CommunityPatchExtras

Community Patch Extras

Opt-in world and performance tunables built on top of the Valheim Community Patch. Where the Community Patch promises no gameplay changes, this companion is where the knobs live that deliberately step past that line — each one off (or at a stated default) until an admin turns it.

Requires the Valheim Community Patch (hard dependency): the features here are designed against its fixes and will not load without it. All settings are admin-only and server-synced: the server's values win for everyone, and a client whose server does not run this mod is held at vanilla behaviour automatically.

Features

Zone Loading

Valheim now ships its own Simulation Distance setting (graphics menu, levels 0–6) with a proper client/server handshake: each player picks their own value and the server caps it. These two settings fill the gaps that setting leaves rather than competing with it — the near ring is the player's choice, as vanilla intends.

• Server Simulation Distance Cap (default 2 = vanilla) — the highest Simulation Distance

this server will grant a client, in 64 m zone rings. Vanilla caps every client at whatever the server is set to, which on a dedicated server is 2 unless it was launched with -simulationdistance — so without this, a player who picks 5 in the menu silently gets 2. Raising it also gives the Community Patch's throttled spawn stream ("Spawn Burst Divisor") more approach runway into heavily built-up areas, so pop-in finishes before you arrive. Costs are real and land on the client that opts in: loaded objects scale as roughly (2n+1)², and creatures/spawners actively simulate in a wider ring — which is why the default changes nothing. This only ever raises the ceiling; a client asking for less still gets less. A server launched with -simulationdistance uses that as its starting point, and this cap and the distant radius below still apply on top of it from the moment the server starts.

• Distant Zone Load Radius (default 4, vanilla 2) — how many further rings of

distant-flagged objects (lightweight landmark props) load beyond the simulated ring. Vanilla ships 2 at every Simulation Distance and offers no way to change it. Cheap per zone, so the default is raised for better long-range silhouettes.

Safety: vanilla's own handshake arbitrates the near ring, and the server is authoritative for it. The distant ring it cannot arbitrate — Valheim only compares two simulation distances whose far rings already match — so that value is held at vanilla until the server's config sync confirms it is running this mod too. A client on a server without this mod stays at vanilla.

Grass

• Grass Distance (default 40 m = vanilla) — how far from you grass and other ground clutter

is grown. Valheim has never offered this: the graphics menu's Vegetation slider only changes how much clutter goes into a patch, never how far out patches are placed, so grass has always stopped dead at 40 m while the terrain under it ran to the horizon.

The ceiling is the loaded world, not an arbitrary number. Clutter can only be placed where a zone is actually loaded, so this is clamped live to what your Simulation Distance covers — 128 m at its default of 2, rising to 320 m at its maximum of 6. Raise Simulation Distance and the grass ceiling rises with it; a server capping it lower lowers it back, with no restart needed either way. Set a value above the ceiling and you simply get the ceiling.

Cost grows with the square of the distance, and it is memory that bites first, not framerate: every instanced clutter type in every patch allocates a fixed 64 KB buffer regardless of how much grass it holds, so the ~25 MB vanilla spends at 40 m becomes a few hundred MB at 128 m and can approach a gigabyte at 256 m. That is why the default is exactly vanilla — raise it a little at a time and watch RAM, not FPS. Lowering it below 40 is a legitimate way to buy performance back on a weak machine.

Two things come along for the ride so the setting actually delivers. Grass fade distances are scaled by the same factor, because vanilla only ever clamps them down and raised patches would otherwise still dissolve at 20 m — all of the cost, none of the view. And the fill rate is budgeted (below), because vanilla builds one patch per frame and rebuilds everything in a single frame after a world load or a graphics change; at a raised radius that is a multi-second freeze.

• Grass Patches Per Frame (default 8, advanced) — how fast a raised radius fills in. Vanilla's

rate is 1, which is fine over 40 m but would leave 256 m visibly growing in for the better part of a minute. Higher fills faster at the cost of a heavier frame while it does. Ignored at or below the vanilla distance.

Unlike everything else here, these two are per-machine and not server-synced: clutter is pure local rendering that Valheim never sends, validates or negotiates, so the right value is a property of your GPU and RAM rather than of the world. The one part that is server authority — how many zones are simulated — arrives through vanilla's own Simulation Distance handshake, bounded by the server cap above, and is read as the ceiling.

Cutscenes

Valheim plays four cutscenes at you and offers a setting for none of them. All four toggles below default to on, i.e. exactly vanilla, and are per-machine rather than server-synced — a cutscene shown to one player at one machine is not a world rule.