Changelog

0.1.4

• A player being hit is no longer treated like a tree. The attacker rule skipped creatures by looking for BaseAI, and a player does not have one - so when something hit a player, the damage RPC named that player's own ZDO and their character was handed to whoever swung. The receiving client then found it owned a Player that was not its local one and did what vanilla does in Player.FixedUpdate: logged "Destroying old local player" and destroyed it. The player's screen went black and they had to rejoin. The test is now Character, which every creature has too, so nothing living is ever moved.

• A chest stays with the player who has it open. Vanilla's container code assumes whoever has the window open owns the ZDO - OnContainerChanged saves only if (IsOwner()), and Load() repaints the panel whenever the data revision moves. Steering a yielded player's chest away mid-session broke both: the stack they dragged out reappeared in the chest a moment later while the one they took sat in their inventory. Nothing was ever duplicated and closing the chest cleared it, but it looked alarming. Open containers are now held with their user, the way a ship is held with its captain. The open request names the chest - it is routed through the server, and only travels at all when somebody else owns it - and the container's own InUse flag says when to let go.

0.1.3

• A tree, rock or ore vein now goes to whoever is hitting it. Vanilla never does this - TreeBase, TreeLog, Destructible and MineRock5 all open their damage handler with if (!m_nview.IsOwner()) return; and nothing anywhere calls ClaimOwnership - so the machine that loaded a tree keeps it and every swing anyone else makes travels there and back, for that tree and the next one. A chopping session is hundreds of interactions against a handful of objects, which makes this the commonest way a group feels somebody else's frame time.

  Resources only. A creature carries live AI state that is not all replicated, so moving one mid-fight can make it re-acquire its target or re-path - a real hitch in the least welcome moment, left alone until it can be measured rather than reasoned about.

  Three details that matter: the transfer waits 0.4s so the swing that triggered it lands first (the old owner's handler checks ownership, and changing it immediately drops that hit); a dwell time stops two players bouncing one tree between them; and it never hands an object to a player work is being steered away from, which would only churn.

• Ship prefabs are found in the right registry. The scan read ZNetScene.m_prefabs, the list serialised with the scene, and found the five vanilla hulls and none of TheGreatestShips'. Mods register into m_namedPrefabs, which is what GetPrefab reads. Now 13 hulls including every DM_* ship.

0.1.2

• The yield list is switched off with the mod. IsYielding did not check Enabled, so with the mod turned off but names still configured it answered yes about a rule that was not in force. The ship pass consults it, so this was a real bug rather than only a display one.
• A small public API, SpreadTheLoadApi, so DiagnoseServerLag can grey the rows of players work is being steered away from. This mod stays server-only and gains no client half; DSL's server half reads it and sends the answer down with its own report.

0.1.1

Both fixes come from the first run on a real server.

• The "NOT WORKING" alarm was a false positive. It fired on a healthy server with no conflicting mod installed. IsInPeerActiveArea is only reached from the second half of (!zdo.HasOwner() || !IsInPeerActiveArea(...)), so an ownerless object short-circuits past it and an object owned by the peer being processed takes the other branch entirely. It is consulted only when one player's active area contains an object somebody else owns - which never happens while everyone is off in their own corner. Silence now only corroborates the Harmony inspection instead of accusing on its own.
• Modded ships were missed. The prefab scan ran once at startup and found the five vanilla hulls and none of TheGreatestShips', because mods register their prefabs after ZNetScene exists. It now re-scans whenever the prefab list grows, which self-corrects however late a mod registers.

0.1.0

• First build. Server-side only; nothing to install on clients.
• Steers object ownership away from named players. Valheim simulates each object on the one machine that owns it, gives ownership to whoever was in range first, and never rebalances - so one struggling client's frame time becomes everybody else's input delay. This hands those objects to another player who is already in range, and hands back the ones already held. Anything only the named player is near stays theirs, so nothing is ever left unsimulated.
• Players are identified by network id, not by character name. A name is used once to find somebody; their id is remembered in SpreadTheLoad-known-ids.txt and used from then on, so the setting survives them playing a different character.
• Optionally finds struggling machines by itself, off by default. Not by ping or connection quality - the machine this was written for had a 24 ms ping and ran at 16 fps - but by timing the gaps between the updates each client sends. Rate saturates around 20 Hz and tells you nothing; a 479 ms hole in the stream tells you plenty. Clearing a flag is deliberately harder than earning one, and the last healthy player is never flagged.
• Ships follow the helm. Vanilla only reassigns a ship when its owner is not aboard, and then picks an arbitrary passenger instead of the captain, while steering is batched to the owner every 0.2s and the physics runs only there - so the person steering often waits a quarter second for every turn. Ship prefabs are found by component, so modded hulls are covered without a list. Whether a yielding player keeps the helm is a setting, defaulting to yes.
• Config changes take effect without a restart. BepInEx keeps the value parsed at startup, so without a file watcher an edited setting would do nothing until the process restarted - which on a dedicated server means disconnecting everybody to change who is being steered away from. The file is watched and reloaded, and every setting is read fresh each pass, so a change lands within a second.
• Says so when it is not working. ValheimPerformanceOptimizations replaces the vanilla method this mod works through, which would otherwise leave it silently inert. It checks both by asking Harmony who else patched that method and by noticing its own decision was never consulted while players were connected.