Skald

Skald replaces the Valheim title screen logo and the main menu music with files of your own. It can also put a crowd of vikings around the campfire behind them.

It ships set up for the Guys Being Vikings server, so the logo and track you get out of the box are ours. Both are meant to be swapped for your own.

What It Does

• Puts your logo where Valheim's title art sits.
• Plays your track on the main menu, on loop.
• Optionally fills the camp with randomly generated vikings who dance, sit and smoke, plus a hot tub with two of them in it.

Everything else on the screen is left alone: the scene, the fire, the menu buttons and your own character. None of it continues once you load a world.

Using Your Own Logo and Music

Put your file in BepInEx/config/Skald/ and set its name in the config. That folder is checked before the one the mod ships with, so your file survives an update and you never have to edit the installed package.

The logo should be a PNG with a transparent background, around 1600px wide. It is fitted into the space Valheim's logo occupies, so any shape works without being stretched. The transparency matters because the logo sits over the forest and the campfire.

The music can be .ogg, .wav or .mp3. Ogg is recommended, as a wav of the same track is around ten times the size.

The Crowd

The vikings are generated fresh each time the menu loads, with different hair, beards, colouring and armour. Nothing about them is saved.

They are placed clear of the fire, the rocks and your own character, and out of the line between your character and the camera.

Weedheim is optional. With it installed they carry its bongs and joints and blow smoke. Without it they appear empty handed. Skald does not depend on Weedheim and will not install it.

Turn the crowd off with Enabled under [Revel], or reduce it with Count.

Install

Client side only. Each player installs it themselves. There is nothing to install on a server, and a dedicated server has no title screen.

Compatibility

Any other mod that replaces the menu logo or the menu music will conflict with Skald. Mods that only add to the main menu are fine, and nothing in game is affected.

The menu ambience is a separate sound and is left alone, so it plays over your music as it did over Valheim's.

Settings

BepInEx/config/gbv.valheim.skald.cfg

The console command skald_props reports what the crowd was able to find. Run it on the main menu if something is missing.

Is It Safe

Skald only touches the title screen. It reads no world or character data, sends nothing over the network, and leaves nothing running once a world loads. If any part of it fails, that part is skipped and the normal title screen is used.

The vikings are made the same way Valheim already makes the character it shows you on that screen, so they have no AI and no physics.

Credits

The bundled menu track is original music written for Guys Being Vikings. It ships so the mod works out of the box and is not released for reuse. Point File at your own track to use something else.

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.