CleanCombat

Are you tired of playing with the hammer boy who drops a smoke bomb with every hit, or the ranger who loves fire arrows that turn your screen into hell, while you're the tank who has to parry through all of it?

CleanCombat tones down combat visual effects so you can see the fight again: fire, poison and frost on creatures, blood and sparks on hits, weapon dust, bomb blasts and clouds, block and parry flashes, death puffs and more. Every group has its own Show / Reduce / Hide setting in F1. Icons on health bars tell you what a creature is suffering from, with a clock for how long it lasts, and damage numbers show the health a creature really lost. CleanCombat is client-only: it works on vanilla dedicated servers and changes nothing in the world.

Features

• Reduce or hide combat effects group by group. Reduce keeps a few small particles and removes the glow, so you still see that something happened without the light show.
• Your effects, creatures' effects and bosses' effects are separate. Creature and boss attacks have their own settings and sliders, left untouched by default because they warn you of what's coming.
• Status icons next to health bars: fire, poison, frost, lightning and spirit, each in a coloured frame, so you can tell a creature is burning even with its flames turned down.
• Stagger icon: a gold-framed burst while a creature is staggered and takes double damage. That's your moment to hit hard.
• Duration clock: each icon darkens clockwise as its time runs out.
• Honest damage numbers: the number over a hit creature is the health it actually lost. The game normally shows the damage from before co-op scaling and the world's Combat setting, so in co-op the number is bigger than what the health bar loses.
• Optional: shorter or no weapon swing trails, a fainter or no red damage flash, weaker or no camera shake.
• Sounds, damage, status effects and timers are untouched. Only what is drawn changes.

Show, Reduce, Hide

• Show: as in the normal game.
• Reduce: the effect keeps a share of its particles (20% by default) at a smaller size (40%), trails get thinner, and its light and glow are removed. A spark or flash stays visible, just small.
• Hide: nothing is drawn.

What's reduced by default

Group	Default
Fire, poison, frost, lightning, spirit on characters	Reduce
Your hit effects (blood, sparks), projectile impacts, bombs and area effects	Reduce
Block, parry and dodge flashes, weapon swing trails	Reduce
Your weapon dust on the ground, your slam rings and cast flashes	Hide
Death and corpse puffs, adrenaline and trinket bursts	Hide
Your projectile trails, red damage flash, camera shake	Show
Damage numbers show the health actually lost	On
All creature and boss effects: hits, ground dust, attacks and abilities, projectile impacts, area effects, projectile glow	Show

The rule behind the defaults: effects that tell you something (a status effect, a hit landing, a parry, where your bomb's cloud is) are reduced. Pure clutter (dust, slam rings, death puffs) is hidden. Creature and boss effects are left alone.

"Your" means you, other players and tames. The mod tells whose effect is whose by watching the game's own attack, projectile and damage code, so a spark burst shared by your sword and a draugr's lands in the right group.

Settings (F1 → CleanCombat)

Section	What's in it
0. General	Master switch; Reduce: amount kept and particle size; Log changed effects
1. Status effects	Status icons, duration clock, stagger icon, icon border, icon size; fire, poison, frost, lightning, spirit
2. Hits and weapons	Your hit effects, weapon dust, attack effects, block / parry / dodge, weapon swing trails
3. Projectiles, bombs and areas	Your projectile impacts, bombs and area effects, projectile trails
4. Other	Death and corpse puffs, adrenaline and trinket effects, red damage flash, camera shake, damage numbers
5. Enemies and bosses	Own Reduce sliders; hits, ground dust, attacks and abilities, projectile impacts, area effects, projectile glow, each for creatures and for bosses

Changes apply right away to new effects, whether you make them in F1 or in BepInEx/config/vh.cleancombat.cfg while the game runs.

Good to know

• Enemy and boss area effects still hurt you. Try Reduce before Hide: hidden, you can't see where a poison cloud is or dodge a fireball made only of particles.
• Status icons show where the game shows health bars: creatures close by and bosses. Your own status effects are already in the game's status list.
• The clock on fire, poison and other status icons needs your game to run the creature, which is the case for everything you fight alone. In co-op, the game hands each creature to one player, and only that player's game knows the time left. Their creatures get the icon without a clock. The stagger clock works everywhere.
• Damage numbers come from the game that runs the creature, which sends them to everyone nearby. With CleanCombat, creatures your game runs (everything you fight alone) show the health actually lost, to you and to other players. A creature another player's game runs shows what that game sends: the game's own number, unless they have CleanCombat too. Fire, poison and spirit damage is dealt over time, so it shows as its own smaller numbers after the hit. Off (Damage numbers: health actually lost) brings back the game's own numbers.
• In co-op, effects made on another player's game (for creatures it runs) don't say who attacked. They're sorted by which side normally uses them, and effects both sides share count as yours.
• Not sure which setting covers an effect? Turn on Log changed effects, fight a bit, and look in BepInEx/LogOutput.log.
• The game's own Settings > Accessibility also has Camera Shake and Reduce Flashing Lights.

Compatibility

• Client-only. Install it on your own game; the server stays vanilla. Other players see every effect as usual, and nothing is written to the world. The only thing they can notice is the corrected damage numbers over creatures your game runs, which the game itself sends to them.
• Mods that restyle the game's damage numbers receive the corrected number from the game.
• Requires BepInExPack Valheim. Recommended: a Configuration Manager for the F1 settings. Without one, edit the .cfg file.
• Made for Valheim 1.0.21.
• Works alongside other dust and effect mods (NoWeaponDust, BreatheEasy and the like). Where two mods hide the same effect, it just stays hidden.
• Servers that only allow whitelisted client mods may refuse it, like any other unlisted mod.