Riverheim

Riverheim is a comprehensive overhaul of terrain and biome generation for Valheim.

It aims to provide a definitive upgrade to the game's terrain generation but to also preserve the look, feel and balance of all the biomes. You will still be playing Valheim, but with terrain that is more varied and exciting.

Features

• Landmasses are greater in variety. Most worlds will have a few continents significantly larger than what was possible in vanilla and a scattering of smaller islands.
• Rivers now have sources and can join with other rivers at confluences as they flow towards the sea.
• Mountains are larger, more epic and tend to conform to the river network.
• Biome distribution is less random and more aware of the terrain and features around.
• Biomes are budgeted meaning worlds are guaranteed to have a certain amount of each biome.
• Greater overall variety of terrain, with steep cliffs, large swathes of lowlands, landmarks and other features meant to enhance nomap playthroughs.
• Landforms are completely unique to each seed, there's no "master map" and no repetition.
• All major platforms should be supported at least for 64-bit architectures. You can use the mod with a 32-bit system, and it will work, but multiplayer syncing has not been tested, so you're on your own here. I've also not tested the mod on Windows on ARM, but don't see a reason why it wouldn't work.
• Multiplayer is supported, but the server and every client all need to have the same version of the mod.

What isn't in the mod:

• No changes to how the game will place points of interest, trees and other objects. Stuff might end up in places that seem weird, but that's entirely due to how original placement code works.
• No progression breaks beyond what was already possible (for example, Ashlands is still on the South Pole and you will still need to navigate the boiling ocean to reach it).
• No UI changes.

Example worlds for the same seed:

Vanilla	Modded

Configuration & Usage Instruction

No configuration is available to the end user at the moment, just install the mod, create a new world and enjoy! Keep in mind, however, that the way the game generates terrain will require you to keep Riverheim (or any other terrain generation mod for that matter) on at all times. To avoid unexpected terrain changes Riverheim and vanilla worlds are two-way incompatible: you can't load a vanilla world with a modded client and vice versa. Incompatible worlds will show with a [BAD_VERSION] label in-game.

Install Riverheim with your mod manager as you would any other mod. If you're not using a mod manager, all you need to install Riverheim is to put the mod's dll (Riverheim.dll) into BepInEx's plugin folder.

If you've got any further questions or feedback, join the Discord server.

Updates & World Stability

All the worlds created with Riverheim are intended to stay unchanged forever, even across updates to the mod or the game. Unless something truly catastrophic happens that will make this impossible, they're safe as "forever worlds". Doesn't hurt to make back-ups, though.

There's an exception here, and it's Deep North. Like the vanilla game, Riverheim will produce some stub terrain for Deep North, but it will be updated some time after Deep North goes live. Unless you're willing to start a new world with Valheim's upcoming 1.0 release or are skilled enough with modding to reset a part of your world, venturing into Deep North is best avoided.

Performance

Riverheim will add a few seconds (depending on your machine) of loading time for your worlds for preprocessing. Real-time terrain generation is also quite a bit more sophisticated and is a little slower than vanilla, but not by a lot.

Compatibility

Riverheim is a large mod, but for its size it patches a surprisingly low amount of the game's code. This makes it highly compatible both with other mods and with game updates, the exception being other world generation mods or game updates that alter world generation.

Compatibility with select worldgen mods

• Better Continents: INCOMPATIBLE. This is an alternative way to generate terrain, so you have to choose one or the other. Riverheim will not load when BetterContinents is present.
• Expand World Size: MIXED. At the moment only stretching is supported, so make sure that your stretching multiplier and world size (with edge added) increase match in value. You also need to exactly match terrain and biome stretching.
• Expand World Data: MIXED. Mods will load together, but EWD will override Riverheim's biome distribution (with catastrophic results) unless both World Data and Biome Data are disabled in EWD's config.
• Expand World Rivers: INCOMPATIBLE. EWR is designed to alter vanilla rivers which Riverheim doesn't use, there's no purpose to loading them together.
• Rest of the Expand World suite: OK. Those mods don't touch terrain or biome generation, so they play with Riverheim well.
• Worldgen mods that don't alter terrain or biome distribution like adding trees or locations: OK.

Example config for EWS for 2.0x world size with stretching

World radius = 20500
World edge size = 500
Stretch world = 2.0
Stretch biomes = 2.0

Fate of the Beta

Riverheim's beta is now deprecated. It might receive updates if a game patch breaks it down and the fix is simple enough, but nothing beyond that. Worlds created with Riverheim's beta are not compatible with 1.0 and beyond, and it's unfortunately not possible to make them so. You can still play them for as long as you want, you can't break them with the new version as they just won't load.

Credits

This mod wouldn't have been possible without inspiration and help. Special thanks to:

• Red Blob Games blog that gave the initial inspiration for this mod.
• Sebastian Lague's YouTube channel on procedural generation.
• The amazing DelaunatorSharp library.
• BepInEx for making Valheim modding possible.
• Iron Gate for making the game we love.
• Everyone on the discord server for helpful feedback and kind words.

Screenshots

v1.0.0

The release version, a major overhaul of all aspects of Riverheim.

• New feature: budgeted generation of biomes, lakes and mountains. Worlds are more consistent and even outliers should be playable.
• New feature: channels can cut through larger landmasses to connect distant bodies of water.
• New feature: sub-biomes present themselves to Valheim as existing biomes, but have distinct terrain.
• Marsh is a rare sub-biome of meadows that is mostly submerged in water. Patches of marsh can be found adjacent to water sources.
• Mistglade is a rare sub-biome of mistlands with mellow terrain and no mist. Patches of mistglade can be found deep within their parent biome.
• Mountains are rarer and grander in scale.
• More variety in the river network.
• Various local terrain features at key locations like river sources.
• Improved cliffs and biome-specific terrain variations.
• Ashlands no longer borrows terrain generation from the base game.
• Independent generation of different regions of the world to prepare for Deep North.
• New metadata format for save files. Some of the generation parameters are now stored in the save file enabling safe updates.
• Consistent generation across different 64-bit platforms.
• Improved performance.
• Innumerable improvements to the foundation code to ensure stability and reproducibility.

v0.12.0

• Merged mod assemblies into one.
• Rivers are now approximated by segments rather than points, eradicating occasional unnatural looks at low widths.
• River profile has changed to be less extreme at large heights, resulting in fewer blending artifacts.
• Different rivers are now blended separately which should eliminate sharp rock formations between them.
• River rendering has been optimized to be marginally faster.
• The above changes produce difference in heightmap compared to 0.11, but it is not drastic and is only contained in close proximity to rivers.

v0.11.0

• Fixed a bug that occasionally prevented joining other servers with a client with other mods installed that presented in an "Incompatible version" error when in fact versions have been compatible.
• Starting from 0.11, version checks are relaxed to major.minor. Patch versions are going to be compatible between each other.

v0.10.1

• Fixed a bug introduced in 0.10.0 that made all terrain rocky and impossible to cultivate.

v0.10.0

• Fixed fish spawning, oceans are now slightly less deep so fish can properly rise to the surface.
• Fixed leviathans barely spawning.
• Slightly lowered overall height of Swamp, improving spawn of locations like the Bog Witch.
• Reduced the amount of unnavigable shallows at the coast of Plains.
• Added support for the None biome to support custom biomes in other mods. It will just use base heights with rivers/splats.
• Added world metrics logging after world generation.
• Patched server-side startup so that the server will terminate with an exception instead of silently creating a new world upon attempt to load a world that's not compatible.

v0.9.2

• Added a changelog
• Added a discord server link to the README (join and provide feedback!)

v0.9.0

• Initial release