Runic Portals

A few paired portals are convenient. A large world turns them into a switchboard of duplicated frames, temporary tags, and rooms built mainly to hold transportation infrastructure.

Runic Portals lets explicitly configured portals join named travel networks. Choose a destination from the network you are using, control who may travel, and decide whether an endpoint handles arrivals, departures, or both.

Major features

• Create case-sensitive named portal networks and destinations.
• Use public, private, or authenticated group access.
• Configure endpoints for arrival, departure, or two-way travel.
• Browse authorized destinations from an in-world or map-based picker.
• Keep ordinary Standard Pair portals completely vanilla.

How it feels in-game

Your portal room can serve your world instead of growing with every destination. Walk to a network endpoint, choose an authorized place, and travel without retagging half the building or maintaining a permanent physical pair for every route.

Safety and compatibility

A portal joins Runic networking only through an explicit edit. Travel rechecks route state, source distance, endpoint revision, ownership, permissions, and wards; ambiguous or stale routes fail closed. Unconfigured portals retain Valheim's normal tag pairing and teleport behavior. The mod is independently installable with BepInEx.

Portal modes

• Standard Pair uses Valheim's normal tag pairing and teleport path.
• Public is the default and permits every player who passes the route and ward checks.
• Private permits only the portal's recorded Valheim player owner.
• Group permits current members of the group bound when the portal is edited. Membership comes from the authenticated server Group snapshot and fails closed while that snapshot is unavailable.

The recorded owner may edit any Runic portal they created, subject to native object ownership and the local ward. Public/private/Group travel policy is evaluated independently from ward evidence, so a ward or stale route is not reported as an owner or Group permission failure.

Arrival and departure are independent. A network endpoint may be both, arrive, or depart. Routing always stays inside the exact case-sensitive NetworkName.

Use

Aim at a portal to see its setup panel. Normal Use edits a Standard Pair tag. Alternate Place + Use opens the Runic Portal editor. With Valheim's default keyboard bindings these are E and Left Shift + E.

The editor keeps setup point-and-click:

• Check Standard Pair and enter a normal Valheim portal tag to use vanilla pairing. Standard tags keep Valheim's 10-character limit.
• Leave Standard Pair unchecked to enter a Network and Portal Name for Runic routing.
• Choose Public, Private, or Group access. Group access provides a dropdown containing the authenticated groups available to the current player; no internal group identifier is typed.
• Choose Both, Arrivals Only, or Departures Only to control how the endpoint participates in its network.

Groups are still created and managed through chat. Use commands such as /group create, /group list, /group use, /group invite, /group accept, and /group leave. /group help lists the other management commands. Reopen the portal editor after changing membership if the group list needs to refresh.

Saving a new setup applies immediately. Replacing existing Runic metadata or returning a configured portal to Standard Pair mode asks for the same save a second time within four seconds. This visible confirmation protects established routes from accidental replacement while keeping all editing in the form.

Walking into an authorized depart or both endpoint opens a map picker containing authorized, online arrive or both endpoints in the same NetworkName. The local player is held in place while the picker is open. Clicking a marker selects the destination and acknowledges a one-way route; Esc cancels. The final action rechecks the source, destination, permissions, wards, revisions, and Valheim's native teleportability rule before calling the local player's native teleport path.

The source portal and portal edits require definite local ward permission. A distant destination's zone is normally unloaded before teleport, so the absence of a local PrivateArea instance is not treated as a destination denial. If the destination ward is loaded and is known to deny the player, the route remains blocked. The same rule is used by the picker and world-wide directory, allowing ordinary long-distance Public, owner, and current-member Group routes to remain discoverable.

On Valheim's normal large map, unmodified P toggles a temporary world-wide portal directory. On a dedicated server, opening the map requests a bounded authenticated directory warm-up so the result does not depend on zones that this client has already visited. It includes Standard Pair portals and Runic endpoints visible to the current player. Temporary pins are never saved or shared.

Ownership and multiplayer

Portal metadata changes run only when Valheim says the local portal ZNetView is its current owner. Travel runs only for the locally owned player. Runic Portals never calls SetOwner or ClaimOwnership, and it does not add portal edit or travel mutation RPCs. Its bounded directory RPC only force-sends already-authorized portal records; it never mutates a portal. If native ownership or current replicated evidence is unavailable, a mutation is rejected without creating a deferred operation.

Public, private, and Group checks are evaluated directly inside this DLL. Ward checks use the currently loaded native PrivateArea state at the action point. A known hostile destination ward fails closed; an unloaded remote zone is governed by its explicit portal policy rather than being mistaken for a permission denial. Route plans and map visibility are advisory; authority is reread immediately before a metadata change or teleport.

Remote /group commands and membership refreshes use the mod-owned RPC names RunicPortals.Groups.Request.v2 and RunicPortals.Groups.Response.v2. The server derives the actor from the current ZNetPeer, its exact owned character ZDO, the Player prefab, and the ZDO's positive s_playerID; payloads do not supply an authority identity. The channel is bounded to 32 pending requests, 128 thirty-second replay entries, 32 KiB envelopes, two attempts in a six-second request window, and short-lived in-memory snapshots. Timeouts and shutdown clear their own state and never lock inventory, tools, or unrelated gameplay.

Persistent compatibility

Portal world data keeps the existing runic.portals.* ZDO keys, schema-1 compatibility reads, and schema-2 record format. Removing the DLL does not delete that metadata; Valheim simply ignores it.

Group membership and active selection keep the prior catalog codecs and world-scoped location under BepInEx/config/RunicPermissions/groups. These are genuine feature data. They are written synchronously with bounded files and atomic replacement; there is no gameplay transaction journal, durable command ledger execution, quarantine, account binding, join-time recovery, or global lock.

Runic Portals also exposes RunicPortals.Api.GroupIntegrationApi.TryIsMember so another gameplay mod may query local membership through optional reflection. No mod is required to consume it.

Bounds and defaults

• Standard Pair tags: Valheim's 10-character limit; Runic network and portal names: 64 characters each.
• Indexed portal ZDOs: 4096; graph endpoints: 2048.
• MaximumNetworkEndpoints: 1024 by default, clamped to 16-2048.
• CyclePageSize: 32 by default, clamped to 1-128.
• Return and selection caches: 256 identities each, memory only.
• Return route lifetime: 15 minutes; one-way acknowledgement: 10 seconds.
• Index refresh: 2 seconds; edit range: 5 metres.

Malformed, stale, unknown-schema, disabled, destroyed, offline, or unauthorized endpoints are excluded. Standard Pair discovery remains Standard-to-Standard and never routes through a Runic network.

Changelog

1.2.0 - 2026-09-08

• Added a native in-game portal editor with a Standard Pair checkbox, separate Network and Portal Name fields, Public/Private/Group access controls, and arrival/departure direction choices.
• Added an authenticated Group dropdown populated from the player's chat-managed groups, removing the need to enter internal group identifiers.
• Standard Pair editing now uses the same form while preserving Valheim's 10-character portal-tag limit and vanilla pairing behavior.
• Kept destructive mode or metadata changes behind a visible second-save confirmation window so an established route is not replaced by a stray click.

1.1.4 - 2026-09-05

• Reworked the Thunderstore description and README opening to lead with the player problem, the mod's core benefit, major features, in-game feel, and then safety and compatibility details.
• Description-only package update. The plugin DLL and gameplay behavior are byte-for-byte unchanged from 1.1.3.

1.1.3 - 2026-09-01

• Fixed first-use network portals incorrectly reporting source-ward-denied while the dedicated server was still loading the source zone's native ward objects.
• Kept source ward checks fail-closed: an ambiguous source requests the exact nearby server zone and receives up to eight bounded retries over eight seconds, while a known hostile ward is still rejected immediately as source-ward-denied.
• Transient missing ward evidence is now reported accurately as source-ward-unavailable instead of being mislabeled as a permission denial.

1.1.2 - 2026-09-01

• A valid 1.1.0 directory request received by a 1.1.2 server is now rejected with the explicit client-update-required compatibility reason instead of being counted as malformed cheat evidence. The older protocol still cannot authorize or enumerate portals.
• Identity-unbound requests during the short connection/character handoff remain denied and recorded, but no longer contribute high-confidence automatic-disconnection strikes. Truly malformed envelopes, malformed authenticated commands, and replay conflicts retain escalation.

1.1.1 - 2026-09-01

• Fixed first-use Runic portal entry on a dedicated server by binding the request to the exact nearby source ZDO and using the server record as authority. Client revision/network values are now freshness hints, so normal replication lag no longer becomes source-unavailable.
• Fixed the normal large-map P directory so it warms authorized world-wide portal records from the authoritative server instead of showing only zones that this client had previously visited.
• Added bounded, authenticated, read-only map-directory transport and precise server rejection diagnostics without adding any portal mutation or ownership-transfer RPC.

1.1.0 - 2026-08-31

• Added an optional, reflection-only Runic Sentinel security bridge without making Sentinel a required dependency. Rejected malformed, identity-unbound, or replay-conflicting portal requests can now contribute trusted evidence to Sentinel's bounded automatic-enforcement policy.
• Kept ordinary portal permission denials out of cheat escalation: being outside a ward, group, or network permission is a normal authorization failure and is never treated as proof of cheating.

1.0.0 - 2026-08-29

• Fixed the first network-portal entry on a dedicated client reporting that no destinations were available until the player had traveled through a vanilla portal. The authenticated client now asks the server to force-send only the matching portal records it may discover and arrive at, then waits briefly for the complete authorized network before drawing the picker map.

• Kept the first-use directory request bounded, retry-limited, source-revision checked, peer-character authenticated, network-scoped, and filtered by portal and ward permissions.

• Fixed dedicated-client long-distance Runic routes being denied whenever the destination zone was unloaded and therefore had no local PrivateArea evidence.

• Separated Public/private/Group policy authorization, source ward authorization, destination ward authorization, and route-revision evidence so failures report the correct reason.

• Public remains the default travel policy; Private remains recorded-owner-only; Group travel uses the current authenticated server membership snapshot and fails closed when it is unavailable.

• Kept source/edit wards strict and kept known hostile loaded destination wards denied, while an unloaded remote destination is no longer rejected solely because its ward state is unknown.

• Applied the same remote-destination rule to the picker, world-wide directory, and final commit.

• Made Runic Portals independently installable with BepInEx as its only runtime dependency.

• Removed the Core registry, capability negotiation, protocol admission, account binding, portal transport, durable edit intents, mutation WAL, recovery, quarantine, and source-protection leases.

• Moved portal edits and travel to Valheim's native local portal/player ownership paths without claiming or transferring ownership.

• Kept Standard Pair routing separate from public, private, and Group named networks.

• Kept permission-filtered map directories, walk-in destination selection, direction rules, one-way acknowledgement, return routes, setup UI, and bounded diagnostics.

• Compiled the limited group domain code needed by this mod into RunicPortals.dll; no shared Runic runtime assembly is produced.

• Added one bounded, namespaced Group request/response channel. The server authenticates its actor from the current peer's owned Player character ZDO and keeps request/replay state only in memory.

• Preserved existing portal ZDO keys and record schemas plus the prior world-scoped group catalog and active-selection file formats and locations.

• Added an optional reflection-friendly Group membership API for other gameplay mods.

• Replaced the obsolete durability and remote-owner harness with 19 focused format, routing, ownership, RPC-authentication, and architecture tests.