Runemark

A Diablo-style loot system for Valheim.

Kill things, open chests, and find gear with coloured rarities and rolled bonuses. Pillars of light mark anything worth walking to. When you find something you do not want, break it down and work it into something you do.

Named for the rune marks carved into an object to give it power, which is exactly what it does: it writes a rarity and a set of bonuses onto an otherwise ordinary piece of equipment.

This is early, and it is going to change. Everything works, but very little of it has been balanced against real play. Drop rates, prices and payouts are first guesses and they will move. Your items are safe across those changes, and every number is in a config file you can edit.

Finding Gear

Vanilla drop tables are almost entirely materials, so once you know a recipe the world stops handing you anything. Runemark changes that. Creatures and chests get a chance to drop equipment, and anything they drop is rolled.

There are five rarities. Higher ones roll more bonuses and roll them harder.

Each has its own colour and its own frame, so you can read an item's worth from the inventory grid without opening anything. On the ground, magic items stand in a pillar of light in their rarity colour, and a chime plays when one lands nearby.

Bonuses are real stats, not flavour: more damage, better armour, faster carry, elemental damage that makes your weapon throw off sparks other players can see.

What drops suits where you are. Gear is sorted into eight tiers, from the Meadows to the Deep North, and a creature pays out for the biome it lives in. A greyling will not hand you flametal.

The Runestone

A standing stone you build for 20 Stone and 10 Wood. You learn it the first time you pick up anything Runemark made. Press Use to open it.

It has three ranks, and raising it is paid for in runes from the panel itself, using the Upgrade button under the rank. There is no mining trip that gets you to rank III; you get there by using the stone you have.

Runes and Ochre

Two currencies, and they come from different halves of the game.

Runes come from breaking magic gear apart. There are five, one per rarity: Fehu, Uruz, Ansuz, Tiwaz and Sowilo. Four of one make one of the next. Runes shape gear.

Ochre comes from trophies. Ochre gambles on it.

Breaking pays fewer runes as rarity rises, which is what makes common gear worth picking up. A Marked item is a handful of Fehu and you will have hundreds of them; a Storied one pays in runes each worth 256 Fehu on their own.

Inscribe

A flat 25 Ochre, and the stone decides the rarity, revealed on a spinning reel. It works on gear that already carries marks, so a poor result is a reason to come back rather than a dead end. The odds are shown before you commit, and they are the same odds the world rolls on.

Names

At a rank III stone, Jarl's and Storied gear can be given a name of your own, up to 32 characters. It replaces the rolled name everywhere: the tooltip, your inventory, and the hover text when it is lying on the ground.

The name travels with the item, so anyone who picks it up or finds it in a chest reads the same thing.

One name per item, and it is permanent. Naming is free, so what makes a named item mean something is that you get a single go at it. The button asks twice for that reason.

Locks

Every row in the panel has a padlock, and locked items say so in their normal tooltip. Nothing Runemark does will consume a locked item, including runes sitting in a chest.

Nearby Chests

The stone reaches into chests standing near it for runes and ochre, so you do not have to carry three hundred Fehu around. The reach is a slider in the panel. Chests behind someone else's ward, set to private, or open at the time are never touched.

Installing

Runemark needs BepInEx 5, and it goes on both the client and the server. Drop Runemark.dll into BepInEx\plugins\ on each.

Both sides matter. The client handles rolling, stats and the interface; the server owns the loot table and sends it to everyone on connect, so a server's settings are the ones that count.

Other Mods

Nine are recognised and all of them are optional. Install any and their content joins in; install none and nothing changes.

Gear appears in the drop tables: Warfare, Armory, Wizardry, SouthsilArmor, WeaponAdditions, Hugo's Armory.

Creatures drop loot: Monstrum, RenegadeVikings, SeaAnimals and AirAnimals.

Modded gear is placed by the game's own numbers rather than by its name, so a Silver Axe lands beside the other silver weapons wherever it came from. Modded creatures are placed by the biome the game actually spawns them in.

Settings

BepInEx\config\gbv.valheim.runemark.cfg holds the switches: rarity frames, ground beams, weapon effects, drop sounds and how far the Runestone reaches into chests. Most people will only want two of them.

• DropSoundMinRarity raises the bar for which rarities make a noise, if the common tiers get chatty.
• GroundBeamMinRarity does the same for pillars of light.

BepInEx\config\gbv.valheim.runemark.loot.json holds the drop rates, the tier weights and every price the Runestone charges. On a server, that server's copy is the one that counts. Every number in it is documented in the file itself.

If you update Runemark and new drops do not appear, it is because a server keeps its stored loot table. Run runemark_reload defaults once to rewrite it; your old file is kept as a .bak.

Console Commands

Most people never need these. Server owners writing loot tables will want the last three.

Uninstalling

Safe at any time. Magic items keep their data quietly while the mod is gone and get it back if you reinstall, because everything lives on the item itself rather than in a separate save file.

Credits

Runemark is our own take on an idea EpicLoot popularised, written from scratch and built on Valheim's own damage types, status effects and item storage. None of its code, data or assets are used.

Supported mods are named by prefab name only. Nothing is bundled and nothing is required.