Dimmer Combat Particle Effects

Fades the particle effects that cover enemies in combat, so their attack animations stay visible.

Elemental weapons and status effects spawn particles on the target. A burning enemy stays wreathed in flame for the whole burn duration, which hides the wind-up animation that tells you which attack is coming. This mod lowers the opacity of those particles rather than removing them, so the effect still reads but no longer blocks the enemy behind it.

Opacity, brightness and size are configurable, each effect source has its own on/off toggle, and changes apply on the next hit with no restart. Client-side only.

What it covers

• Status effect auras on creatures. The flames on a burning enemy, the frost shell, the poison cloud, and the burst those re-spawn on every damage tick. These last for the whole duration, so they are by far the worst offender.
• Weapon impact bursts. What your weapon throws off at the point of contact, including the elemental bursts from fire, frost, lightning, poison and spirit weapons.
• The creature's own hit burst. Blood, impact sparks, and the extra crit and backstab bursts.
• Projectile and area-of-effect impacts. Arrows, bolts, staff projectiles, atgeir sweeps, bombs.

Each of these is a separate toggle, so you can dial back the burning aura and leave everything else at full strength if that is all that bothers you.

Settings

Everything lives under Dimmer Combat Particle Effects in Configuration Manager, and changes apply on the very next hit with no reload or restart.

Setting	Default	What it does
Opacity	0.35	Alpha multiplier on hit particles. 1 is vanilla, 0 is invisible. This is the main dial.
Brightness	1	Colour multiplier. Only needed for the occasional effect whose shader blends additively and ignores alpha.
Size	1	Size multiplier. Shrinks how much screen an effect covers instead of only fading it.
Status effect visuals on creatures	on	The burning/frost/poison aura and its per-tick burst. Turning this off removes most of what the mod does.
Include hits on players	off	Also fade the hit burst when a player is the one struck. Off so your own damage feedback stays at full strength.

Start with Opacity alone. On the setup this was built against, 0.35 with everything else left at default was enough.

Notes

• Client-side. It changes nothing but what your own machine draws, needs no server support, and will not desync you. It is safe to use on a server where other players do not have it.
• Lights are never touched. The mod only changes particle colour and size, so any effect that casts real light on the world still lights it. Be aware that most Valheim hit effects turn out not to use light sources at all - their glow comes from the particles themselves, so fading the particles does dim that glow.
• Particles only. An effect that draws its flash with a mesh renderer rather than a particle system is not affected. None encountered so far do, but if you find one, turn on Log every effect and it will name itself in the log as skipped.
• Ground fire from fire arrows is not covered. That patch is spawned through a different path that does not pass through the game's effect system.

Troubleshooting

If the mod appears to do nothing, check Status effect visuals on creatures is on - the lingering aura is most of what you see in a fire fight. Failing that, turn on Log every effect in the General section, hit something, and the BepInEx log will list every effect spawned marked dampened or skipped. Whatever is still bothering you shows up as skipped, named.