety	PresenceRadiusZones	2	a player counts as near all zones (64 m) within this many of their own
Safety	PlayerBuildRadius	48	metres around player-built pieces and tombstones that are never touched
Locations	Together	true	a location regrows as a whole: once one thing in it is due, every core, creature, chest and location object in it comes back
SurtlingCores	Enabled / AfterHours	true / 10
SurtlingCores	Prefabs	Pickable_SurtlingCoreStand	hide-when-picked, non-respawning pickables to restore; name:hours gives one its own hours instead of AfterHours (goblin_totempole:24, the Fuling totem)
TreasureChests	Enabled / AfterHours	true / 24	hours after a player was first near the chest (or it was seen empty) since it was last restocked
TreasureChests	ExcludePrefabs		chest prefabs never to refill, e.g. TreasureChest_meadows_buried or shipwreck_karve_chest
TreasureChests	KeepPlayersItems	true	what a player left in a chest stays, and the loot takes the free slots; false: it is replaced with the rest, and gone
Terrain	Enabled / AfterHours / StepHours	true / 48 / 24	what players dug or paved is first stepped back 48 h after it was first seen, once nobody has been near for Safety IdleHours, and then at most once every 24 h
Terrain	Divider / MinDelta	1.7 / 0.2	a step divides every height change outside a protected area by this and drops it once below this many metres
Terrain	ProtectMultiplier	1	the protected radius of a base object or ward is its own times this
Terrain	WorkbenchRadius	48	metres around a player's workbench that are never stepped back (its own radius is 10); 0 = only its own
Terrain	ProtectPiecesRadius	0	also protect this many metres around any player-built piece or tombstone
Terrain	KeepPaved / KeepCultivated	true / true	paved and cultivated ground stays so; only its height returns
DungeonMonsters	Enabled / AfterHours	true / 24
DungeonMonsters	ExcludePrefabs		spawner prefabs never to reset
LocationObjects	Enabled / AfterHours	false / 48	put back destroyed objects of locations and villages (needs a restart)
LocationObjects	Prefabs	Beehive	which ones; only world-generated objects are ever put back (boss items: see Boss items; jewels and coins: see What lies on the ground; walls and roofs: see Buildings of a camp or village)
LocationObjects	Locations / LocationsExclude		locations whose every breakable part is put back, * matching any run of characters; prefabs that never are (see Whole locations; needs a restart)
CopperDeposits	RaiseMeters	0	metres higher than the game puts copper deposits, up to 8 (see Copper deposits); back to 0 puts them back
CopperDeposits	OverDeepestHole	-1	raise each copper deposit further, until every piece of it reaches this many metres over the deepest pit a pickaxe can dig (up to 4; 0.5 recommended); -1 = off, and what it raised goes back down
CopperDeposits	FollowSlope	0	with OverDeepestHole on: the most degrees a copper deposit is tilted to lie along its slope (up to 45; 30 recommended); 0 = upright as the game stands it, and what it tilted stands back up
SilverVeins	OverDeepestHole	-1	raise each silver vein until every piece of it reaches this many metres over the deepest pit a pickaxe can dig, as far as UnderGround allows (up to 4; 0.5 recommended; see Silver veins); -1 = off, and what it moved goes back
SilverVeins	UnderGround	0.5	metres under the ground every part of a silver vein stays at least when it is raised or tilted, the ground taken at the lowest the locations around can leave it (up to 4); more keeps more silver out of reach, less brings veins nearer sight
SilverVeins	FollowSlope	0	with OverDeepestHole on: the most degrees a silver vein with pieces out of reach is tilted to lie along its slope, not on ground flatter than 2 degrees (up to 45; 30 recommended); 0 = upright as the game stands it, and what it tilted stands back up
Zones	Enabled	false	generate visited zones again as the world first made them (needs a restart)
Zones	DryRun	true	only log which zones would be generated again
Zones	IdleHours	72	real hours with nobody near before a zone is generated again
Zones	PerPass	8	most zones per pass
Zones	GraceMinutes	30	minutes after a start before any zone is generated again
Zones	RefreshNow	false	one-off, switches itself off in the config: in the first pass after a start, generate again every zone nobody has been near for the last 30 minutes (no IdleHours, no GraceMinutes, no PerPass) and bring the ground of every modified zone back at once, paint too; what a workbench or a ward protects stays
Zones	ProtectedLocations	StartTemple, boss altars, traders, Hildir's dungeons	never generated again (also every location placed only once)

Build

Requires the .NET SDK and a Valheim dedicated server with BepInEx installed (for the reference assemblies). Point VALHEIM_DEDI_INSTALL at it, or pass -p:ValheimServerDir=...:

VALHEIM_DEDI_INSTALL=/path/to/valheim_server dotnet build src/ResourceRegrowth.csproj -c Release

The DLL ends up in bin/Release/.

License

MIT, see LICENSE. Copyright (c) 2026 MistrCech / Sarkastic.gg.