Gjallarhorn

A server-side Viking kill feed and roster. Player deaths land in the top-left message feed and the chat window; boss defeats get the centre-screen banner; players arriving and leaving are announced in the same voice.

Named for Heimdall's horn — the one sounded to announce across all nine realms.

Who needs to install this

The server needs it. Every client is optional, and the mod is not version-enforced.

• On the server it does all the work — detection, wording, and broadcasting. It reaches players over ShowMessage and ChatMessage, two RPCs vanilla Valheim already registers, so a server full of unmodded players still sees the whole feed.
• On a client it is purely additive. Installed, that player's deaths are reported with the real cause and the real killer. Absent, their deaths still announce, but the killer is a proximity guess and non-combat causes read as generic.

Mixed populations are fine and expected. Nobody is refused at connect.

Why clients change the quality of the feed

Everything specific about a death — who swung, what kind of damage, whether another player did it — lives in Character.m_lastHit, set in Character.Damage. That runs on whichever peer owns the dying character's ZDO, which is the victim's own machine. A dedicated server never instantiates a Player component for a remote client and can never read it.

So the server falls back to what it can see: the dead flag on each connected player's replicated character ZDO, and whatever hostile creatures are standing near the corpse. That gets the ordinary case right — you died to the thing that was hitting you, and it is still there — and gets ranged kills, deaths on a fleeing mob, and every non-combat cause wrong.

Boss defeats are exact either way. The server sees them through ZoneSystem.RPC_SetGlobalKey, which is registered server-side only.

Joins and leaves

Vanilla announces arrivals but never departures, and the asymmetry is not an oversight. The arrival line is a chat shout the joining client sends itself, from Game.SpawnPlayer the first time it spawns. A client that is leaving cannot shout, so there is nothing to mirror it with. Both halves have to be observed server-side instead.

Departures are caught at ZNet.Disconnect, the single funnel a clean quit, a dropped connection and a kick all pass through. Arrivals come from a diff over the peer list on the server tick, gated on the player actually having a character in the world, so someone who backs out at character select is never announced. That same diff backs up the departure hook: if a game update ever moves Disconnect, leaves announce a tick late instead of silently stopping.

Leaves come in three wordings, because a crash should not read as a cheerful farewell:

RejoinQuietPeriod keeps a flapping connection from filling the feed: a player who rejoins inside the window is not announced, and the leave that follows is suppressed too — unless the session outlasted the window, in which case it was a real visit and its ending is reported. Identity is the peer's platform id, so it survives reconnects and does not collide when two players pick the same name.

Leaves are announced by default. Arrivals are not: vanilla already covers them, so AnnounceJoins starts off, and turning it on adds a second line rather than replacing vanilla's. Stopping the server is silent either way — no wall of departures nobody is online to read.

Known limits

• Repeat boss kills only announce for clients with the mod. The global key a boss sets on death is added once per world; a second Bonemass changes nothing the server can observe. A client running Gjallarhorn reports every kill, including repeats.
• The killer guess is a guess. It is labelled as such in the logs ([guess] versus [exact]) so you can tell at a glance which path produced a line.
• Chat lines also appear as floating text at the death site for players standing nearby, or with the map open. That is vanilla Chat.AddInworldText behaviour and cannot be suppressed from the server. Turn off UseChatLine if it bothers you.
• Arrivals are left to vanilla by default. Valheim's own "I have arrived!" is a shout sent by the joining client, so a server cannot suppress a message it did not originate. AnnounceJoins is therefore false out of the box — turning it on adds Gjallarhorn's wording on top of vanilla's rather than replacing it. Leaves have no vanilla equivalent and are on by default.
• A listen server's host announces neither their own join nor their own leave. The host is not a network peer, so there is nothing to observe — and when the host leaves, the server goes with them. Dedicated servers are unaffected.
• Modded creatures read as their prefab name. The display-name table covers vanilla only; anything else falls back to a cleaned-up prefab name.
• English only. Creature and biome names come from a built-in table rather than Valheim's Localization, whose singleton is set up by the client-side startup path and is not dependable on a headless server.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/com.ragemedia.gjallarhorn.cfg, generated on first run. Everything except VerboseLogging and DiscordScreenshots is admin-only and synced from the server, so clients cannot give themselves a different feed.

Compatibility

Discord Screenshots (warpalicious). When both mods are installed on a client, that player's death screenshots are posted with a Gjallarhorn line, such as "Astrid was felled by 2-star Troll in the Black Forest", instead of the generic caption. The line is rolled separately from the in-game one, so the wording can differ, but the killer, stars and biome are the same. Players without Gjallarhorn keep Discord Screenshots' own caption. F12 screenshots are never touched. If a Discord Screenshots update moves the method this hooks, the log says so and its default caption returns.

Do not run this alongside another kill-feed, death-announcement, or join/leave-announcement mod. Nothing stops BepInEx loading both, and every event will simply be announced twice.

Safe to add or remove

Nothing is written to the world save. Announcements are in-memory only.