Runic World Engine 1.1.0

Runic World Engine is a standalone, conservative world-state observatory and save smoother for Valheim 0.221.12. It measures aggregate ZDO population, peer count, create/destroy intervals, send/receive rates, and save/load call duration at a hard maximum of one aggregate sample per second. Its only runtime requirement is BepInExPack Valheim 5.4.2333.

Authority and performance bounds

World-data handling remains conservative:

• it never deletes, rewrites, compacts, quarantines, reprioritizes, or force-sends a ZDO;
• unknown third-party data is always preserved;
• it creates no persistent world keys of its own;
• it publishes no registry, capability, protocol, ownership declaration, or cross-mod service;
• it has no client UI or asset load, so dedicated servers use the same small runtime;
• optional summaries are off by default and rate-limited to 5–600 seconds.

The observatory uses constant-time collection counts and event counters. It does not perform a base scan, sector walk, prefab enumeration, heat-map build, or save clone on the game thread. Save/load completion cannot force an extra sample through the one-second ceiling. A failed sample is discarded without changing world state or blocking any gameplay mod.

Save smoothing

Asynchronous periodic saves are coalesced while an earlier save is still active and their main-thread preparation is deferred briefly when the previous frame exceeded the configured frame budget. The deferral is bounded (five seconds by default), so a persistently busy server still saves. Synchronous shutdown saves are never deferred. The smoother never touches Unity objects from a worker thread; Valheim retains ownership of both snapshot preparation and its normal disk writer. This reduces avoidable save-time spikes, but no mod can promise a literally zero-frame hitch for every world size and storage device.

Configuration

Planned later work—world heat maps, compaction, and synchronization scheduling experiments—is not claimed by 1.1.0 and remains disabled until separately designed and tested.

Changelog

1.1.0 - 2026-08-31

• Added bounded main-thread save preparation smoothing for asynchronous periodic saves.
• Coalesces overlapping requests, never defers synchronous shutdown saves, and never accesses Unity objects from a background worker.

1.0.0

• Kept constant-time aggregate ZDO observability and interval event counters.
• Kept installed-Valheim-verified save/load timing hooks with exception-preserving finalizers.
• Made Enabled = false startup-inert and deferred Harmony construction until after the setting gate.
• Verified exact installed field shapes and kept load completion within the one-second sample ceiling.
• Removed the Core registry, capability, protocol, service, and world-data ownership declaration architecture; BepInExPack Valheim is the only runtime dependency.
• Preserved all unknown data and retained no deletion, compaction, or sync-scheduling path.