Rist

Rist adds a character level beside Valheim's skills. Every level gives you a pick, and a pick carves one more rank into a runestone you choose. Vanilla skills are read and never written, rescaled or reskinned.

Built against Valheim 1.0.7, Unity 6000.0.75, BepInEx 5.4.23.5, Harmony 2.9. One DLL plus one text file, no asset bundle.

Features

• A character level with its own curve, fed by skill level-ups.
• One pick per level. Picks bank; nothing expires.
• Runestones raise a stat by a fixed amount per rank, to rank 5 by default. Every fifth rank grants a capstone, a second and different effect.
• No runestone carries a drawback.
• A panel on the compendium bar showing every runestone, what it is worth now, what the next rank adds, and which character level bought each rank.
• An experience bar on the HUD, cloned from one of the game's own bars, that flashes while a pick is unspent.
• A line above other players' heads: level, total XP, days since their last death.
• Dying no longer costs skill progress. On by default, and switchable.
• The catalogue is a plain text file. Adding a runestone is one line and no rebuild.
• On a server, progress is kept in the server's own ledger rather than in the character file.

How it works

XP and levels

XP comes from skill level-ups and from nothing else. Almost everything in Valheim raises some skill, so building, sneaking, sailing, cooking and fishing all pay in without Rist keeping a list of what counts.

A level-up is worth the skill level it reached, not a flat amount, multiplied by that skill's weight. Vanilla's own skill cost curve is pow(level+1, 1.5), so early levels are nearly free; a flat rate would hand out runestones in the first hours and dry up when the deep ranks start to matter.

The weight is what stops one activity carrying the level. On the live server, a character at Rist level 12 held 1346 XP of which WoodCutting alone was 666, against 293 for everything earned in a fight. Default weights:

Full price for a skill raised by something that can kill you, a fraction for repetition that cannot. The same character comes out at level 6 under this table, with over half of it earned fighting. SkillWeights is meant to be edited, and on a server the host's table applies to everyone.

Cumulative XP for level N is LevelBaseXp * N^LevelExponent, which is 40 * N^1.4 by default.

Changing the weights affects new XP only. To re-price characters that already exist, change WeightGeneration to any different text: every character is then recomputed once, on its next login, from the skill levels the server has watched it reach. Runestones already taken are kept, so a character re-priced from level 12 to level 6 still holds all twelve ranks and earns no new pick until it passes level 12 again.

Spending picks

The panel is a fifth tab on the compendium bar, beside the raven and the trophy. There is no keybind; the tab is the only way in.

Each runestone carries its own outline, rock and runes, seeded off its id, so it looks the same in every session and on every machine. A rank cuts one more mark into the rim, and the mark holds the character level that bought it. The column beside the field follows the cursor and says what the stone is worth now, what the next rank would make it, and what sits at the bottom of its track.

Death

RemoveDeathSkillLoss skips Skills.OnDeath entirely. Valheim's own world modifier is not the same thing: Skills.OnDeath calls LowerAllSkills(m_DeathLowerFactor * Game.m_skillReductionRate), and inside that method only the level loss is scaled by the factor.

m_level -= m_level * factor;   // scaled: a zero factor means no loss
m_accumulator = 0f;            // not scaled: always wiped
// ...and "$msg_skills_lowered" is shown regardless

So setting the world's skill reduction to zero still discards partial progress toward the next level in every skill, and still announces that skills were lowered. Skipping the method removes all three.

The bar and the plate

The experience bar is a clone of one of the game's own upright bars, so it carries the real frame, track and fill sprites at whatever HUD scale you run. It drains rather than snapping to empty on a level-up, and flashes while a pick is waiting. If the clone ever fails against a game update it falls back to a plain drawn bar.

The plate writes level, total XP and days since the last death into the game's own nameplate, so it inherits the plate's font, fade and distance rules. Each client publishes its own three numbers onto its own character's network object; the server cannot write them, because a write to a network object you do not own is discarded. A player without Rist shows a plain name.

Days alive counts from the day the plate first saw the character, not from the day it was created. The game keeps no creation date, so every existing character reads 0 when this first runs and grows from there. It resets on death and is counted in world days.

PlateFormat is the whole of the presentation: the fields, their order, their colours and whether it wraps to a second line. It is a TextMeshPro label, so rich text works.

Installation

1. Install BepInEx 5.4.2350. Rist uses the BepInEx 5 API and does not run on BepInEx 6.
2. Install Rist from Thunderstore or with a mod manager, or drop Rist.dll and cards.txt into BepInEx\plugins\Rist.

cards.txt must sit beside the DLL. It ships with the mod and is not optional: without it no runestone can be taken, and the startup log says NOT READY rather than ready.

Install it on the client and on the server. The server decides every number, the client reports skill-ups and applies the effects, and neither half does anything useful alone.

Longhouse Core is an optional soft dependency. See Multiplayer for what Rist gives up without it.

The catalogue

cards.txt is read once at load. Edit it and restart the game; there is no reload.

One runestone per line, eight pipe-separated fields:

id | Name | flavour text | effect | value-per-rank | capstone effect | capstone value | sigil

The last three are optional. A line with five fields is still a valid runestone.

• id is the key the ledger stores. It is permanent: change it and every rank anyone bought in that runestone is a rank in a runestone that no longer exists.
• effect is the literal name of a public float field on the game's own SE_Stats, or one of the specials below. Valheim already sums about forty-five of these across active status effects (carry weight, armour, the six stamina costs, stealth, fall damage, regen rates, skill gain), so naming one turns it into a runestone with no code change.
• value-per-rank accumulates: rank 3 of a 15-per-rank line gives 45.
• capstone effect and capstone value are granted once per BonusEvery ranks, which at the default MaxRank 5 means once, on the final rank. A capstone can name anything an effect can, including a special.
• sigil is the rune cut into the middle of the stone, written as a Latin letter. The game's rune font is a Latin-mapped decorative face, so a real runic code point renders as an empty box. Omit it and the first letter of the id is used.

Specials are effects with no SE_Stats field behind them, handled in code:

The header comment in cards.txt carries the sign conventions, which are the game's rather than Rist's. The stamina-use modifiers are fractions where negative means cheaper, so -0.05 is a 5% discount per rank. Four fields count from 1 rather than 0 (the three regen multipliers and m_damageModifier); write the plain fraction and Rist adds the 1. Which fields those are is read off a fresh SE_Stats at load rather than hardcoded, and any disagreement with the four Rist was written against is logged.

An unknown field name or unknown special is logged and the line skipped, so a typo costs one runestone rather than the catalogue. A blank id, a duplicate id or an unparseable number is skipped the same way. An effect with no readable display name still works, and is named in the log at load so it can be added to the label table.

Configuration

BepInEx\config\ezomic.valheim.rist.cfg

BepInEx writes every entry to disk on first run and the saved value beats a new default in code. If a change appears to do nothing, check the file.

General

Levelling

Cards

ReconcileMaxLoss is worth understanding before you edit the catalogue. Removing a runestone from cards.txt hands its picks back and drops the ranks bought in it, which is correct when it was meant and is a permanent wipe when the catalogue merely failed to load. Over the threshold, nothing is returned and nothing is removed; the server logs why on every login and leaves every record alone until you fix the catalogue or raise this and restart. A catalogue that is missing, unreadable or empty is refused whatever this is set to.

Death

Gate

These bound what a client's skill-up report can be worth. Skills live on the client, so a report cannot be verified, only bounded. None of them detects a cheat, none disconnects anyone, and nothing is ever taken away. They are inert in single player.

Crediting a joining character has a cost: a maxed vanilla character walks in at Rist level 219 with the picks to take most of the catalogue. If that matters on your server, restrict who can join rather than withholding XP. Dyrr does that.

Plate

Bar

Every pixel number in the [Bar] block is multiplied by your HUD's canvas scale, so one value is the same visual position on every screen. BarSize is in canvas units and is already scaled by the game.

Multiplayer

Progress is kept on the server, in BepInEx\config\rist-ledger.txt, keyed by the platform identity of the connection and the character being played. Valheim character files live on the player's own disk, so nothing that decides rewards can be stored there. The client reports only that a skill went up; every number is derived server-side.

Single player takes the same path with no special casing, and the throttles are inert there.

With Longhouse Core

Core is a soft dependency. With it installed on both ends:

• Client mod versions and build ids are checked on connect, and mismatches are rejected.
• A hash of cards.txt travels with that check, so two ends running the same build over different catalogues are reported.
• The host's Rist config is applied on connected clients, in memory only. Your own config file is not modified, and your values come back when you disconnect.
• Inventory row claims are arbitrated, so Rist and any other row-granting mod stack instead of overwriting each other.

Without Core

Rist installs and runs on its own, and solo you give up nothing. On a server you give up three things:

The catalogue is no longer checked. cards.txt names what every rank is worth, effects are applied client-side from it, and the server only ever verifies the rank. A client that edits its own catalogue gets whatever it wrote.

The host's curve is not applied. A client with a different LevelBaseXp reads a different level out of the same XP, and every number on its screen disagrees with the server deciding them. The .cfg files have to be matched by hand.

Inventory rows are claimed without an arbiter. Inventory.m_height is a single private int with no owner, so two mods that both want rows each write it and the last writer wins. Rist's standalone owner is correct on its own and conflicts with any other mod that grants rows, with the winner decided by frame ordering. Install Core if you run one.

Rist logs a warning at startup when it starts without Core, naming all three.

Compatibility

• Requires BepInEx 5. Not compatible with BepInEx 6.
• 1.2.0 and later require Valheim 1.0. Earlier versions do not run on 1.0, and this one does not run on pre-1.0 Valheim.
• Conflicts with other mods that add player inventory rows unless Longhouse Core is installed. With Core, they stack.
• Vanilla skills are read and never written, so mods that change skill gain, add skills or rebalance the skill curve work alongside this. A mod that grants skill levels in bulk will trip MaxSkillLevelJump on a server; raise it.
• The three attack-speed specials patch Attack.Start and set the animator speed through CharacterAnimEvent.Speed. Another mod driving the same number will fight over it.

Updating a server

The ledger format is v4 as of Rist 1.1.0. A v4 line does not parse on 1.0.1 or earlier and is dropped rather than erroring, so copy rist-ledger.txt aside before updating a server you care about. v1 to v3 lines are still read and come back as never re-priced.

Troubleshooting

A config change did nothing. BepInEx writes the whole file on first run and the saved value wins over a new default. Edit BepInEx\config\ezomic.valheim.rist.cfg. On a server with Core installed, the host's values are applied over yours while you are connected.

An edit to cards.txt did nothing. It is read once at load. Restart the game.

The startup log says NOT READY. cards.txt is missing, unreadable, or every line was rejected. The warnings above that line name each rejected line. Reinstall if the file is gone: it ships with the mod.

There is no tab on the compendium bar. Check ShowInfoTab, then look for "No compendium tab to clone" in the log. There is no keybind, so that message means the panel has no way in and is a bug worth reporting.

Level is 0 on a server. Check Rist is installed on the server as well as the client, and check CreditExistingSkills.

"You are earning faster than this world will pay for." The server's earning cap is withholding XP. MaxXpPerMinute and XpBurst control it.

The server log says it is refusing to reconcile. More of the runestone history than ReconcileMaxLoss allows is missing from cards.txt. Nothing has been lost; fix the catalogue or raise the setting and restart.

Known limitations

• Nothing in the runestone catalogue has been tuned against anything but reasoning and a small amount of live play. The curve has been retuned twice off real ledger data; the per-rank values have not.
• With a free choice the strongest runestone is always available, so balance rests on the per-rank values and on MaxRank.
• The plate is published by each client onto its own character, so a modded client can put whatever it likes there. The server's ledger is still the only thing that grants a pick.
• Ranks taken before ledger v3 have no recorded level and show a dash permanently. Everything taken since is exact.
• SE_Stats has no max health, stamina or eitr field, since those come from food in Valheim, so no max-pool runestone is possible without a different mechanism.

Design notes

Why picks are chosen rather than dealt, why a capstone sits at the end of a track, how the bar is built out of a vanilla one, and why the ledger lives where it does: DESIGN.md.

Bug reports

The Discord is the fastest route, and the right one if you are not sure whether what you are seeing is a bug. Issues on the repo suit anything long.

Attach BepInEx\LogOutput.log, and say whether you were on a server or in single player. For a runestone behaving wrongly, include the line from cards.txt. If a vanilla mechanic broke, AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\Player.log is where gameplay exceptions land, and it is a different file from the one BepInEx writes.

Discord

discord.gg/hJzAVaZ5wb is where mod information, updates, support and bug reports go.

Server

There is a small EU server running the pack if you want somewhere to play: hard combat difficulty, resources at 1x, everything else vanilla, no application and no activity requirements. Connection details are in the Discord.

Part of Longhouse

Rist is part of Longhouse, a pinned set of the Ezomic mods that installs in one click. You do not need the pack to use Rist, and it behaves the same on its own.

Credits

Rist is an original mod by Robbin Thijssen (Thijssen Software). Copyright (c) 2026 Robbin Thijssen. MIT licensed. See LICENSE.

Changelog

Notable changes to Rist. Format follows Keep a Changelog, and the mod uses semantic versioning.

[1.3.1] - 2026-09-12

Far sight and Weatherly did nothing in 1.3.0. They work now. Update if you carved either one; your ranks are kept and take effect.

Changed

• Weatherly now makes you faster to windward. Each rank narrows the dead zone and points the sail's push toward the bow inside the arc it opens, so a fully carved card moves your best upwind heading from 52 degrees off the wind to about 36, roughly 71% faster. Dead upwind still stalls, so tacking is shallower rather than gone. It used to only narrow the zone, which did nothing you could feel: the game aims the sail's force sideways near the wind, so every heading the card opened was slower to windward than vanilla's own best.
• Weatherly's capstone makes you row faster rather than tack faster. Rowing is a separate force from the sail, and it is what you are left doing when you still cannot point high enough. It applies forward and back.
• Weatherly and its rowing capstone apply only to a ship you are steering, read from the helm itself, so a passenger cannot sail someone else's boat on their own runestones.
• With Weatherly carved, the wind ring's black dead zone narrows to match. It used to keep showing vanilla's, so the boat sailed with the wind pointer sitting in the black. The black now ends where the sail is half drawn, on both sides of the bow. Without the card the ring is untouched.

Fixed

• Far sight and Weatherly did nothing in 1.3.0. Their patches were written but never registered, so no map widened, no dead zone narrowed and no boat rowed faster, and a fully carved Weatherly sailed exactly like none. Nothing failed and nothing was logged. Both work now, and Rist checks at startup for any patch that was written but never applied, and logs an error naming it. If you spent picks on either in 1.3.0, those ranks are kept and now take effect.
• Several runestone values showed as raw numbers. Far sight and Weatherly read "+0.1 map sight" where they meant +5%, and Tireless's capstone read "-0.2 m_runStaminaDrainModifier", with no name and the value rounded to the wrong number. They read as percentages now, and Rist warns at load if a card's value would be shown as a raw fraction, so the next one is caught before it ships.

[1.3.0] - 2026-09-12

Added

• Far sight and Weatherly, two runestones that widen what the world gives back rather than what you do to it. Far sight multiplies Minimap.m_exploreRadius by 5% a rank, so the map uncovers further as you walk, with the capstone worth another 10%. Weatherly is the sailing one: Ship.GetWindAngleFactor kills the sail inside a hard cone around dead upwind, and that cone is the only reason tacking exists, so the card puts a floor under it and lets you point nearer the wind before the sail dies. Its capstone is 20% more speed while beating upwind.

  Deliberately not more move speed. That card is capped at 10% from a single source because a permanent speed buff is always on, never noticed while you have it, and a player told us Rist had made his unmodded playthroughs feel worse. Neither of these follows you home: a bigger map radius is felt only on ground you have not walked, and the wind cone only at sea with a sail up. Weatherly leaves the across-the-wind term alone and is clamped so upwind can never beat a beam reach, since raising that term would just be a flat speed bonus in a hat.

• A Rist line above other players' heads - level, total XP, and days since their last death - written into the game's own nameplate rather than drawn beside it, so it inherits the plate's font, fade and distance rules. ShowPlate turns it off, PlateFormat is the whole of the presentation: fields, order, colours, and whether it wraps to a second line.

  The HUD half was one postfix. The data half is why this is more than that: nothing about another player's Rist state is on the wire, since the server pushes a record to the peer it belongs to and to nobody else. Each client now publishes its own level, XP and last-death day onto its own character's network object, which every client in range already replicates. The server cannot publish them instead - a write to a network object you do not own is discarded in silence - so a modded client can lie about its own plate. Accepted knowingly: the plate is decoration and the server's ledger still decides every pick.

  Days alive counts from the day the plate first saw a character, not from its creation. The game keeps no birthday, so every existing character reads 0 on the day this ships.

[1.2.2] - 2026-09-10

Fixed

• Quick study's capstone read "+2 m_skillLevelModifier at rank 5". The panel builds each card's green line from a table of readable names and falls back to the game's own field name when there is no entry, and m_skillLevelModifier had none. It is "skill levels" now, and correctly not a percentage - the game adds it to the skill's level rather than scaling it.

  The card itself was always working. This was the label only.

  Checked against the whole catalogue rather than the one card that was reported: 25 effects are in use and this was the only one missing a name.

Changed

• An effect with no readable name now says so at load, naming the card. The fallback to the raw field name is right - a card with an unnamed effect still works and still says how much it gives - but it was silent, so this sat on a player's screen for a release and was found by somebody sending a screenshot. Cards.Load cross-checks every card's effect and capstone against the label table and warns once.

[1.2.1] - 2026-09-10

Fixed

• The experience bar disappeared and never came back. It went the first time it was hidden - which on a dedicated server was immediately, before anyone saw it, and in singleplayer was the first time you died or pressed the hide-HUD key.

  The bar is a clone of the eitr panel, and the eitr panel spends its life switched off for a character with no eitr: vanilla's hide clip does not fade it, it deactivates its parts by name through AnimationObjectToggle. Everything the clone showed - frame, track, both fills, text - came from one SetBool("Visible", true) written once when it was built. The bar was then hidden and shown with SetActive, and disabling a GameObject disables its Animator; Unity's keepAnimatorStateOnDisable defaults to false, so re-enabling rebinds it and resets every parameter to its authored default. Visible went back to false, the show clip never played again, the parts stayed inactive, and nothing re-asserted it.

  It is hidden by a CanvasGroup alpha now, so nothing is ever disabled and nothing rebinds. The clone is also detached from the borrowed animator entirely at build time and brought up by hand instead - handing a permanently visible bar's visibility to a controller whose whole job is hiding the eitr panel was the mistake underneath. The flash on a waiting pick is driven here now rather than through the donor's trigger.

  Both GuiBar components are destroyed at build time as well, with what they point at cached first. That was the next failure waiting: this file already drives both fills by hand because GuiBar caches m_barImage in Awake and re-reads m_width on the first SetValue, and its comment noted that LateUpdate "never runs, because the donor's parts are inactive". Activating those parts made it run, and it would have squashed every width to m_width * value with an m_width captured from a donor whose fills are zero wide.

  Reported from the live server by a player and reproduced on two machines.

• The "rist waiting" note is above the bar, and follows it. It was drawn at BarPosX and BarPosY, which are only where the bar is when BarFollowStamina is off - and that has defaulted to on since the bar started following the stamina bar, so the note sat at a point the bar had long since left. It is measured off the bar's real top edge now, taken from the union of its child rects rather than the root's own, which is a thin strip that runs through the middle of what you can see.

• The bar no longer re-pins itself during a cutscene, when Hud has parked its whole root off screen at x=10000.

Changed

• Every position in the [Bar] block is now measured against your HUD's canvas scale instead of in raw screen pixels. The bar's placement is a server setting - the host decides where it sits so that everyone on a server sees the same layout - and a raw pixel offset could not deliver that: 70 pixels below the stamina bar is a different place on a 1080p screen, a 1440p screen, and for a player running the HUD at 1.4. Multiplying by the scale factor Valheim's own CanvasScaler applies turns one imposed number into the same visual position on every screen. The IMGUI text scales with it too, with 12px as a floor rather than a fixed size.

  BarSize is deliberately untouched: it is set in canvas units and the scaler is already applying the same factor to it.

  On a screen at scale 0.93 this moves the bar about five pixels; the defaults are kept as round numbers rather than retuned to cancel that out on one particular monitor.

Added

• BarNoteGap, the gap between the top of the bar and the note above it.

[1.2.0] - 2026-09-09

Rebuilt for Valheim 1.0. This version does not run on pre-1.0 Valheim, and the previous one does not run on 1.0.

Changed

• Which stat fields count from 1 is now read off the game rather than from a list in the mod. A fresh SE_Stats carries its declared defaults, and a = 1f initialiser is exactly what "the neutral value is one" means, so the set can be asked for instead of remembered. It reproduces the same four fields today; the difference is a balance pass that makes another modifier multiplicative, which would otherwise have this writing 0.03 into a damage multiplier and cutting damage to 3% instead of raising it by 3%. Any disagreement with the four it was written against is logged.

[1.1.1] - 2026-08-29

Fixed

• The plugin announced the wrong version of itself. 1.1.0 moved the csproj, the manifest and the toml and missed the BepInPlugin constant, which is the version the plugin actually reports and half of what Core's gate compares - so the package read 1.1.0 on Thunderstore and introduced itself as 1.0.1 on every connection. Harmless while everyone runs identical builds, and not harmless the moment they do not.

[1.1.0] - 2026-08-18

XP is now weighted by which skill it came from, not only by how far that skill got.

Why

The live server's ledger asked for this rather than a hunch. A character sitting at Rist level 12 held 1346 XP, of which WoodCutting alone was 666 - half the character was felled trees, and everything earned in a fight came to 293, under a quarter of the whole. The level had stopped describing the character and started describing how long they had stood in the Meadows with an axe.

The existing weighting compounded the wrong way. XP being the level reached is right on its own, but the safest repeatable activity in the game is also the one that climbs highest, so it was collecting the most level-ups and the most XP per level-up.

Raising LevelBaseXp or LevelExponent cannot fix that, and it is the obvious reach, so it is worth saying why not: both scale the whole curve, so the ratio survives untouched and the late game pays for a problem that lives in the first hour. That is exactly what happened when the pair was 60 and 1.5, and it had to be walked back.

Added

• SkillWeights - a multiplier per skill, as Skill=multiplier pairs. The default table is built on risk: full price for a skill raised by something that can kill you, half for one that is situational, a quarter for repetition that cannot hurt you. Synced from the host, so a server sets it for everyone on it.
• DefaultSkillWeight - what a skill not named in the table is worth. 1, so a skill added by a game update or another mod is paid normally rather than silently going unpaid.
• WeightGeneration - bump it to any different text and every character is re-priced once, on its next login, from the skill levels this server watched it reach.

Changed

• Existing characters are re-priced on their next login. The bundled generation is 1 and no existing ledger line carries a stamp, so this happens once, automatically. The character above goes from level 12 to level 6, with 53% of it now earned fighting.
• Runestones already taken are kept. A character re-priced from 12 to 6 holds all twelve and earns no new pick until it passes twelve again. Refunding them would turn a re-pricing into a free rebuild of the whole character.
• The join-time credit is weighted by the same function as the re-pricing, deliberately shared so the two can never drift apart.

Ledger format

The ledger is now v4, carrying the generation each record was last re-priced at. v1-v3 are still read and come back as never re-priced, which is what they are.

This is a one-way door. A v4 line does not parse on 1.0.1 or earlier, which drops the record rather than erroring, so copy rist-ledger.txt aside before updating a server you care about.

[1.0.1] - 2026-08-18

Documentation and the text players read, with no change to what the mod does.

Threshold is Dyrr

The companion mod that decides who may join a world was renamed, and Rist pointed at the old name in two places that matter: the config descriptions, which are read by anyone who opens rist.cfg, and the notes on what Rist deliberately does not do. Both now say Dyrr.

The README is shorter

The design argument and the technical notes moved to DESIGN.md, leaving the README as what someone reads before installing. The reasoning is all still there, one link away, rather than in front of a reader who only wanted to know what the mod is.

Its two links are absolute now. Thunderstore builds the package page from the README alone, so a sibling-folder path pointed at nothing there and DESIGN.md is not in the zip at all - both would have rendered as dead links on the store page and nowhere else, which is the kind of fault you only see after publishing.

Em-dashes are gone from the docs throughout.

[1.0.0] - 2026-08-16

First release. There is no 0.1.0 entry below it because 0.1.0 was never published. It was this same work under a version that had not yet been judged ready, and folding it in beats inventing a release nobody could have installed.

The line this sits on

It adds a level beside the skills. It never reads, writes, rescales or reskins a vanilla skill.

Valheim has skills but no character level. Rist adds one that runs alongside them. Vanilla skills are read and never written.

Levels and picks

• Every character level earns one pick, spent on any runestone in the catalogue to raise it a rank, up to five.
• Picks bank. Nothing expires and the panel waits.
• No drawbacks. A runestone is a reward or it is nothing. A cost attached to a reward makes a pick something you can regret, and regretting a permanent choice is a reason to stop playing rather than a reason to think harder.

Free choice, not a dealt hand

An earlier version dealt three runestones per level, seeded so that quitting on a bad offer and returning re-offered the same three, since otherwise the pick is theatre, since anyone can reroll until they get what they want.

Choosing freely deletes that problem rather than defending against it: no roll to reroll, no offer to store in the ledger or on the wire, no second window with its own visibility rules. What it costs is the tension of a hand you are dealt. A free choice means the strongest runestone is always available, so balance now lives in the runestones themselves and in MaxRank.

The panel carries the weight for this: choosing between nineteen runestones is only a real choice if each stone says both what it is worth now and what the pick would make it.

Every fifth rank is a capstone

Taking a runestone the whole way grants something the earlier ranks did not hint at, rather than one more slice of the same number. It is what makes depth a decision against breadth instead of a rounding error: five ranks of the same small bonus is the same reward as five different small bonuses, so without this there was no reason to ever finish anything.

Capacity is a capstone, not a runestone of its own

This began as an inventory problem: late-biome kit eats the grid and leaves nothing for what you went out to fetch. The cheap fix is more rows, and that is exactly what Hoard argues against.

It was a runestone once, called Deep pack, and it was the strongest thing in the catalogue: taken first, every time, which is not a choice. A row now sits at the bottom of Ox-backed and of Sure hand, so capacity is the reward for taking a hauling runestone all the way rather than a purchase anyone makes on their first pick.

The panel

A fifth tab on the compendium bar, beside the raven and the trophy, opens a full screen of runestones, one per rist, each with its own outline, rock and marks, all seeded off the card id so a rist looks the same in every session and on every machine. A rank cuts one more mark into the rim, and the mark holds the level that bought it.

Three designs came before it: a draft window dealing three at random, a board of tiles, and that same board dressed in the game's own wooden sprites. The last is why this one exists. Borrowing a window frame is imitation, and it read as a different game no matter how close the sprites got. A runestone imitates nothing.

The bar

A fifth bar under stamina, cloned from one of the game's own so it carries the same frame, fill and trailing fill. It follows the stamina bar rather than sitting at fixed pixels, so "below stamina" stays true at any resolution and HUD scale, and it flashes while a pick is waiting.

Verdigris, because the HUD already spends red, yellow, blue and orange between its four bars and a fifth in any of those reads as one of them.

What the server decides

The ledger is held by the server and keyed to the platform identity plus the character, never to the character file. A character file sits on the player's own disk, so nothing that decides rewards may live there. The client reports only that a skill went up; every number is derived server-side.

Three ceilings bound what a report can be worth, because skills live on the client and a report is therefore a claim that cannot be verified, only bounded:

• Reports per minute, which caps how many claims are accepted.
• A one-level step, which caps how much a single claim may say. Skills level one at a time and fire one callback each, so a report naming a level far above the baseline this server watched that skill reach did not come from playing. This also protects the baseline, which would otherwise adopt the forged level and give every later claim an alibi.
• XP per minute of connected time, which is the only cap that does not depend on believing the client at all. It banks three minutes so an honest burst, clearing a crypt levels four skills at once, is paid in full.

Nobody is disconnected and nothing is ever taken away. Rist used to refuse the connection, and a levelling mod deciding who may play means a bug in an XP system locks people out of a server. Refusing at the door moved to Dyrr, where it is the whole job and is done openly.

Cloning vanilla UI, and what it does not hand over

Both the bar and the compendium tab are clones of things the game already draws, which is what makes them match. What a clone does not bring is its own lifecycle: it has never run Awake, OnEnable or LateUpdate, because the donors sit inactive.

GuiBar puts something essential in each of those, so the bar failed three times over - the tint reached nothing, the width was discarded and re-derived from the donor's, and setting a value stored a number without drawing it. All three are ways of not reaching one line. The fill is written directly now, and the trailing bar lagged by hand.

The tab had the same shape of problem read from the other end: its gold is not in any sprite or any Image.color but in the Button's normalColor, applied to whichever graphic is its targetGraphic. Building a layer alongside it could never match; swapping the sprite on the graphic already being tinted inherits size, shadow, gold, hover and press at once.

The rule both arrive at: clone for geometry and sprites, drive the state yourself.

Core is optional

Rist installs and runs on its own. Core is a soft dependency; installing Rist no longer installs Core with it, and manifest.json no longer lists it.

Solo, nothing is given up, including the extra inventory rows, which now have a Rist-owned implementation used only when Core is absent. On a server, three things are lost, and the README section "Core is optional, and here is exactly what that costs" sets them out: the cards.txt hash check, the host-authoritative curve, and the arbitration of Inventory.m_height between mods. Rist logs a warning at startup naming all three.

The row fallback deliberately copies Core's Player.Load widening rather than simplifying it. That is not a nicety: without it every item in a granted row is destroyed by loading the game, silently, because AddItem drops any saved position outside the current grid and the rows are not applied until after the load. It is patched in only when Core is absent, so the two owners can never both write the field or both widen the grid.

Mechanically, as elsewhere in the suite: every Ezomic.Core call now sits in its own [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoInlining)] method behind a Chainloader.PluginInfos check, because the JIT resolves a method's assemblies when it first compiles that method, and an inline call would drag Core in before the check could prevent it. Verified by decompiling the built DLL: Suite.* and InventoryRows.* appear only inside those isolated methods.

A character arrives worth what its skills are worth

CreditExistingSkills, on by default, pays a joining character for the skills it already holds: turn up carrying skills worth twenty levels and you arrive at twenty levels with the picks to spend. XP is the skill level reached, so a skill at N has already produced N(N+1)/2; summing that over every skill is exactly what the character would hold had all of it happened here, which also makes it safe to re-run on every login and impossible to double-pay.

Off, only XP gained on this server counts and every character starts at level 0. Config syncs from the host, so a server picks one rule for everyone on it.

There is no untrusted state. A character above the baseline was briefly marked untrusted and paid nothing "until they line up again", which it could never do, because the withholding returned before the baseline was updated, and the login check only adopted a new baseline when it had found nothing wrong, so the baseline froze while the player's real skills climbed away from it.

Keeping a well-travelled character out of a world altogether is a door policy, and the door is Dyrr's.

Known limits

• Never played at the shipping curve. The pick path was exercised against a deliberately cheapened one so it could be reached without grinding. LevelBaseXp and LevelExponent are back at 60 and 1.5, and how often a stone lights up at those numbers is still a guess.
• Runestone balance is untested by definition. With free choice the strongest runestone is always available, and nothing has been played hard enough to find out which one that is.
• Multiplayer has never had a second player. The version gate, config sync and catalogue hash all work host-side and against a dev server, but no remote client has connected.