ValheimEnhancedEdition

Valheim Enhanced Edition

More frames in big bases, with the game looking and playing exactly as it does without it. And, optionally, your builds and the world around them visible all the way to the fog, now on dedicated servers too.

Unofficial mod, not affiliated with Iron Gate. A performance and far view mod, not a ReShade preset.

New in 1.1.0

• Far view on dedicated servers. Install the mod on the server as well, and players with far view on see every base on the server out to the fog. Before, it was single player and hosts only. See Server far view.
• Far view for very big worlds. On a test world with a million building pieces it stays within bounded memory, disk and graphics memory.
• Memory stays flat at about 11 GB; before, it passed 20 GB at 40% loaded and kept climbing.
• It allocates 6 MB/s instead of 229 MB/s.
• Its main-thread cost once loaded is about 0.1 ms a frame.
• A new simplifier for distant buildings (Quadric, the default). It draws 68–80% fewer far triangles and uses 45–55% less graphics memory for them, at the same frame rate and with no visible difference.
• Presets for weaker PCs. Far view picks its reach and detail from your graphics card, processor and free memory, or you choose one.
• Smoother loading. Far view's own work is spread over frames, 1 ms at a time. Its worst frames while a big world loads dropped from about 100 ms to about 50 ms.
• Fog: distant bases no longer pop out of view as fog thickens.
• Debug views are public: colour views of what the mod draws, with a legend on screen, in the console and on a hotkey. See Debug views.

What it does

Big bases are slow in Valheim mainly because the game draws every building piece as its own object. The mod draws the plain pieces of an area as one merged mesh per material instead. Each piece stays a real piece: you can still damage it, repair it, remove it, open it and build onto it. The moment anything about a piece changes, it is drawn the game's own way again. Nothing about the picture changes: we checked it frame by frame against the unmodded game.

It also removes some smaller per-frame costs, each producing exactly the game's own result:

• Merged buildings: one mesh per material per area instead of one object per piece. This is the big one.
• Object streaming: skips the game's 30-times-a-second check for objects to create or remove when nothing

near you has changed.

• Water:
• water surfaces update their animation without asking Unity for their material every frame;
• the water height under floating things (boats, items, swimmers) is worked out with the per-frame values

looked up once. Checked against the game's own heights 1.35 million times, with 0 differences.

• Zones: a faster check of whether a zone still holds objects before it is unloaded.
• Terrain: keeps more finished terrain builds, so zones you come back to don't rebuild their terrain from

scratch.

Before and after, drag to compare: https://claude.ai/artifact/Eb7gJWfsmjmnZF6gJCUQh5

How much faster

Measured with the frame rate unlocked, same spot and same camera path, on an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K with an RTX 5090. In big bases Valheim is limited by the CPU, so on a slower CPU the frame times are longer and the gain in milliseconds is bigger:

| Scene | Without | With the mod | Change | |---|---|---|---| | Island Castle (a public world save with 25,850 pieces) | 32 fps | 46 to 52 fps | +46 to +58% | | A large lived-in base (about 4,500 pieces in view) | 53 fps | 65 fps | +23% | | Meadows next to a big base | 76 fps | 108 fps | +42% | | Loading into Island Castle (time spent in slow frames) | 5.8 s | 2.4 s | 58% less |

On 2 and 4 cores, at low and high settings, and from 1080p to 4K it was faster everywhere, by 6 to 28%. How much you gain depends on how many building pieces are in view: big bases gain the most, and open wilderness little or nothing.

Island Castle world: castle build by Hjalmere (Nexus Mods). Used for the measurements and the video with thanks.

Installation

Install with r2modman or the Thunderstore Mod Manager; BepInExPack Valheim is installed automatically.

Manual install: put ValheimEnhancedEdition.dll in Valheim\BepInEx\plugins\ValheimEnhancedEdition\.

Multiplayer: the performance features are client-side. Players with and without the mod can play together, on servers with or without it. On a dedicated server the drawing features switch themselves off, and the rest work as usual. For far view on a server, install the mod on the server too (next section).

Server far view

Far view needs every base's pieces, but on a dedicated server a client only receives the objects near it. With the mod installed on the server too, the server sends the piece lists of distant areas to players who have far view on. Their game builds the far copies itself, from the prefabs every client already has. No meshes are sent.