balrond negative skills

BalrondNegativeSkills

BalrondNegativeSkills extends Valheim's normal skill range from 0..100 to -100..100.

A negative skill is not only a displayed number. Below zero, the mod turns the skill into a real gameplay penalty. The intended idea is that a character can become worse than an untrained level-0 character and must relearn basic competence before normal progression resumes.

-100  <----------------  0  ---------------->  100
 severe deficiency      baseline              mastery

Main rules

• Positive skills 0..100 remain vanilla wherever possible.
• Negative values are stored in Valheim's normal character skill save data.
• Raw values are clamped to -100..100 on save/load.
• A negative skill can recover through normal skill XP.
• When the skill reaches 0, normal vanilla progression resumes.
• Negative skills do not count as negative credit against Valheim's total skill cap by default.

Signed skill factor

For calculations that normally use Skills.GetSkillFactor(), the mod exposes a signed factor below zero.

With default settings:

| Skill | Factor | |---:|---:| | 0 | 0.00 | | -25 | -0.25 | | -50 | -0.50 | | -75 | -0.75 | | -100 | -1.00 |

Negative Effect Multiplier can scale this negative branch without changing positive vanilla skill behavior.

What negative skills affect

The mod extends the existing Valheim formulas rather than inventing a separate stat system.

Examples:

• weapon skills: lower damage/knockback and higher stamina/eitr/health costs where the vanilla attack uses that skill;
• Blocking: lower block power;
• Jump: lower jump force;
• Run: lower run speed and higher stamina drain;
• Swim: higher stamina drain;
• Sneak: worse stealth and higher stamina drain;
• Dodge: higher stamina cost;
• Bows: negative skill extends the existing bow draw-time penalty path;
• Crossbows and other skillAccuracy projectile attacks: negative skill now extrapolates accuracy below the level-0 baseline instead of being clamped by Mathf.Lerp;
• Riding: lower mount performance and higher stamina usage through the signed rider-skill path;
• Crafting/Cooking: skill-scaled actions take longer and tool/action costs can increase;
• Farming: harvest radius can shrink and tool costs can increase;
• Fishing: performance can become worse and stamina costs can rise, with a safety floor preventing invalid negative/zero speeds.

Chance-only positive bonuses such as extra yield simply stop occurring below zero unless the underlying Valheim mechanic has a meaningful negative counterpart.

Blood Magic safety

Blood Magic contains several vanilla formulas that use the numeric skill level directly instead of GetSkillFactor(). Extending those formulas blindly below zero can produce zero or negative values.

Summons

Vanilla copied summon performance uses a formula equivalent to:

1 + skillLevel * prefabCopyFactor

At sufficiently negative Blood Magic this could reach zero or become negative, causing nonsensical damage or inverted knockback.

For negative Blood Magic only, BalrondNegativeSkills remaps this branch so the entire negative range approaches a safe configurable floor.

Default:

Blood Magic 0     -> 100% of level-0 summon multiplier
Blood Magic -100  -> minimum 25%

Positive Blood Magic continues using the original prefab coefficient.

Protection shields

SE_Shield also scales absorb capacity directly from skill level. Negative Blood Magic could otherwise create a zero/negative barrier.

For Blood-Magic shields, the negative range is remapped from the normal level-0 absorb value down to a configurable positive floor.

Default floor: 25% of the level-0 base absorb value, before world-level additions.

Death skill loss

Hard death vs soft death

Valheim does not lower skills on every death.

Player.OnDeath() applies Skills.OnDeath() only when the death is a hard death. A death during Valheim's hard-death cooldown is a soft death and does not reduce skills. BalrondNegativeSkills preserves that vanilla rule.

The current Valheim player field uses a 10-second hard-death cooldown. Because respawning itself takes time, rapid test deaths can still land on the boundary. For testing, wait a little after respawning before killing the character again.

Negative skill UI

Valheim's vanilla Skills window casts raw skill level directly to an integer. C# truncates negative fractions toward zero, so raw -0.25 was displayed as 0.

BalrondNegativeSkills uses floor semantics for negative labels, matching Skills.GetSkillLevel():

raw -0.25 -> displayed -1
raw -1.25 -> displayed -2

Relearning a negative skill

Vanilla Skills.Skill.Raise() is not safe for negative levels because its level requirement formula assumes a non-negative skill.

BalrondNegativeSkills replaces only the negative branch.

Recovery uses vanilla requirement values in reverse deficit order:

raw -100 -> next recovery step uses approximately the vanilla level-100 requirement
raw  -50 -> next recovery step uses approximately the vanilla level-50 requirement
raw   -1 -> next recovery step uses approximately the vanilla level-1 requirement
raw    0 -> vanilla progression resumes

A recovery step can never grant free positive levels while crossing zero.

Saving and relogging

Valheim serializes each skill's raw level as a floating-point value in the normal character save. The vanilla save/load code does not itself clamp that float to zero.

BalrondNegativeSkills therefore does not create a duplicate ZDO/custom-data database. It keeps the normal Skills.Save/Load data authoritative and clamps only to -100..100.

Negative skill values persist across logout/relogin while the mod is installed.

Keep character backups while testing mods that alter core skill data.

Console testing