Shadows Of Midgard

🌙 Shadows of Midgard

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> "You think the dark hides you. The dark hides nothing — it only makes them work for it. Step off the gravel. Wait for dark. Let the rain do the rest, and the draugr will walk past close enough to touch."

Shadows of Midgard replaces Valheim's perception with one that can be reasoned about. A creature has a vision cone with a real blind spot behind it, casts a real line-of-sight ray against the same layer mask the game uses, and hears you at a distance that depends on what you are wearing and how fast you are moving. It remembers where it last saw you, goes and looks, gives up, calls for help, and runs when it is losing. And it does all of that per player — it can be hunting your friend and completely unaware of you, crouched two metres away, in the same frame.

It does not fight the game's AI. It answers the questions vanilla already asks — can I see this, can I hear this — and lets vanilla decide what to do about the answer.

⚔️ Features

🕯️ Light and Shadow Are Real

Your visibility starts from the light actually falling on you, and that light is the sun or the moon. Full daylight makes you easiest to see, a clear moonlit night adds well under half as much, and the dark of a crypt adds nothing. Put a wall, a rock face or a roof between you and the sun or moon and you are harder to see again. Weather joins in — rain and snow cut how far a creature can see you, and fog cuts it harder. None of this is a biome lookup or a time-of-day switch: it is the game's own sun and moon, exactly as bright as the hour and the weather make them. Torches, fires and forges are not counted; a torch in your hand is just one more item you are carrying.

🌿 Cover You Can Actually Stand In

Bushes and tall grass conceal you, sampled from the real vegetation around your feet rather than from what biome the map says you are in. Crouching helps everywhere, and helps considerably more when there is something to crouch in. The three stack: crouched, in grass, inside a bush is a genuinely different proposition from crouched on bare rock.

🔊 You Make Noise

Movement generates noise scaled by how fast you are going, and armour adds to it — plate is loud. Crouching removes most of it. Rain, snow and mist mask a good fraction of whatever is left, so foul weather is the sneak-thief's friend twice over. Hearing is omnidirectional and does not care about walls: a creature that cannot possibly see you can still hear you blunder past in iron.

🎽 Armour Is a Trade

Every equipable item in the game is classified on first launch by weight and material and written to a hand-editable JSON file. Heavy metal is loud and visible. Leather is quieter. Ghillie, forest, swamp, wolf, lox and mist-themed gear grant active camouflage when it matches the biome you are standing in. Modded armour is picked up automatically, and if the classifier gets a piece wrong you can correct it and mark it "Protected": true so your answer survives every future rebuild.

👁️ Creatures Look, and Can Be Blocked

A creature has a configurable vision cone — 120° by default — with a real blind spot behind it, and it casts a line-of-sight ray against the same layer mask vanilla uses. So a closed door works. A rock works. And critically, it keeps working after the creature has noticed you: an alerted creature re-checks line of sight on a bounded interval, which means retreating indoors and shutting the door genuinely loses it. Creatures with mist vision see through mist; everything else does not.

The blind spot is for sneaking, not for fighting. Once a creature is alerted to you it sees all round, as vanilla creatures do, so stepping past its shoulder in a fight does not make you vanish. And a creature that is actually fighting you sees you up close whatever the light: darkness hides you from the hunt, not from the fight. Walls and shut doors still work at any range.