Deep North Snowfall

Deep North Snowfall is a small BepInEx Valheim mod for dedicated servers and clients. It restores missing Deep North ground snow after a successful sleep/night skip, so walked paths and shoveled snow look fresh again.

It does not simulate weather, continuous snowfall, or gradual snow buildup. It simply restores Deep North ground snow toward the area's normal generated snow value.

What It Does

• After a successful sleep/night skip, starts one Deep North snow refresh regardless of where players slept.
• Adds an admin command, snowrestore, for manual testing or manual refreshes.
• The server creates the restore event and syncs it to modded clients.
• Modded clients restore any Deep North terrain they have loaded.
• Briefly retries the loaded-terrain check after sleep or snowrestore, so hosted servers can catch zones that become ready shortly after the event.
• Records a pending restore after sleep or a successful manual command, so unloaded Deep North zones restore once when the game loads them later.
• Saves the changed snow paint through Valheim's normal terrain save/sync system.

Safety

This mod is intentionally conservative:

• Only changes the Deep North terrain paint snow-depth channel.
• Never changes terrain height.
• Never resets terrain zones.
• Never touches flattening, digging, raised ground, buildings, structures, vegetation, or items.
• Never piles snow higher than the area's generated natural snow value.
• The manual command can be run from the server console or by a remote admin, but it only affects Deep North snow data.
• Does not use destructive terrain reset behavior.

Install

Install on the dedicated server and on clients who should restore loaded Deep North terrain:

BepInEx/plugins/DeepNorthSnowfall.dll

On hosted dedicated servers, the server may not keep terrain components loaded. In that case, client installation is required because clients are the side that actually has the loaded terrain paint data available through Valheim's normal APIs.

For best results, install it on the server and on every player client that visits Deep North. At minimum, install it on the server and on the admin/client used to test Deep North snow restoration.

Config

BepInEx creates the config automatically after the server starts once:

BepInEx/config/com.teamgrimgoren.valheim.deepnorthsnowfall.cfg

Useful settings include:

• RestoreAfterSleep: enable or disable automatic restore after sleep.
• PostEventScanSeconds: how long after sleep or snowrestore the mod keeps checking loaded terrain.
• PostEventScanIntervalSeconds: how often those short post-event checks run.
• VerboseZoneLogs: log each touched zone.

The mod also creates a small state file:

BepInEx/config/com.teamgrimgoren.valheim.deepnorthsnowfall.state

That file remembers which Deep North zones have already been restored for the current sleep/manual restore cycle, including after server restarts.

Command

Run on the server console, or from an admin client that has the DLL installed:

snowrestore

The command starts a pending Deep North restore on the server and broadcasts it to modded clients. Any modded client with loaded Deep North terrain can process it immediately. Other Deep North zones are covered later as Valheim loads them on a modded client.

The command does not depend on where the admin or players are standing. It still only changes Deep North snow paint data.

Compatibility

Deep North Snowfall does not patch or replace DeepNorthTerrainFix. It restores only saved Deep North snow paint values and should be compatible with terrain-generation fixes that leave Valheim's normal terrain systems intact.

Technical Notes

The mod was built after inspecting the current Valheim assemblies. Deep North ground snow is stored in terrain paint data, separately from terrain height.

The mod writes only the terrain paint snow value and its modified flag, then asks Valheim to save the terrain component normally. It does not write to height, level, smooth, flatten, raise, or dig data.