Goo's Combat Overhaul

Goo's Combat Overhaul is a configurable Valheim combat-systems overhaul. It gives players detailed control over weapon identity, attack feel, PvP behavior, stamina, blocking, staff magic, spawned entities, enemy behavior, player traits, equipment values, and combat debugging while preserving a one-click Goo preset and a one-click vanilla reset.

Fresh installs use Goo's curated ruleset by default. Players can reapply Goo's ruleset, reset combat values back to vanilla/no-op behavior, or manually tune each system through the config file or an optional configuration manager.

A configuration manager is recommended because the mod exposes many live-tuning options, but it is not required as a dependency.

Core Combat Framework

The mod classifies attacks by weapon category and attack role, then applies temporary runtime modifiers to the cloned attack instance Valheim creates for each swing. Those temporary changes are restored when the attack ends, aborts, or is corrected.

Supported weapon categories include:

• One-handed swords
• One-handed axes
• Clubs and maces
• Knives
• Spears
• Atgeirs
• Two-handed swords
• Two-handed axes
• Sledges
• Pickaxes
• Dual axes
• Bows
• Crossbows
• Magic and staff weapons
• Unarmed attacks
• Other weapons that share supported Valheim categories

Supported melee attack roles include:

• Primary 1
• Primary 2
• Primary 3
• Primary 4, where the weapon actually has one
• Secondary
• Running attack
• Jump attack
• Airborne attack modifiers

The mod tracks Valheim's authoritative attack role after Humanoid.StartAttack confirms it. If a nonstandard moveset briefly looks like the wrong attack role, the mod restores provisional field changes and reapplies the correct values so primary, secondary, running, and jump modifiers do not leak into each other.

Goo's Ruleset

Goo's ruleset is the default curated combat setup. It is not just a damage preset; it is a full combat-feel ruleset that changes how weapon classes commit, turn, stagger, lunge, trade, and behave in PvP.

In broad terms:

• Heavy weapons receive stronger commitment tools such as hyperarmor, stagger identity, lunge tuning, or damage mitigation.
• Faster weapons stay responsive but do not receive the same trading tools as heavy weapons.
• Weak or clunky attacks are adjusted with animation speed, hitbox, range, angle, or lunge tuning.
• Melee windup rotation is generally more forgiving, while recovery remains punishable.
• PvP damage, stagger, knockback, and hitstun are tuned separately from PvE behavior.
• Stamina, food, carry weight, player traits, and blocking are tuned to support committed combat without turning the mod into a raw-stat cheat.
• Staffs, projectiles, shield magic, vines, and skeleton summons receive their own dedicated control surfaces.

Use this to reapply Goo's ruleset:

Set To Goo Ruleset = true

This rewrites the combat and balance config values to Goo's preset, saves the config, and turns itself back off.

Vanilla Reset

The mod can reset its balance values back to vanilla/no-op behavior while staying installed.

Reset To Vanilla = true

Reset to Vanilla restores combat, player, weapon, staff, blocking, and equipment tuning values to vanilla-style behavior where possible. It does not remove the mod or wipe every general/debug option.

Runtime Master Switch

Apply Mod Options = true

This is the runtime master enable/disable switch. When disabled, the mod stops applying combat changes and clears active runtime state. It does not rewrite your saved config.

Damage and Weapon Identity

Each weapon category can tune base damage, backstab damage, primary-chain damage, secondary damage, running attack damage, jump attack damage, airborne damage, PvP damage, and utility damage such as chop and pickaxe damage.

The mod can also patch non-character destructible damage so configured player damage modifiers affect trees, rocks, pieces, and other destructibles through Valheim's normal HitData damage channels.

Optional max-damage behavior can make player attacks use the maximum skill-scaled damage value instead of Valheim's random skill factor. Weapon tooltips can reflect configured base damage and max-damage behavior.

Stagger, Poise, PvP Hitstun, and Block Break

The mod separates several combat pressure systems that Valheim normally blends together:

• Outgoing stagger power
• Incoming stagger resistance and poise
• Stagger decay speed
• Non-staggering-hit stagger decay cooldown
• PvP stagger power
• PvP stagger duration / hitstun
• Block-break threshold
• PvP block-break threshold

PvP hitstun is configurable per weapon and attack type. The mod tracks when a PvP hit should stagger and then adjusts stagger animation timing to approximate the configured hitstun duration.

A PvP test dummy tool is included for testing damage, armor, stagger, and hitstun behavior. Its hit logging is disabled by default.

Hyperarmor

Hyperarmor is a first-class combat system in the mod. It can be configured per weapon category and attack role.

Supported hyperarmor styles include:

• Off
• Balanced
• Full attack animation
• While holding a weapon type

Balanced hyperarmor starts during the committed attack animation and ends after the hit trigger, leaving recovery frames punishable. Full-animation hyperarmor lasts through the full configured attack window. While-holding hyperarmor can grant weapon-type-based protection while the configured weapon type is equipped.

Hyperarmor can control:

• Damage taken during hyperarmor
• Stagger taken during hyperarmor
• Knockback taken during hyperarmor
• PvP-specific mitigation values
• Whether mitigation is applied directly to incoming hit data, by final health restoration, or both

Counter Damage

Counter damage rewards hitting enemies or players during their own attack animation. The mod does not use a loose timer alone: the victim must have tracked attack state and still be in Valheim's real attack state for counter damage to apply.

Counter damage can be enabled per attack and can be restricted to player-owned attacks. Goo's ruleset uses counter damage to give certain weapons stronger timing-based identity without making every light attack a trading tool.

Hit Stop and Freeze Frames

The mod patches Valheim's melee hit-stop / freeze-frame behavior. Per attack, hit-stop can be preserved, reduced, disabled, or scaled.

This allows weapons to keep impact where it feels good while removing excessive freeze on attacks that become clunky or visually misleading when repeated.

Attack Movement, Lunge, and Rotation

The mod controls three separate attack-feel systems:

• Attack movement speed during the animation
• Lunge / root-motion distance
• Attack rotation / turning speed

Lunge can be applied before the hitbox emerges or across the full animation. Goo's ruleset generally lets attacks move or lunge during commitment while keeping recovery punishable.

Attack rotation can be generous during windup and then locked after the hit trigger. Better Free Aim can make the player face movement input during attacks or blocks without forcing the camera/crosshair to rotate.

Hit Rays, Hitboxes, Noise, and Multi-Target Falloff

The mod exposes per-attack melee hit-ray controls for ray-based melee weapons:

• Hit Ray Start Height
• Hit Ray Offset
• Hit Ray Range
• Hit Ray Angle
• Hit Ray Thickness
• Hitbox Type: Horizontal or Vertical
• Multi Target Damage Penalty: Enabled or Disabled
• Attack Start Noise multiplier
• Attack Hit Noise multiplier

Attack start and hit noise affect Valheim's AI aggro/noise radius, not player-audible sound volume.

Sledges are excluded from hit-ray support because they use Valheim's AOE-style attack system rather than ordinary hit rays.

Goo's ruleset uses this system to better align hit detection with weapon models, tune vertical attacks, avoid phantom reach where possible, and preserve or disable multi-target damage falloff according to weapon identity.

Running, Jump, and Airborne Attacks

Running attacks and jump attacks can use their own damage, stagger, stamina, animation speed, movement, lunge, rotation, PvP, hit-ray, and multi-target settings.

Running attacks can select which existing Valheim attack role they use. Jump attacks can trigger when the player initiates an attack after being airborne long enough. Airborne damage/stagger/rotation modifiers are separate from the special jump-attack system and do not independently change hit-ray settings.

Ranged Weapons

Bows and crossbows can tune:

• Projectile speed
• Spread
• Bow draw behavior
• Crossbow reload timing
• PvP damage
• PvP stagger
• PvP knockback

Thrown spears also have projectile-speed tuning.

Staffs, Magic, Vines, and Skeletons

Staff and magic behavior is split into direct-attack staffs, shield staffs, and spawned-entity staffs.

Direct staff controls can include:

• Damage
• Stagger
• Animation speed
• Eitr consumption
• PvP damage
• PvP stagger
• PvP knockback
• Projectile speed
• Spread
• Reload or burst-related behavior where relevant

StaffShield has active-shield controls for health cost, shield strength, stagger mitigation, knockback mitigation, PvP mitigation, and active parry behavior.

StaffGreenRoots / Staff of the Wild controls include vine damage, vine size, vine attack speed, vine level, max vine count, and experimental PvP targeting.

StaffSkeleton / Dead Raiser controls include skeleton damage, PvP damage, size, attack speed, level, health cost, quality-based summon caps, and experimental PvP targeting. Dead Raiser summon caps are resolved from item quality and written onto the spawned skeleton so Valheim's native summon cleanup can enforce the configured cap.

Staff spawn origin is propagated directly through SpawnAbility, Character.Awake, projectiles, and AOEs rather than by constant scene scans.

Blocking, Shields, Parry, and Staff Blocking

Weapons, shields, and staffs can tune:

• Block armor
• PvP block armor
• Block force
• PvP block force
• Parry bonus
• PvP parry bonus
• Parry adrenaline
• Block stamina use
• Block-break threshold
• PvP block-break threshold
• Blocking movement speed

Bucklers, medium shields, and tower shields have separate shield-category surfaces. Staffs also have their own blocking controls.

General Block Force and Parry Bonus can update item tooltips. PvP-only block and parry values are intentionally not shown in normal tooltips.

Player Systems

The player section controls core character behavior:

• Negative stamina
• Stamina recovery rate
• Stamina regeneration curve
• Base health
• Base stamina
• Base eitr
• Eitr regeneration
• Base armor
• Max carry weight
• Jump force
• Run, jog, walk, and crouch speed
• Player size
• Player rotation
• Player poise
• Stagger decay behavior
• Jump/run/roll/crouch stamina costs
• Roll animation speed
• Healing rate
• Fall damage start height, damage per meter, and cap
• Whether food slots must use unique food types

Negative stamina allows committed actions to overdraw stamina to a configured floor, while action gates still require current stamina to be above zero. HUD-facing stamina reads are clamped so negative stamina displays as zero.

Goo's ruleset allows duplicate foods in multiple food slots. Reset to Vanilla restores Valheim's unique-food requirement.

Enemy Systems

Enemy behavior can be tuned separately from player behavior:

• Enemy stagger dealt
• Enemy knockback dealt
• Enemy attack animation speed
• Enemy movement animation speed
• Enemy size
• Enemy base rotation
• Enemy attack rotation
• Enemy poise
• Enemy stagger decay behavior

These controls allow difficulty and combat feel to be adjusted without relying only on raw damage multipliers.

Equipment, Armor, and Tooltips

The mod can override movement penalties or bonuses from weapons, shields, armor, tools, and utility equipment.

Armor base-armor multipliers are grouped by armor type and can update armor tooltips. Weapon damage, max-damage behavior, backstab damage, block stats, parry stats, armor values, and movement modifiers can also update tooltips when those values are relevant to normal gameplay.

Debugging and Testing

The mod includes debug tools for combat testing, including a PvP test dummy based on Valheim's TrainingDummy prefab. The dummy can be used to test damage, armor, stagger, and hitstun behavior. Dummy hit logging is off by default and can be enabled when needed.

Attack debug logging can include attack hashes and authoritative role-correction messages to diagnose attack-role modifier leaks.

Config Migration

The current config schema version is 1.1.0.

Configs older than 1.0.5 are archived out of the active config path so old stale entries do not clutter the configuration page. Configs from newer versions preserve compatible user-tuned values and add newly bound entries with defaults.

The 1.1.0 config uses readable spaced option names. The mod migrates old compact keys into their spaced equivalents when possible, then removes stale compact entries.

Use Set To Goo Ruleset = true to apply Goo's full current ruleset after updating.

Feedback

The mod may still have bugs or balance issues. Feedback can be posted here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModdedValheim/comments/1toleqf/about_combat/