NoodlesMcDoodles

In vanilla Valheim, a zone belongs to whichever connected player is nearest it — and it stays theirs for as long as they're there. If that player's own connection is the slowest one on the server, their upload and their latency quietly become everyone else's lag, for every zone they happen to be standing in. Raising send rates alone doesn't fix that; it just lets a bad connection flood the pipe faster.

NoodlesMcDoodles fixes the cause. The dedicated server runs the world around every player (creatures, buildings, production, doors, terrain) instead of leaving it to whichever player loaded the area first; players keep only what they handle directly, like chests, carts and their own character. The server also paces its sending per player, so distant players get steady updates instead of vanilla's bursty ones. Every feature has its own config switch, and the whole mod reverts to stock vanilla instantly if you flip its kill switch — see Safety below.

⚔️ Features

🗺️ Server-run zones

In vanilla, the first player to load an area runs it for everyone: their game simulates the creatures, buildings, doors and smelters there, and everyone else sees that world second-hand through their connection. NoodlesMcDoodles gives that job to the dedicated server. With the default OwnershipAuthority.Mode = FarOrShared, the server runs creatures and tames, buildings, production (smelters, kilns, windmills, crafting stations), trees and rocks, doors and terrain, both in empty areas and in the areas players are standing in. Players keep what they handle directly: their own character, chests, carts, item and armor stands, turrets, signs, items on the ground, ships, and anything harvestable within reach. Moving an object to the server only changes which machine sends its updates; nothing a player sees happen to it changes.

Where several players share an area, the objects players keep go to whichever of them has the best round-trip time to the server, not to whoever arrived first. An experimental extension (O10) lets the server hold such an object itself when every player near it is far from the server. It's marked EXPERIMENTAL in its own config description (that exact case, several far players at once, hasn't been exercised in a long live session yet), and it can be switched off on its own.

🧊 Empty-area preservation

The server also keeps running areas nobody is standing in — which in vanilla is exactly when things start decaying, despawning, or losing durability with nobody around to notice. A dedicated guard freezes those specific destructive vanilla code paths (weather/structural decay, dropped-item despawn, wild-creature-vs-tame and wild-creature-vs-piece combat) only inside that empty, server-held band. Nothing changes for a zone a player is actually standing in — normal combat and damage there behave exactly as vanilla.

📡 Steadier networking

Raises the per-connection send-rate ceiling and lets it adapt upward per player as their connection proves it can take it, instead of pinning everyone to one fixed number. The old vanilla send-queue gate only ever allowed about one round trip's worth of data in flight, which quietly punished distant players the most; the queue now grows with a connection's own measured round-trip time, so a far player can approach the same effective throughput as a nearby one instead of being structurally capped lower.

🧩 Optional client-side extras

Installing the same DLL on your own game client (not just the server) unlocks these client-side improvements, plus the F6 status panel below: your own uploads get the identical rate/queue treatment the server gives itself, so other players see fresher updates from you; and a shortened dead-reckoning window means a creature, player, or object you don't own stops sliding on stale movement data sooner after a network hiccup, instead of coasting for vanilla's full two seconds and snapping back. A second, more aggressive smoothing mode (buffered interpolation) also ships but stays off by default — measured testing found it smoother in ordinary play but worse than vanilla in the worst case, so it's left in as an experiment rather than a default.

📊 Status panel (F6)

Press F6 in game for a small black-and-gold panel with two tabs. Basic shows who runs the world around you, as a share of the objects loaded near you (Server owns, You own, Other players own, Unowned), your ping, upload and download, your upload and download limits, and whether the server runs NoodlesMcDoodles. Detailed splits your connection into Upload (you to the server: your set limit against the one in use, your send queue against its allowance, with the peak over the last minute) and Download (the server's own numbers for you: its limit, what it actually sends and its queue for you, since your download is the server's upload and only the server sets it). It also shows who controls each of the nine zones around you, by name, which players own objects near you, and this client's own features. Drag the title to move the panel, drag its corner to resize it; text wraps and the content scrolls, and the panel remembers where you left it. F6 cycles Basic → Detailed → hidden. It works on any server, modded or vanilla (download numbers need a NoodlesMcDoodles 1.0.3+ server), and only reads what your game already has: the only file it writes is its own position and size.