Tipping Point

Difficulty that lives in the step from one biome to the next. Arrive in a new biome in the last biome's gear and you will feel every hit.

Armour shrugs things off

Armour in Valheim is not a flat percentage. It works more like a threshold.

When something hits you for a small amount compared to your armour, your armour shrugs off almost all of it. A light hit against good armour barely registers. The better your armour is relative to the hit, the more completely it disappears — and a shield is better still, because it does the same job before your armour even gets involved.

This is why a well-geared Viking with a shield up can stand in front of things that would have flattened them an hour ago. It isn't that the numbers got slightly better. It's that the hits dropped below the point where armour really bites.

Until it doesn't

There is a point where that stops.

Once a hit gets big enough compared to your armour, the shrugging-off stops and your armour just shaves a bit off the top. The rest lands on you. Your shield stops scaling too — past that point it soaks up a fixed amount no matter how well you time the block. And if enough still gets through, you get knocked off balance and take the whole hit anyway, block or no block.

That's the tipping point. Below it, armour and shields are the best thing you own. Above it, they're decoration.

Nothing in the game tells you where that line is. But you can feel it — it's the difference between a fight you control and a fight that's happening to you.

Damage scaling changes the tipping point

Changing the damage output of creatures scales that number against your armour, which moves where a hit lands relative to your tipping point - something that sat comfortably below the line can end up above it.

That is a different kind of difficulty from the one this mod reaches for. Scaling damage puts the pressure on how much a hit hurts. This mod puts it on whether you are equipped for where you are standing, and keeps hits on the side of the line where armour and shields do their best work.

Both make the game harder. They just ask different things of you.

What this mod does

Every creature hits for an amount measured against the armour you're expected to have where that creature lives.

Dressed for the biome you're standing in, you're on the good side of the tipping point. Blocking works. Parrying works. Fights are dangerous and fast and you can still read them.

Walk into the next biome in the last one's gear and you're on the wrong side of it. Same armour, same shield, same skill — but now the hits are landing past what your gear can answer, and you will feel every one of them.

So your old armour stops carrying you, and it stops carrying you at a specific place, for a reason you can feel. You will not cross the plains in troll hide.

What changes

• Creatures hit for an amount set by the biome they spawned in. One that chases you somewhere easier keeps the strength it was born with.
• Stars no longer add damage. A starred creature is tougher, not a coin flip. A single star was often the thing that pushed a hit past the point where your shield still helped.
• Creatures are harder to knock off balance. A weapon from the last biome can still wear one down, but staggering it takes something made for where you are.
• Two-star creatures don't take extra damage while staggered. You can still stagger one and still get your opening — you just can't use it to end the fight in one go. They're meant to feel like small bosses. A backstab is still the way to take a real bite out of one.
• Backstabs land on a creature that can't see you, even one that's already fighting. The game normally wants it completely unaware, which no knife or fist build can count on in a real fight. The usual limit of one backstab per creature still applies.
• Bosses are left alone. Those fights are hand-built set pieces, and this has nothing to add to them.

Nothing about your character changes. Your damage, your armour, your stamina, your skills and your drops are all exactly as they were. The only thing that moves is how hard creatures hit.

Settings

Difficulty

The dial, and the only one most people should touch. It sets how hard creatures hit relative to the armour expected where they live.

Turning it up lifts a whole biome rather than sharpening its hardest hitters, so the weak stay weaker than the strong however high you go. Creatures that already hit harder than their biome expects are never touched by it at all.

Remove star damage

On by default. Stars stop adding damage and buy pressure instead — a starred creature moves and turns a little faster, is slightly larger, and from two stars upward attacks more often, all of it scaling with the number of stars.

Turn it off and stars go back to vanilla's extra damage, with none of the rest. It is one or the other rather than both.

Advanced

Anchors — one entry per biome, holding the armour a prepared player is expected to have there. These are measured from the game's own gear, and they are what Difficulty multiplies.

Change one of these to fix a single biome that feels wrong to you. Do not reach for them to change the difficulty overall: Difficulty means the same thing everywhere, and these do not.

Ocean tier decides which biome's expectations apply to creatures that spawned in open water, since the ocean has no gear of its own.

Unknown tier is the fallback for a creature whose biome cannot be worked out. It is set to leave those creatures alone, and in practice it should almost never come up.

Debug

Log scaling writes one line the first time each creature type is adjusted, naming its biome, its own damage and what it was changed to. Useful if something feels wrong and you want to know whether this mod is the reason. Off by default, and it is the one setting that is yours rather than the server's.

A note on who controls them

Everything except logging is admin-only and comes from the server, so everyone in a world plays by the same rules. A player cannot quietly set themselves an easier game.

Multiplayer

Everyone needs the mod, including the server if it runs mods. This isn't a personal preference setting — it changes how much damage a hit does, and two players taking different damage from the same creature would be a mess.

Part of the Dwarf Haven Games collection.