The Great Hall

The client half of The Great Hall, a server-side death ledger, leaderboard and realm-character system for Valheim.

This mod is a companion. The server does the real work; this gives you the leaderboard window and, on servers that ask for it, lets that server own your character.

On a server that does not run The Great Hall, this does nothing

That is deliberate and it is the main safety property. The mod greets each dedicated server once and goes inert if it gets no answer. Unknown routed RPCs are silently ignored by vanilla Valheim, so a plain server never even notices it is there — no custom version string, no changed network version, nothing to make you incompatible with anything.

Singleplayer and other people's servers are unaffected.

The leaderboard

Press F7 (configurable) for the ladder: days survived, total deaths, and every character on the server ranked by deaths, power level, or any single category.

Power Level = 50% Combat + 25% Agility + 25% Trades, where each of those is the total of its constituent skills — Combat is your Axes + Swords + Clubs + Blocking + Unarmed and the rest, not an average.

Deaths are measured by the server and can never be faked or hidden by a client. Skills are reported by your own game, because a dedicated server genuinely cannot read them.

Realm-bound characters

Some servers run in realm mode, where the server keeps its own copy of your character. On those servers:

• The server's copy is the one that counts. Whatever you did with that character elsewhere is not part of it.
• Your first visit starts a brand new character — no gear, no skills. Your name, face, hair and beard come with you; nothing else does.
• Your own character file is never read, written or deleted. The realm character is held separately, and nothing this mod does touches the character you picked at the menu.
• Everything you earn there is uploaded to the server and given back to you next time you play — skills, inventory, food, recipes, appearance, and where you were standing and what you had explored.

Your progress is uploaded every few minutes, on death, on logout, and a few seconds after your inventory changes. An unclean exit — a crash or a power cut — can cost you whatever happened in the last few seconds; a normal logout costs nothing.

You are always asked first

Before any of that happens the mod stops and tells you, in plain words, what the server is about to do — and you can disconnect instead. There is no silent swap. That question is asked once per character, per server, and remembered in BepInEx/config/Deathboard.Client/accepted-realms.txt. Delete that file to be asked again.

The same prompt carries one optional extra, off by default: whether to keep your character-select slot updated with your realm progress, so the carousel shows the gear you actually have. Turning it on replaces that local character when you log out. It is the only thing this mod ever writes to your own character files, it cannot be undone, and it never happens unless you tick the box.

Requirements

• BepInEx for Valheim
• A server running The Great Hall server plugin. Both halves ship as a pair — a mismatched client goes inert rather than half-working.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/com.deathboard.valheim.client.cfg

The config file and folders still say deathboard — that was the mod's working name, and those names are where your settings, consent records and cached characters already live. Renaming them would orphan all of it, so they were left alone on purpose.

Setting	Purpose
Enabled	Turn the whole client off.
LadderKey	Key that opens the leaderboard. Default F7.
LadderScale	Window size.
LadderBlocksInput	Whether the window holds your character still while open.
HandshakeTimeoutSeconds	How long to wait for a server to answer before deciding it is an ordinary server.

Privacy

On a realm server this uploads your character — skills, inventory, food, recipes, appearance — to that server, which is what lets it hand the character back to you. Nothing is sent anywhere else, and nothing at all is sent to servers that are not running The Great Hall.