ValheimVisualEnhanced

Valheim Visual Enhanced

Valheim Visual Enhanced is a client-side graphics mod that enriches Valheim with carefully integrated visual effects while preserving the game's original style. THIS IS NOT RESHADE. Its effects respond to Valheim's lighting, water, weather, biome, and time-of-day systems instead of applying a generic screen filter.

Visual examples

1. Underwater caustic lighting

Optional animated caustics add moving sunlight patterns to shallow underwater terrain and objects. They respond to sunlight, wind, water depth, weather, and viewing distance, then pass through Valheim's own water refraction.

2. Meadows fireflies

Small yellow fireflies appear outdoors in the Meadows at night. They are subtle one-pixel particles, smoothly fade near shelter, in wet weather, or during a Seasonality or Seasons winter, and do not add lights, colliders, shadows, or gameplay behavior.

3. Enhanced Environment

Optional all-day color palettes refine sunlight and fog across dawn, day, dusk, and night. The feature is disabled by default, preserves Valheim's weather and biome behavior, and leaves the normal sun path intact unless its separate override is enabled.

4. Wind-driven cloud shadows

World-XZ cloud patterns travel with Valheim's wind and attenuate direct light before fog, while native shadow maps remain in control. The result is atmosphere that belongs to the world rather than a post-process overlay. Their motion is smoothly compensated near sunrise and sunset, preventing low-angle projection from making shadows move unnaturally fast.

Features

• World-anchored cloud shadows that travel with Valheim's wind.
• Cloud shadows smoothly fade out at low sun, avoiding unnaturally fast

projections at dawn and dusk.

• Direct-light attenuation integrated before fog, preserving atmospheric haze.
• Native Valheim shadow maps remain active.
• No directional-light cookie replacement, so the cookie slot remains available

to Valheim and other mods.

• Optional animated underwater caustics on opaque terrain, rocks, structures,

characters, and other depth-writing surfaces.

• Caustics respond to sunlight, weather, water depth, viewing distance, and wind.
• Flowing caustic motion bends layers independently and varies filament

thickness without an additional texture or additional texture samples.

• Automatic fading at night and under roofs or inside caves.
• Automatic cloud-shadow fading in the Mistlands and Ashlands, while caustics

remain independent.

• Automatic cloud-shadow fading during Valheim snow storms, and during winter

when the optional RustyMods Seasonality or shudnal Seasons mod is installed.

• Cloud shadows gather in systems several hundred metres across instead of one

uniform dapple size, and unresolvable detail is skipped at low mask qualities.

• Caustics follow the surface they light: floors and the seabed receive the most,

vertical walls and hull undersides noticeably less.

• Optional full-day Enhanced Environment palettes: warm GoldenSaga, lush

VerdantWilds, cool Frostbound, bold amber/crimson Emberfall, vivid teal/violet AuroraVeil, or configurable Custom; the separate sun-angle override is off by default and weather/biome behavior remains authored by Valheim.

• One narrowly scoped Harmony hook supplied by BepInEx; no Jotunn, network

synchronization, or additional cameras.

• Subtle yellow Meadows fireflies at night: one particle renderer, a 1x1 white

texture tinted yellow through Valheim's native Thistle particle material; no lights, colliders, shadows, or per-firefly GameObjects. When the optional RustyMods Seasonality or shudnal Seasons mod is installed, they stay inactive in winter. They also stay inactive in Valheim rain and wet storms.

Underwater caustics are enabled by default and can be controlled independently through Water Caustic Lighting.Enabled in the configuration file or BepInEx ConfigurationManager.

Requirements and compatibility

• Valheim 1.0 / Deep North on Windows.
• BepInExPack for Valheim 5.4.2350 or newer.
• Unity Built-in Deferred Shading with directional shadows enabled.
• Direct3D 11. The included shader bundle is built for D3D11; Vulkan is not

currently validated.

This build's AssetBundle was rebuilt with Unity 6000.0.75f1, matching the Valheim 1.0 Windows engine. Valheim Visual Enhanced is client-side. Servers and other players do not need to install it.

Installation

Thunderstore, r2modman, or Gale

Install Valheim Visual Enhanced with the mod manager. Its BepInEx dependency is declared in the package manifest.

Manual installation

1. Install BepInExPack for Valheim.
2. Copy the ValheimVisualEnhanced folder into Valheim/BepInEx/plugins/.
3. Start Valheim once to generate

BepInEx/config/dev.local.valheimvisualenhanced.cfg.

Do not install the mod on a dedicated server unless you only want to keep a copy there; it has no server-side behavior.

Default configuration