GroupRecipes with Popups

A Valheim BepInEx mod that shares material, recipe, build-piece and crafting-station discoveries between all players of a world — including players who were offline when something was discovered — and shows the original Valheim unlock popup (icon plus "New material" / "Recipe learned" / "New piece" / "New station") for every entry a player receives, not just a line of text.

How it works

• Four kinds of discoveries are shared: materials/items, recipes, build pieces and crafting stations (with their level; a level is only ever raised, never lowered).
• The server (dedicated server or the hosting player) keeps a persistent, append-only ledger per world in BepInEx/config/GroupRecipesWithPopups/<world>_<worldUID>.txt. Nothing is ever removed from it.
• Every client checks its own knowledge once per second. New entries are sent to the server, which stores them and forwards them to everybody else (the game's own routed-RPC forwarding for "Everybody").
• When a player joins, the server sends the complete ledger, so entries discovered while the player was offline are caught up. Entries the player already knows are ignored.
• Applying an entry uses the game's own unlock path, so the popup is the vanilla one:
  • materials: Player.AddKnownItem (public),
  • recipes and pieces: the private AddKnownRecipe / AddKnownPiece (via reflection),
  • stations: the vanilla behaviour is rebuilt (station level raised, then the vanilla "new station" / "station level" popup is queued), because the game method needs a live station object. If a method is missing in some game version, the mod logs one warning, writes the entry directly and queues the popup itself.
• Popups are paced (PopupIntervalSeconds) so they appear one after another. When a large batch arrives (joining a world, or another player uploading their whole knowledge) only the first MaxPopupsOnJoin entries show a popup — materials first, then recipes/pieces, then stations. All other entries are still applied, silently, followed by one summary line (if ShowNotifications is on).
• Entries already present in the ledger are ignored completely, which prevents popup loops.

Installation

Requires BepInExPack for Valheim 5.4.2351.

Remove other recipe-sync mods and old copies of this mod's DLLs first, otherwise two mods fight over the same knowledge data and every unlock is applied (and shown) twice.

r2modman / Thunderstore Mod Manager

Install GroupRecipes_with_Popups into the profile used for the client and into the dedicated server profile (if you use one).

Manually

Copy both GroupRecipesWithPopups.dll and GroupRecipesWithPopups.Core.dll into BepInEx/plugins/ (for example BepInEx/plugins/GroupRecipesWithPopups/).

• Client: every player who should take part installs it.
• Server: install it on the dedicated server (or on the hosting player's game) to get the persistent ledger and the join catch-up.

Missing mod on the server

Unknown RPC names are ignored by peers that do not have the mod, so a vanilla server never crashes. Without the mod on the server there is no ledger and no catch-up; modded clients can still exchange live unlocks, because the server's routing forwards the messages, but players who were offline will not receive what they missed.

Configuration

File: BepInEx/config/555maggot666.GroupRecipesWithPopups.cfg

Section	Key	Type	Default	Effect
General	ShowNotifications	bool	true	Only controls the summary line ("N more unlocks were synchronised without popup"). The vanilla popups are not affected.
Sync	Items	bool	true	Share materials/items (sending and receiving).
Sync	RecipesAndPieces	bool	true	Share recipes and build pieces (sending and receiving).
Sync	CraftingStations	bool	true	Share crafting-station levels (sending and receiving).
Display	EnablePopups	bool	true	Show the vanilla unlock popup for entries received from others. When false, entries are applied silently.
Display	MaxPopupsOnJoin	int	25	Upper limit of popups for a large batch (join catch-up, bulk upload). Further entries are applied without popup.
Display	PopupIntervalSeconds	float	0.3	Delay between two applied entries.

Building

The build reads the reference locations from environment variables (or -p:NAME=value); it fails with a clear message when one is missing. No game or BepInEx assembly is stored in the repository.

VH_MANAGED_DIR=/path/to/valheim_Data/Managed \
BEPINEX_CORE_DIR=/path/to/BepInEx/core \
dotnet build -c Release

dotnet run --project tests/GroupRecipesWithPopups.Tests -c Release

GroupRecipesWithPopups.Core contains all logic that does not need the game (ledger, file format, snapshot diff, popup planning and pacing) and is covered by the console test project.

Thunderstore

The Thunderstore categories are chosen in the web upload, not in manifest.json. Set these when publishing: AI Generated, Client-side, Server-side, Crafting.

AI disclosure

The code of this mod was created with generative AI on behalf of 555maggot666.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Copyright (c) 2026 555maggot666.