RL Valheim Link

Links this Valheim server to the group's Raid Ledger site: on every profile save (the server's save broadcast, logout, quit) your client sends a summary of your character (equipment, inventory including Equipment & Quick Slots rows, skills, trophies, known items and recipes) and your explored map with pins to the game server, which uploads it to Raid Ledger with the server's own token. Once per game version one admin's client also exports the item catalogue (names + icons from the installed game, so modded items work).

Nothing on your PC talks to the internet: only the dedicated server holds a Raid Ledger token.

Players

Part of the GamerSaloon modpack; nothing to set up. Not join-enforced: without it you simply send nothing. To opt out, set [Client] OptOut = true in BepInEx/config/RaidLedger.ValheimLink.cfg (SendCharacter / SendMap turn off one kind). Nothing is sent until you have spawned, and nothing leaves your PC except through the game server you are playing on.

Server setup (operator)

1. Install the mod on the dedicated server too (BepInEx/plugins/RlValheimLink/, three DLLs). Server and clients need the same RPC protocol, not the same version: a server update never forces a modpack update, and the server log says which client version joined.
2. Start it once so BepInEx/config/RaidLedger.ValheimLink.cfg exists, then set under [RaidLedger]:
   • BaseUrl — your Raid Ledger instance (scheme + host, no trailing slash);
   • ServerId — the id Raid Ledger shows next to the token (the Pelican server id, as digits);
   • ServerToken — the per-server token from Raid Ledger's Pelican panel integration page (press Generate on this server's row; it is shown once). Paste it into the file; it is never written to any log.
3. Restart the server. The log (BepInEx/LogOutput.log) shows RLVL: server half active: … token=set and, a few seconds later, RLVL: PUT blob … → 201 stored for the world's base map.
4. Item catalogue: the export is produced by an admin's client (a SteamID64 listed in the server's adminlist.txt, Steam_7656… format), once per game version and again when the server's mod set changes. The server asks the first admin who joins; nothing else is needed. To let any player do it, set [Server] ItemsExportBy = anyone.

Operations (operator)

• Token rotated or rejected: uploads halt with RLVL: uploads HALTED: 401 … and retry every 10 minutes. Paste the new token into the config; it is picked up on the next retry, no restart needed.
• Raid Ledger instance rebuilt, moved, or server id changed: nothing to do. The server notices that its upload target changed and re-sends the base map and the item catalogue by itself; players' character and map data re-send on their next save.
• Switching worlds: the base map is rendered once per world and game version (about 20 s of server ticks on first load) and cached under BepInEx/RLValheimLink/spool/basemap/.
• rlvl status in a client's F5 console (launch option -console) prints what the mod is doing.

Privacy

The server receives: your SteamID64 (from the connection, not from the client), character id and name, equipment, inventory, skills, trophies, known items and recipes, explored-map bitmaps, map pins (type, position, label), and sends them to the operator's Raid Ledger. Pin labels are never logged. Source and the exact wire format: https://github.com/Raid-Ledger-Plugins/rl-valheim-link

Changelog

0.2.1 — 2026-10-20

• [Server] WorldAllowlist (comma-separated world names, case-insensitive; empty = every world). When the loaded world is not listed the server half stays idle: no base-map render, every client's hello is answered with reject hello: world 'x' is not linked … so a 0.2.1 client sends nothing that session (an older client keeps sending and the server drops it), and nothing is spooled or uploaded. For one dedicated server that is sometimes booted into a test world: the character key has no world in it, so a test-world session would otherwise become the character's latest snapshot in Raid Ledger.
• Client: a reject whose reason starts with hello: now stops the session's captures (older servers never send one).
• [Chests] Dump (dedicated server only, default true): a diagnostic for the planned chest-inventory capture, on by default (operator ruling: nothing should need a flag; Dump = false skips it). Two minutes after every start, the server reads every container from the world's ZDOs with the game's own Inventory.Load and logs RLVL: chestdump[r<run>.c<check>] lines: the keys on a few known chests (items / itemData hashes), which data shape and which Inventory.Load variant decode a 1.0.20 chest (and whether the temporary inventory avoids instantiating item objects), milliseconds per stack, row counts, counts per prefab (duplicates, creator 0, gone, dropped), totals of DumpMaterials, creator / creatorIndex on personal chests, every container and processing-station prefab with its values, and the 1.0.20-only recipe and station fields. DumpRuns (default 2) and DumpRerunMinutes (default 10) repeat it and report what changed (freshness). Logs only: no upload, no new message kind, no ZDO string contents in the log; it does log chest positions and the player and Steam ids of chest creators and connected players. Each run (two by default, about 2 and about 12 minutes after start) can cause a short server hitch, longer on large worlds; discovery is spread at one prefab query per tick. It never runs in a player's single-player or self-hosted world. Because it uploads nothing it also runs on a world that is not in WorldAllowlist and without a Raid Ledger target. Run 1 logs how long its two single-frame steps took (setup tick, probe tick).
• Members that are new in 1.0.20 are read by name through GameAccess, so a wrong guess shows up as a dump line, never as a failure of the captures.

0.2.0 — 2026-10-19

Bundled release after the first full in-game runs (operator ruling: fewer, better-tested iterations).

• Compatibility by protocol, not version. The server accepts any client that speaks the same RPC protocol and logs the client's mod version; a server-side update no longer forces a modpack update. Server.RequireExactModVersion = true restores the strict check.
• Equipment & Quick Slots rows named through its official API (API.IsSlotCell), so the extra inventory rows arrive as equipment / quickslot instead of other.
• Progress lines at 25/50/75% for large transfers (the icon atlas is ~6 MB and Steam sends it at ~150 KB/s, about 40 s).
• Includes 0.1.6: the logout flush sends only the small snapshots and leaves large transfers to a live session.

0.1.6 — 2026-10-19

• Fix: logging out while an item-catalogue export was queued lost everything, including the character and map — the multi-megabyte atlas sat ahead of them and the connection closed before any of it drained. At logout/quit the client now sends only the small snapshots (character first, then map) and drops large transfers; the server asks for the catalogue again on the next join. Seen on the operator's second admin join.

0.1.5 — 2026-10-19

• The server notices when its upload target changed (Raid Ledger instance rebuilt or moved, server id or token changed) and forgets its "already uploaded" markers, so the base map and the item catalogue are re-sent without any manual step; dedupe watermarks and pending messages are kept.
• Operator instructions: server setup, item catalogue by admins, token rotation and rebuilt-instance behaviour on the Thunderstore page; docs/operations.md runbook.

0.1.4 — 2026-10-19

• Fix: captures made on logout or quit were lost — the game saves the profile and closes the connection in the same frame, so chunks queued for later frames never left the client. The client now flushes every queued transfer synchronously (and flushes the socket) when the save is a logout/quit save.
• Fix: the admin check for the items export accepts both Steam_<id> (Valheim 1.0 list format) and bare SteamID64 entries in adminlist.txt.

0.1.3 — 2026-10-19

• Fix: the client never sent anything on Valheim 1.0.20 — the runtime enforces member visibility, and the build (compiled against publicized references) called the private ZRoutedRpc.GetServerPeerID() directly (MethodAccessException every tick, seen in the operator's client log). Every non-public game member the mod reads now goes through Harmony AccessTools in GameAccess.cs (equipment slots, trophies / known items / recipes, skills, minimap bitsets and pins); routed-RPC ids come from public API.
• A startup self-check logs game member access ok|BROKEN, and CI scans the built DLL against an unpublicized reference assembly so a direct private access can never ship again.

0.1.2 — 2026-10-19

• First version published to Thunderstore as GamerSaloon-ValheimLink, from main by release.yml.

• Fix: a spooled blob with no message referencing it yet (the base map, rendered at world load) was never uploaded; blobs now go up on their own, oldest first, before messages. Found on the first real run.

• No operator URLs in the repository or the built DLL: the BaseUrl config description and the design doc no longer carry an example instance URL (operator ruling). The pinned contract keeps Raid Ledger's own $id, which is theirs to change.

0.1.1 — 2026-10-19

• Build against the game build the operator runs: Valheim 1.0.20 on Unity 6000.0.75 via the Digitalroot.Valheim.Common.References and UnityEngine.Modules packages (ValheimGameLibs stopped at 0.221.4).
• Console command registration no longer binds one ConsoleCommand constructor signature (1.0.20 added a parameter and the old binding threw MissingMethodException at every Terminal init); it picks the ConsoleEvent overload by reflection.
• Steam id read through reflection into the game's own Steamworks.NET; no Steamworks reference shipped.
• First real-endpoint findings: the server half renders the 2048² base map in ~21 s on the dedicated server and queues it; error bodies are { code, message } (fixed in 0.1.0's PR 4).

0.1.0 — unreleased

• Contract library (RlValheimLink.Contract): message model, JSON writer, pre-send validator covering schema.json and every CONTRACT.md §6 refinement, bitset/gzip/base64 encoder, PNG encoder; tests against the pinned golden and invalid fixtures.
• Client half: character, map (explored + shared layer + pins) and items (ObjectDB + icon atlas) captures on Game.SavePlayerProfile, hello on spawn, per-player opt-out, rlvl console command.
• Chunked routed-RPC transport (RLVL_Chunk / RLVL_Control) with caps and per-peer rate limits.
• Server half: RlValheimLink.Core (enricher with socket identity + playerId cross-check + clock clamp, disk spool with latest-wins dedupe and content-addressed blobs, uploader state machine honouring Raid Ledger's codes, budgets, 429 Retry-After, backoff and 401/403 halts, HTTP client with gzip bodies) plus the game glue (peer identity cache, hello → needItems, base-map render once per world and game version). Tested end to end against the mock receiver.
• Contract pin refreshed to Raid Ledger main after ROK-1833 (additive: optional blob on file icons); mock receiver matches the real routes, error codes, rate buckets and quotas.
• Thunderstore package name decided: GamerSaloon-ValheimLink.
• Tooling: mock ingest receiver, ajv + C# fixture validation, contract drift check, CI and release workflows, Thunderstore layout.