Skald

The skald remembers every deed. And every death.

Skald keeps the story of your server: who reached the Mistlands first, who has died to trolls eleven times, who has gone twenty days without dying, and whether the server itself is going to make it to Fader.

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Quick start

1. Install Skald on the server and on every player's game. The server does the remembering; each player's game reports what happened to them and displays Skald's messages. A player without it sees nothing and reports nothing.
2. Everyone must run the same version: mismatched clients are turned away at the handshake, with the reason in the log.
3. In game, press F10.

Nothing else is required. Discord is optional and off until you add a webhook.

💬 Questions, bug reports or ideas? Join the Discord.

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The panel

Press F10. Skald's own window opens on its own, with a tab for each page:

• Achievements: what you've earned, and what you're closest to, with progress bars
• Leaderboards: who leads on achievements, hours, kills, exploring, deaths and streaks
• Deaths: how you've died, to what, your grudges, and the server's recent deaths
• The World: what the world is made of, and how the server is holding up
• Admin (admins only), your announcements, with switches and a form for adding more: a name, what it says, and dropdowns for when it fires and where it goes

Progress is drawn as proper bars that fill in as the page opens, with the numbers counting up beside them. On the World tab, memory and world size are shown as gauges that turn from green to amber to red as the server fills up.

Escape or Close shuts it again. Rebind the key with PanelKey.

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In chat

Achievements appear in big text in the middle of the screen, with the detail in chat:

Timothy earned "Into the Mist" Timothy is the first on the server to set foot in the Mistlands.

Deaths get a line, and Skald has opinions:

Skald: Daniel came apart in Troll's grip like wet bread. Skald: Fulda was crushed by the very tree they were chopping. Skald: A Deathsquito killed Timothy. Two grams of pure malice.

Grudges form when the same thing keeps killing you:

Skald: A grudge is born: Troll has killed Daniel 3 times. Skald: Vengeance: Daniel has cut down Troll at last.

Streaks, returns, bosses and raids:

Skald: Astrid has survived 20 days without dying. Something out there is taking notes. Skald: Bjorn returns after 6 days away. Things died in the meantime. Skald: Moder fell after a 6-minute fight. Casualties: 2 (Daniel, Fulda x2). Skald: The ground is shaking near Daniel's base. Trolls.

Arriving after a break gets you a private summary:

While you were away (2 days): Boss down: Bonemass. Timothy earned Woodsman. 3 deaths while you were gone (Troll took 3). Your 9 days without dying still stands.

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Chat commands

Type these in chat. Nobody else sees the command or the answer.

Command	Shows
!skald	Your achievements, hours, deaths, streak, nemesis, and the three you're closest to
!skald <name>	The same for another player
!deaths [name]	Deaths by cause and by killer, and active grudges
!top	Leaderboards: achievements, time played, deaths, longest streak
!world	What the world is made of, what grew this week, and the busiest areas
!recap	(Admins) Post this week's recap so far to Discord
!announce	(Admins) List, add, switch, test and remove announcements
!skald reload	(Admins) Reread achievements.json, messages.json and announcements.json

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What Skald tracks

• 58 achievements: 7 bosses, 6 biomes, 2 playtime tiers, 24 for combat, work, travel, taming, eating and dying, 12 for hunting particular creatures and 7 for exploring, with 8 of them hidden until someone earns them. Progress counts from when Skald first sees you, so veterans don't unlock everything on day one.
• Kill counts by creature: every kill counted per player and per kind of creature, which the game itself doesn't keep, for achievements like "Troll Toppler: 25 trolls" and a Kills leaderboard.
• Exploring: how much of the world each player has uncovered on their own map, worked out on their machine and sent as a single number. No map ever leaves it.
• Death announcements: 326 lines across all 25 ways Valheim can kill you, with their own lines for a dozen notable creatures. Dealt rather than rolled, so you see every one before any repeats. All of them editable, and yours can be added.
• Nemesis system: three deaths to the same kind of creature (or the same player) and it holds a grudge. Killing one settles it.
• Survival streaks: in-game days survived without dying, counted only while you're online. When a long streak ends, the death message says so.
• First to reach: the first player into each biome is named.
• Return messages for players back after a long absence, and a private "while you were away" summary of what they missed.
• Boss fight summaries: how long the fight took, and who died in it.
• Raid announcements: everyone hears whose base is under attack, and the casualties when it ends.
• Performance watchdog: frame time, memory, save stalls and world size, alerting Discord when things degrade.
• World census: what your world is actually made of, so growth can be blamed on something specific rather than just noticed.
• Busiest areas: where on the map the objects pile up, and whose build it is, e.g. "Timothy's build, 1.2 km north-east of the world centre: 41,200 objects, mostly building pieces".
• Live Discord status: one message kept up to date with who's online and how the server is doing.
• Weekly Discord recap: hours, deaths, achievements, bosses, server health, and how fast the world is growing.
• Your own announcements: lore on a timer, a private word when someone first reaches a biome, a warning before the nightly restart.

Achievements are awarded once per character per world, ever, and survive restarts and crashes. A new world starts fresh.

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Server setup

Installing on a dedicated server. Most hosts can install Thunderstore mods directly. If yours can't, put Skald.dll in BepInEx/plugins/Skald/ on the server and restart it. The server needs BepInEx, same as the clients.

Discord does nothing until you give it a webhook:

[Discord]
WebhookUrl = https://discord.com/api/webhooks/...

Nothing is sent anywhere until you do. Once set you get performance alerts, the weekly recap (Sundays at 18:00 server time by default) and a live status message; deaths, achievements and raids can be posted too.

Boards that edit themselves. Besides the status, Skald can keep a death log (the last few deaths), a world report (makeup, busiest areas, growth) and a leaderboard up to date, each as a single message it edits rather than a stream of posts. All three are off until you switch them on, and each can have its own webhook so it sits in its own channel. Pin them.

The live status message is posted once and then edited every two minutes: who's online, the in-game day, uptime, frame time, memory, world objects, the last save and the busiest area, under a green, yellow or red light. Pin it. It shows when it was last updated, so if the server dies it visibly goes stale, and a clean shutdown marks it offline. To put it in its own channel (a #server-status, say), give that channel's webhook to StatusWebhookUrl. If the message is deleted, Skald posts a new one.

Achievements are a file you can edit. BepInEx/config/Skald/achievements.json is written on the server, the first time a world loads, with all the built-ins in it. It won't appear on a player's game: the server owns the catalog, so changing it asks nothing of your players. Change a threshold, add your own, or mark one "hidden": true so it only shows once earned:

{ "id": "trees_500", "title": "Woodsman", "description": "500 trees felled.",
  "type": "stat", "stat": "TreeChops", "target": 500, "unit": "trees" }

New built-in achievements arrive by themselves. When an update adds achievements, Skald adds them to your existing achievements.json on the next load, leaving everything you wrote untouched and keeping the previous file as achievements.json.bak. It records what it has offered in achievements.offered.txt, so one you deleted is never added back.

Types are stat (any of the game's per-character counters), playtime, biome, key (a world flag such as defeated_bonemass), kills (a number of one kind of creature, e.g. "creature": "troll") and explored (a percent of the world). A broken file is never overwritten: Skald logs what's wrong with it, line by line, and uses the built-in catalog until you fix it.

Your own messages, on a timer or when something happens. BepInEx/config/Skald/announcements.json, written on the server with examples in it, all switched off until you enable them:

{ "announcements": [
  { "id": "lore", "enabled": true, "when": "every 45m", "to": "chat",
    "lines": ["The gods are watching, and they are bored.",
              "Every raven that follows you is taking notes."] },
  { "id": "swamp", "enabled": true, "when": "firstbiome:Swamp", "to": "private",
    "lines": ["The water here has a taste. Old iron, and older mistakes."] }
] }

When: every 45m, at 03:00 (server clock), dawn, dusk, newday, join, firstjoin, biome:Swamp (each time a player walks in, not on spawning, at most every 5 minutes each), firstbiome:Swamp (their first time ever), death, boss, raid, achievement. Where: chat, banner or discord for everyone; private or private, banner for only the player it happened to. For banners without the chat window popping up, set [Banners] AlsoInChat = false. Placeholders: {player}, {biome}, {boss}, {killer}, {day}, {online}. Add requirePlayers to keep quiet on an empty server, minGap to space repeats, and seconds to set how long a banner stays up. private needs a player, so it doesn't work on timers, bosses or raids, and never with Discord, which can't message one person.

Every message is a file you can edit. BepInEx/config/Skald/messages.json, written on the server on first run, holds every line Skald says: deaths by cause and by creature, grudges, streaks and returns.

{
  "deaths": {
    "byCause": { "Drowning": ["The sea kept {player}."] },
    "byKiller": { "troll": ["A troll made a rug out of {player}."] }
  },
  "streaks": ["{player} has gone {dayspan} without dying. Suspicious."]
}

Placeholders are {player}, {killer}, {count} and {dayspan}. Your lines are added to Skald's by default; "mode": "replace" makes yours the only ones, and [] with replace silences that kind of message. Sections you leave out keep their built-in lines. Broken files are never overwritten: Skald logs what's wrong and uses its own lines until you fix it.

The full guide. Skald writes BepInEx/config/Skald/GUIDE.txt on the server every time a world loads: every field, trigger and placeholder for all three files, and lists of every death cause, creature, boss, stat and biome, taken from the running game so they match your server exactly, mods included. After editing any file, type !skald reload in game as an admin; no restart needed.

Where the data lives, beside the world save:

worlds_local/<World>.skald.tsv          player profiles, achievements, deaths
worlds_local/<World>.skald.tsv.bak      the previous save, for recovery
worlds_local/<World>.skald-health.tsv   performance history and world censuses

Deleting them resets that world's records. They're tab-separated and safe to read.

Testing raid announcements: with devcommands on, run event army_eikthyr.

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Settings

BepInEx/config/com.dks.skald.cfg, created on first run. "Where" says which side reads it, client settings can differ per player.

General

Setting	Default	Where	What
Enabled	true	both	Master switch. Off leaves the game unpatched.

Achievements

Setting	Default	Where	What
Enabled	true	server	Track and announce achievements
AnnounceInChat	true	server	Show Skald's public announcements in game
AnnouncerName	Skald	server	Name in front of Skald's chat lines
CountLifetimeStats	false	server	Count a character's whole life instead of progress on this server
ReportIntervalSeconds	30	server	How often a client reports its stats
StartupGraceSeconds	30	server	Silence after startup, so loading a world doesn't spam old milestones
FirstToReachBiomes	true	server	Call out the first player into each biome

Banners

Setting	Default	Where	What
Seconds	4	server	How long banners stay on screen (2 to 30). 4 is the game's own
AlsoInChat	true	server	Also write banners into chat. Off for banner-only: an achievement's description shows under its title instead

Deaths

Setting	Default	Where	What
Enabled	true	both	Announce deaths with cause and killer
AlsoPostToDiscord	false	server	Send death announcements to the webhook
Nemesis	true	server	Grudges against whatever keeps killing you
NemesisThreshold	3	server	Deaths to the same killer before it's a nemesis
SurvivalStreaks	true	server	Announce days survived without dying
StreakEndMentionDays	3	server	Streak length worth mentioning when it ends

Social

Setting	Default	Where	What
ChatCommands	true	both	Enable !skald and friends
PanelKey	F10	client	Key that opens the panel from anywhere
WhileYouWereAway	true	server	Private summary of what an arriving player missed
WhileYouWereAwayMinHours	0.5	server	Hours away before that's worth sending
ReturnMessages	true	server	Announce players back after a long absence
ReturnAfterDays	3	server	Real days away that count as a long absence

Events

Setting	Default	Where	What
BossSummaries	true	server	Fight length and casualties when a boss dies
RaidAnnouncements	true	server	Raids, naming whose base, and the toll after
WorldCensus	true	server	Count what the world is made of
CensusIntervalHours	6	server	Hours between counts

Watchdog

Tuned for a 4 GB server with around 5 players. Adjust the memory thresholds for other sizes.

Setting	Default	Where	What
Enabled	true	server	Monitor server performance
SampleIntervalSeconds	10	server	Seconds per metrics sample
FrameWarnMs	50	server	Average frame time that counts as slow
FrameCriticalMs	120	server	Average frame time that counts as bad
SustainedSamples	3	server	Bad samples before alerting, so one hitch doesn't page you
MemoryWarnMb	2800	server	Memory warning threshold
MemoryCriticalMb	3400	server	Memory critical threshold
ObjectAlertCount	0	server	Alert when the world passes this many objects. 0 = never: the count only grows with exploration, so it's tracked, not warned about
SaveWarnSeconds	5	server	World saves slower than this are reported
AlertCooldownMinutes	15	server	Minimum gap between repeats of an alert

Discord

Setting	Default	Where	What
WebhookUrl	(empty)	server	Your webhook. Empty means nothing is ever sent
AnnounceAchievements	false	server	Also post achievements and boss summaries
AnnounceRaids	false	server	Also post raid start and end
WeeklyRecap	true	server	Post the weekly summary
RecapDay	Sunday	server	Day it posts, server local time
RecapHour	18	server	Hour it posts (0-23). If the server is down then, it posts at the next start
LiveStatus	true	server	Keep a live status message up to date
DeathLog	false	server	One message holding the most recent deaths, edited in place
DeathLogSize	10	server	How many deaths it shows (3-25)
WorldReport	false	server	One message with the world's makeup, busiest areas and growth
Leaderboard	false	server	One message with the standings
LeaderboardIntervalMinutes	15	server	Minutes between leaderboard updates
DeathLogWebhookUrl, WorldReportWebhookUrl, LeaderboardWebhookUrl	(empty)	server	A channel of its own for each. Empty uses WebhookUrl
LiveStatusIntervalSeconds	120	server	Seconds between status updates (30-3600)
StatusWebhookUrl	(empty)	server	Separate webhook for the status message. Empty uses WebhookUrl
StatusServerName	(empty)	server	Name on the status message. Empty uses the server's own name

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Compatibility

• Valheim 1.0 (Unity 6), BepInExPack_Valheim 5.4.2351
• Dedicated and listen servers
• Doesn't touch gameplay, items or balance, so it should sit alongside other mods

Privacy

Skald keeps, on the server, beside the world save: each character's name and the game's own ID for that character, playtime, the game's per-character counters (trees felled, enemies killed and so on), biomes visited, deaths (cause, killer and time), grudges, streaks, achievements, and when they were last seen. It does not store Steam or other platform IDs, IP addresses, or locations. A refused !recap logs the requester's platform ID to the server log so admins can fix adminlist.txt.

Nothing leaves the server unless the admin sets a Discord webhook. With one set, performance alerts and the weekly recap (player names, hours, deaths, achievements) are posted there, and deaths, achievements and raids too if enabled.

If you run a server with Skald, tell your players. To erase a player's record, stop the server and delete their lines from <World>.skald.tsv; deleting the whole file resets everyone. Keep your webhook URL private: anyone who has it can post to your channel.

Known limits

• Players without Skald see none of its messages, and don't report their own deaths or stats.
• Raid names come from the game's data rather than its code, so a few raids get a generic "something is coming" line.
• Stats and deaths are reported by each player's own game. Skald checks who sent them and limits how often, but it can't tell whether the numbers are true: a player with a modified game can claim achievements they didn't earn. The same player could just as easily cheat in the game itself.
• Installing on a world already in progress: the first person to reach each biome after installation is the one called first.

Questions, bugs and ideas

💬 Questions, bug reports or ideas? Join the Discord , it covers Skald and my other Valheim mods.

License

MIT - see LICENSE. Provided as is, without warranty of any kind. Back up your worlds; the author is not liable for lost data or anything else arising from its use.

Skald is a fan-made mod, not affiliated with or endorsed by Iron Gate or Coffee Stain. Valheim is a trademark of its respective owners.