The Dead Remain

What it does: kills stay where they fall. In vanilla Valheim a body vanishes a few seconds after it drops; with The Dead Remain it stays, and over about three in-game days nature takes it back. Crows circle and land to feed, wolves and boars come to eat it (and fight over it), and the carcass goes from Fresh to Picked to Bones and then it is gone. You butcher a carcass for its loot, and the longer you wait, the less is left.

The wild takes back what you leave behind.

Version 0.1.0. Carcasses, decay, loot, caps, birds and scavengers are all in. Not yet tried in multiplayer.

Features

• The body stays. Most creatures leave a carcass. It settles, freezes where it lies and comes back in exactly the same pose when you walk away and return, or save and reload. Nothing drifts, sinks or launches across the map.
• Birds find it. By day crows circle high over a fresh kill (ash crows in the Ashlands, gulls on the coast), drop down to feed and scatter the moment anything comes near. Circling birds do not mean the carcass is safe: something may still be on it.
• Scavengers come. Wolves, boars, bears, necks, ulvs and asksvin walk to a carcass and feed, and a carcass they feed on is stripped far faster. A feeding animal is distracted, but walk up on it and it attacks at once. When too many arrive, a bigger animal drives a smaller one off and equals fight for it.
• Three days, three stages. Fresh, then Picked (the body darkens and dries), then Bones (a few bone piles where it lay, no physics), then gone. The length is a config value.
• Things keep in the cold. Carcasses in the Mountains and the Deep North last longer; in the Ashlands and the Swamp they go faster. Every biome is a config line.
• Time passes while you are away. A carcass you leave keeps decaying, and sleeping through the night moves it on too.
• Butcher it (default). The loot stays in the carcass until you press E on it: full loot when Fresh, about half when Picked, nothing once it is bones. Set LootMode = Vanilla to get the loot dropped beside the body as usual instead.
• No charnel houses. A creature that dies inside an active ward leaves a normal vanilla ragdoll. Bodies that end up in deep water or on a ship are given back to vanilla too (no floating corpses).
• Hard caps. At most 8 carcasses per 64 m zone and 200 in the world. A raid or a flood can never pile up bodies: past the cap the oldest one goes first, and its loot drops before it goes if someone is near it.
• Skipped: players, bosses, skeletons, ghosts, wraiths, blobs, leeches, serpents, the Charred, summoned creatures, hares and a few others. Everything is a config list.

Works with

• Dismemberment: a severed limb stays beside its carcass until the carcass is down to bones, while you are within 150 m of it.
• Crimson Blood: its blood and The Dead Remain's carcasses work side by side.

Both are optional; The Dead Remain runs on its own.

Console (F5)

Config

BepInEx/config/marc.valheim.thedeadremain.cfg, also live in Configuration Manager (F1). The main ones: LifespanDays (3), LootMode (Harvest), MaxPerZone (8), MaxWorld (200), BiomeDecayMultipliers, CarcassCreatures / NeverCarcass, and LogCarcassCounts to log the counts every few minutes.

Multiplayer

Install on every client and on the server. Clients keep the per-zone cap on their own, but the world-wide cap and the decay of carcasses nobody is near are run by the server.

For other mods

A public API (TheDeadRemain.DeadRemainApi) lets other mods register carcasses, find them, read their stage and scent strength, claim feeding slots and tie their own objects (blood pools, severed limbs) to a carcass's lifetime.

Install

Install with r2modman / Thunderstore Mod Manager, or drop TheDeadRemain.dll into BepInEx/plugins/TheDeadRemain/. For multiplayer, put it on the server too.

Changelog

0.1.1

• A carcass shows "[E] Butcher" as soon as the creature drops, not only once the body has stopped moving (that took a few seconds, and up to 20).
• Butchering a body that is still moving freezes it where it lies once it is lying still, then drops the loot on top of it, so nothing ends up underneath the body.
• Scavengers no longer always come: ScavengerVisitChance gives each one a chance per biome to go to a given carcass (Meadows 40%, Black Forest 50%, Swamp 30%, Plains 35%, Mistlands 10%, Ashlands 0%, Deep North 60%, Mountains 50%).

0.1.0

First release.

• Kills leave a carcass that keeps its pose through zone loads and save/reload.
• Three-day decay (Fresh, Picked, Bones, Gone), faster when scavengers feed, slower in cold biomes.
• Butcher a carcass for its loot (full when Fresh, about half when Picked); LootMode = Vanilla for normal drops.
• Crows circle, land, feed and scatter when anything comes near.
• Wolves, boars, bears and other scavengers feed at carcasses, attack when walked up on, and contest a full carcass.
• Hard caps: 8 carcasses per zone, 200 per world; no carcasses inside active wards.
• Works with Dismemberment and Crimson Blood.