Skald

The title screen for the Guys Being Vikings server. Our logo where Valheim's goes, our music behind it, and a crowd of vikings having a party around the campfire.

A skáld was the court poet, the one who announced a hall by name: in words, and in song.

Is this for you?

Probably not, unless you play with us. Skald ships Guys Being Vikings branding and puts it on your title screen the moment you install it.

There is one good reason to take it anyway: the logo and the music are just files. Point the settings at your own and it will announce whatever you like, which works as well for your server as it does for ours.

What it does

• Puts a logo of your choosing where Valheim's title art sits.
• Plays a track of your choosing on the main menu, on loop.
• Fills the camp with randomly generated vikings who dance, sit around, and pass a smoke between them.
• Stands a hot tub off to one side, with two of them in it.
• Leaves everything else alone. The scene, the fire, the wind in the trees and the menu buttons are all untouched, and the whole thing stops existing the moment you load a world.

Your own character keeps standing where it always has.

The crowd

The vikings are rolled fresh every time the menu loads. Different hair, beards, colouring and armour each time, and nothing about them is saved.

They keep out of the way: clear of the fire, clear of the rocks, clear of your character, and out of the line between it and the camera, so nothing blocks the view.

Weedheim is optional. Install it and they pick up its bongs and joints and blow smoke. Skip it and they turn up empty handed and carry on dancing. It is not a dependency of this mod and installing Skald will never pull it in.

Not interested? Set Enabled to false under [Revel] and the camp stays empty.

Install

Client only. Every player installs their own; there is nothing to put on a server, and a dedicated server has no title screen to change.

Nobody else can tell whether you have it. It does not connect you to anything, join you to our server, or announce you to anyone.

Compatibility

It will fight any other mod that replaces the menu logo or the menu music, and there are very few of those. Anything that only adds to the main menu is fine, and nothing in-game is affected at all.

The menu ambience, the wind and the forest, is left alone, so it plays over your music the same way it played over Valheim's.

Using your own logo and music

Drop your file into BepInEx/config/Skald/ and put its name in the settings. That folder wins over the one the mod ships with, so you never have to touch the installed package and your choice survives an update.

The logo wants a PNG with a transparent background, around 1600px wide. It is fitted into the space Valheim's logo occupies rather than stretched, so any shape works. The transparency matters: the logo sits over a forest at dusk with a fire burning behind it, and a flat backdrop reads as a sticker stuck on the screen.

The music takes .ogg, .wav or .mp3. Use ogg; the same track as a wav is about ten times the size for no audible gain.

Settings

BepInEx/config/gbv.valheim.skald.cfg

There is one console command, skald_props, which reports what the crowd managed to find. Run it on the main menu if something is missing and you want to know why.

Is it safe?

Yes, and it is easy to check: it only touches the title screen. No world data, no character data, nothing sent over the network, nothing that survives into a game.

The vikings are the same thing Valheim already puts on that screen to show you your character, so they have no AI, no physics and nothing to collide with. If any part of it fails you lose that part and keep an ordinary working title screen.

Credits

The menu track is original music, written for Guys Being Vikings and owned by us. It ships so the mod works out of the box and is not released for reuse; point File at something of your own if you want a different track.

Changelog

0.3.1

Added

• A scrollbar on the world, server and save lists. Drag it, or click anywhere on it to jump.

Fixed

• The number beside Community counted what was listed rather than what exists, so a list that was still filling looked like it had stopped. It now shows how many servers are out there and the footer shows how many are listed.
• Opening the window for the first time is quicker.

0.3.0

Added

• A new Start Game window, replacing Valheim's. Your worlds and the server list sit beside a panel showing everything about the one you picked.
• Save a server's password and it is sent for you, so the password prompt stops appearing.
• Sort servers by name, players, version or whether they are up.
• The community list shows every server it gets. Valheim's browser stops at 200.
• Server sources load as soon as the window opens instead of when you click them.
• A Rejoin row at the top of the server list for the one you were last on.
• A warning when a server is on a different game version, before you try to join.
• Nicknames and notes per server, so a list of hosts' names becomes a list of yours.
• Favourite or drop any server, and add one by typing its address.
• New World, World Modifiers, Manage Saves and Remove World, all in Skald's own style.
• Manage Saves can move a save between your computer and cloud storage, and delete old backups.
• New [Browser] settings: Enabled and Passwords.

Notes

• Saved passwords are kept in BepInEx/config/Skald/servers.json, not in the mod's config file, and are encrypted with your Windows account. Copied to another machine they stop working.
• Your favourites and recent servers are still Valheim's own lists, shared with its browser.
• Restoring a backup is not offered. Use Valheim's own Manage Saves screen for that.
• Turn the whole window off with Enabled under [Browser] to get Valheim's back.

0.2.3

Fixed

• Errors when you leave a server and come back to the title screen. The crowd was setting itself up as though it were still in a world.

0.2.2

Changed

• New bundled menu track. The Guys Being Vikings theme is now the chiptune version.
• Plainer readme.

0.2.1

Documentation only. No behaviour change.

Changed

• Rewrote the description and readme. Skald is a mod for replacing the title screen logo and music with your own; it happens to ship set up for the Guys Being Vikings server, and the previous wording made that sound like the only thing it was good for.

0.2.0

Added

• A crowd of randomly generated vikings around the campfire on the title screen. They dance, sit and headbang, and are rolled fresh every launch.
• A hot tub with two vikings in it, in shot on the character select screen.
• Weedheim support: the crowd carries its bongs and joints and blows its smoke. Optional, and not a dependency.
• skald_props console command, reporting what the crowd could find.
• New [Revel] settings: Enabled, Count, Radius, HotTub, Props, Bongs, Smokers and SmokeInterval.

Notes

• Works without Weedheim. The vikings turn up empty handed and nothing else changes.
• Your own character is untouched.
• Turn the crowd off with Revel/Enabled = false.

0.1.0

First release.

Added

• Replaces the title screen logo with a bundled image, fitted to the space Valheim's own logo occupies rather than stretched.
• Replaces the main menu music. The track is kept compressed in memory, costing about five megabytes rather than forty.
• Your own logo or track can be dropped into BepInEx/config/Skald/, overriding the bundled ones and surviving an update.

Notes

• Client side and cosmetic. Anything that fails falls back to Valheim's own title screen.
• Menu ambience is a separate sound and is left alone, so it still plays over the music.