Valheim Network Compression Plugin

Substantially reduce bandwidth usage by compressing network data.

Requirements

• Requires BepInEx Valheim Full
  • No, it will not work with the old BepInExPack because it's missing DLLs.

Installation

Mod manager

This package is structured for use with r2modman.

Manual installation

Until r2modman adds support for plugins that ship in their own folder, you'll need to do the following steps:

1. In your BepInEx Valheim Full plugins folder, create the folder SebNetCompressionPlugin
   • It should now be structured as BepInEx/plugins/SebNetCompressionPlugin
2. Copy everything from SebNetCompressionPlugin/plugins/ in the package to BepInEx/plugins/SebNetCompressionPlugin in your local install

The final structure should be:

BepInEx/
    plugins/
        SebNetCompressionPlugin/
            libzstd.dll
            libzstd.so
            SebNetCompressionPlugin.dll

Usage

• Install the plugin.
• All clients as well as the server need to have the plugin to work.
• Change the configuration options to your liking (logging, compression level).

Reasoning

The plugin uses Zstandard for fast, real-time compression of network data.

While testing compression algorithms, we tried:

• Deflate
• Gzip (deflate w/ CRC)
• LZ4
• Brotli

and found that Zstd achieved one of the highest compression rates (i.e. the lowest bandwidth usage) at a fraction of the CPU time.

To test the compression rates, we enabled logging on both client & server and played around in the game world to trigger many different events, with up to 5 players.

Links & Licenses

• Zstandard
  • LICENSE.zstd.md
  • https://github.com/facebook/zstd
• ZstdNet, C# Zstd library
  • LICENSE.ZstdNet.md
  • https://github.com/skbkontur/ZstdNet
• Illustration by Icons8 from Icons8