Rist

Rist

Rist adds a character level beside Valheim's skills. Every level gives you a pick, and a pick carves one more rank into a runestone you choose. Vanilla skills are read and never written, rescaled or reskinned.

Built against Valheim 1.0.7, Unity 6000.0.75, BepInEx 5.4.23.5, Harmony 2.9. One DLL plus one text file, no asset bundle.

Features

• A character level with its own curve, fed by skill level-ups.
• One pick per level. Picks bank; nothing expires.
• Runestones raise a stat by a fixed amount per rank, to rank 5 by default. Every fifth rank

grants a capstone, a second and different effect.

• No runestone carries a drawback.
• A panel on the compendium bar showing every runestone, what it is worth now, what the next

rank adds, and which character level bought each rank.

• A row of tabs on that panel to read another character's stones, read only. The host can turn it off.
• An experience bar on the HUD, cloned from one of the game's own bars, that flashes while a

pick is unspent.

• A line above other players' heads: level, total XP, days since their last death.
• Dying no longer costs skill progress. On by default, and switchable.
• The catalogue is a plain text file. Adding a runestone is one line and no rebuild.
• On a server, progress is kept in the server's own ledger rather than in the character file.

How it works

XP and levels

XP comes from skill level-ups and from nothing else. Almost everything in Valheim raises some skill, so building, sneaking, sailing, cooking and fishing all pay in without Rist keeping a list of what counts.

A level-up is worth the skill level it reached, not a flat amount, multiplied by that skill's weight. Vanilla's own skill cost curve is pow(level+1, 1.5), so early levels are nearly free; a flat rate would hand out runestones in the first hours and dry up when the deep ranks start to matter.

The weight is what stops one activity carrying the level. On the live server, a character at Rist level 12 held 1346 XP of which WoodCutting alone was 666, against 293 for everything earned in a fight. Default weights:

| Weight | Skills | | --- | --- | | 1 | Swords, Knives, Clubs, Polearms, Spears, Axes, Bows, Crossbows, Unarmed, Blocking, ElementalMagic, BloodMagic | | 0.5 | Dodge, Sneak, Swim | | 0.25 | WoodCutting, Pickaxes, Crafting, Farming, Cooking, Fishing, Run, Jump, Ride |

Full price for a skill raised by something that can kill you, a fraction for repetition that cannot. The same character comes out at level 6 under this table, with over half of it earned fighting. SkillWeights is meant to be edited, and on a server the host's table applies to everyone.

Cumulative XP for level N is LevelBaseXp * N^LevelExponent, which is 40 * N^1.4 by default.

Changing the weights affects new XP only. To re-price characters that already exist, change WeightGeneration to any different text: every character is then recomputed once, on its next login, from the skill levels the server has watched it reach. Runestones already taken are kept, so a character re-priced from level 12 to level 6 still holds all twelve ranks and earns no new pick until it passes level 12 again.

Spending picks

The panel is a fifth tab on the compendium bar, beside the raven and the trophy. There is no keybind; the tab is the only way in.

With a controller the panel has a pointer of its own, because the game's own windows are walked by focus and this one has none to walk. Push the left stick and a gold cross appears; A carves the stone under it and B closes the page. Moving the mouse or a trackpad hands the page straight back to the cursor.

Each runestone carries its own outline, rock and runes, seeded off its id, so it looks the same in every session and on every machine. A rank cuts one more rune into the rim. The column beside the field follows the cursor and says what the stone is worth now, what the next rank would make it, what sits at the bottom of its track, and the character level that bought each rank.

The stones stand in five ættir, Combat, Survival, Endurance, Stealth and Utility: towers two stones wide and up to four tall, each under its name and a count of how many in it are carved. A new theme adds a tower to the right rather than a row at the bottom, so the panel grows into the width a wide screen has spare. It used to be one field a fixed number of columns across, and at twenty-one runestones it ran off the bottom of a short window.

Around each stone is a ring of five segments, one per rank, filled gold as the ranks are carved. The header on your own page also shows your total XP, which the nameplate shows to everyone else but not to you.

Other characters

When someone else is on the server, a row of tabs sits above the panel: yours, then one for every other character, online ones first with a green dot and then the rest greyed. Picking one shows that character's stones with their rank after each name, their level, and how many stones and marks they have. It is read only. There is nothing to carve, and the page never sends anything that could change another character's ledger.

The list is asked for when the page opens and answered once. The server sends one line for each character in the same text its ledger already keeps, so there is no new storage and nothing is broadcast. The ledger holds no names, and the server only knows the name of a player who is connected, so a character who is not online is shown as "Char" and the last four digits of their character id. The host's ShareRanks setting turns it off for everyone, since the answer is the server's to give.

The panel works out from the screen how to fit. On a wide or 1920x1080 screen the towers stand with full-size stones and every tile shows its value. On a smaller one it tries smaller stones,