None of this is a biome lookup or a time-of-day switch. It is the game's own sun and moon, exactly as bright as the hour and the weather make them. Torches, fires and forges are not counted.

The cover terms stack. Crouched, in grass, inside a bush is a genuinely different proposition from crouched on bare rock — and a bush is the strongest single piece of cover in the game.

Heavy gear adds to how visible you are, scaled by how heavy the item is, so plate costs far more than leather. Camouflage gear adds concealment of its own on top of matching the biome.

Noise. Movement and armour make it; crouching and weather each remove a fraction of it. They multiply, so crouching in the rain makes you quiet, never perfectly silent — unless you set crouching itself to remove everything.

Armour is a trade. Every item you can wear is classified by name into a weight and a material. Heavy metal is loud and visible, leather quieter, cloth barely registers. Gear named for ghillie, forest, swamp, wolf, lox or mist grants camouflage when it matches the biome you stand in. Monster attacks — which the game counts as equipable items — are left out: only things a player can pick up are scored.

When it gets one wrong. The classifier reads names, and names mislead. Correct the entry and mark it "Protected": true, and your answer survives every rebuild and every update (see The Toolbox).

Stepping past a creature's shoulder in a fight does not make you vanish: once it is alerted to you, the cone is gone. And a creature that is actually fighting you sees you within a few metres of its body whatever the light, cover or camouflage, so fights in the dark do not go quiet — darkness hides you from the hunt, not from the fight.

Walls, shut doors and mist still block it at any range, and it never sees you where a vanilla creature could not. A creature fighting one player still has its blind spot for anyone else sneaking up behind it, and one that is merely searching can still be hidden from.

The re-check is a rate, never a skip: an alerted creature always loses you when you shut a door; the setting only decides how quickly it notices.

The alert state is the game's own. The aggro roar, the alert animation, the give-up timer, taming, Sneak XP, the enemy icon on every client and the backstab bonus all follow it. Backstab lands only on a creature that has not been alerted — as it should.

Searching goes through vanilla's own pathfinder, so a creature does not beeline into walls. Fleeing goes through vanilla's flee behaviour: the creature picks a reachable spot away from water and lava, turns in place, and runs — never gliding backwards while staring at you.

Memory survives a handover. A creature's detection state goes with it when it passes from one player's game to another's, so it does not forget who it was chasing when you cross a zone boundary.

Vanilla's calm-down is a timer, not a re-check, so an alarmed animal keeps fleeing for four full seconds after it has lost you. Shadows of Midgard drops the alarm the same moment — but only when it is sure: the measurement is fresh, sight and hearing are both negative, the detection ramp is at zero, and the animal was never escalated past Suspicious. An animal you hit is not an animal that has lost you, and is left alone.

This can only ever make an animal less aware than vanilla would. DriveAnimals switches the whole animal half off.

The file is config/ShadowsOfMidgard/barrkbot_stealth.json, in a shape a Discord bot — or anything else that reads JSON — can use. The counters cover the current server session and reset when it restarts.

It costs nothing on the wire you were not already paying: each player's counters ride on their own replicated data, with no new messages. TelemetryExport turns the counting and the file off together; a file already written is left behind, so delete it by hand if you opt out for good.

They scale with Valheim's HUD, hide with it in cutscenes and when you hide the interface, and go with it on world exit. They anchor to the bottom-left corner. AllowDrag off locks them where they are; the four position settings are always editable by hand. EnableStealthUI off hides both — the simulation carries on regardless.

These names, signatures and meanings do not change between releases. The full guide is MIGRATION-for-mod-authors.md, in this package.

nview.GetZDO().Set("SoMStealthExempt".GetStableHashCode(), 1);   // owner-side
bool exempt = ShadowsOfMidgard.StealthExemption.IsExempt(character);

SoM_Ack lets you tell "Shadows of Midgard says unaware" apart from "Shadows of Midgard never reached this creature". AwarenessSystem.GetData(Character) keeps its original signature and never returns null. The Harmony id has never changed, so existing HarmonyBefore / HarmonyAfter attributes still resolve.

No forced priorities, no double-asserting postfixes, no reflection into vanilla. It does not patch BaseAI.IsAlerted, MonsterAI.UpdateTarget, Character.Damage or Character.OnDamaged.

Roughly in order of how much each one moves the needle:

• Get off the metal. Heavy gear adds more to being seen than daylight does, and plate is loud too; leather and cloth barely register.
• Crouch. It cuts noise by 60% and adds concealment on top.
• Wait for dark, and keep out of the sun or moon. A clear night adds well under half the light of noon, and shade takes more off.
• Use the weather. Rain, snow and fog cut sight; rain and snow mask sound.
• Break line of sight, then keep it broken. A wall works even against something already hunting you — but it re-checks about twice a second, so a doorway you dart straight back across buys nothing.
• Watch the angle. Behind a creature that has not noticed you is genuinely behind it. Once it is alerted to you, it sees all round.

The classifier matches whole words, so a modded chestpiece called Werewolfmail will not match wolf. Open BepInEx/config/SoM_ArmorData.json, find the entry, fix Weight / Material / Camo, and add "Protected": true. That answer is now permanent: it survives a rebuild, a migration and every future update.

To re-derive everything else after installing an armour mod, set RebuildArmorData = true and launch once. It backs the file up, rebuilds, keeps every protected entry, and switches itself back off.

Put the DLL in the server's BepInEx/plugins/ as well as every client's. Launch the server once to make its config, then edit the server's copy — every 🔒 setting below is pushed from there to all clients and locked to admins. There is no local player on a dedicated server, and nothing in the engine looks for one.

A healthy launch is two lines: [SoM/VanillaBind] … vanilla capabilities bound, every gate open and [SoM/Patches] … applied, none failed. If a game update moves something out from under the mod, those lines change and the full table prints by itself — you never have to switch anything on to see a failure. ShowPatchSaga = true prints the whole table on a healthy launch too.

Two failure states are designed, not crashes:

• READ-ONLY — something the perception layer depends on did not bind, so the mod installed nothing and the game runs vanilla. The table names the exact member that changed.
• DEGRADED — something failed after startup. The mod stops holding opinions about creatures and hands perception back to vanilla rather than guessing.

The debug switches are all off by default and loud when on. RebuildArmorData is one-shot and switches itself back off. Failures are always reported in full, whatever ShowPatchSaga says.