DamageSplash

Valheim's damage numbers are small, thin and unreadable against snow and sand, and they all look alike whether you grazed a greyling or landed the hit of your life. DamageSplash makes them prominent, festive, and worth reading.

Client-side. Nothing to install on the server, and players without it are unaffected.

The look

A bold outlined face that stays legible on any background, numbers that pop in and settle rather than appearing fully formed, and an arc instead of a straight drift upward. Three presets to start from:

• Vanilla reproduces the stock look exactly, for when you want only the other features.
• Bold keeps vanilla's motion and just makes the numbers readable.
• Festive is the full treatment.

Every part of it is a setting: font, size near and far, outline, shadow, colour per damage kind, and the whole animation, including five motion presets from a gentle pop to a bouncing fountain.

What the numbers tell you

• Size means impact. A number is sized by the share of the target's health it took, so 30 damage reads big on a greyling and small on a fuling berserker. No fixed threshold can say both.
• Sneak attacks and hits on staggered enemies get their own colour and a tag. Those are the two damage multipliers Valheim actually has, so they are the honest equivalent of a crit.
• Killing blows get a tag, the largest size and a moment longer on screen.
• Burning, poison and frost are tinted by element, and repeated ticks on one victim add into a single number that climbs and follows the creature rather than stacking into a column.
• Damage to you has its own colour, and a heavy hit blooms red around the edges of the screen.

Multiplayer

Set visibility to All, Mine or None. Only hits resolved on your own machine can be told apart, so Mine keeps your hits and anything aimed at you, and drops other people's fights. Blocks, heals and bonuses are not damage numbers and always show.

Console

splash demo shows one of every kind of number around you, so you can judge the look without finding a fight. splash rain trickles numbers while you drag a slider. splash set <name> <value> changes any setting live. splash on its own lists the rest.

Compatibility

ColorfulDamage and ZenCombat replace the same thing this mod replaces, and whichever loads first silently wins. DamageSplash names the conflict in the log and stands aside by default. Pick one.

Requires BepInEx. Source and issues: https://github.com/jumpingmushroom/DamageSplash

Changelog

0.1.3

• The development command file (DevCommandFile) is gone from release builds. It let a text file in the config folder drive the console, which a client-side mod has no business shipping; it now exists only in developer builds. An old DevCommandFile line left in your config file is simply ignored.

0.1.2

• Mine visibility now keeps your own hits on creatures another player's game is running. Those numbers arrive with no hit behind them, and were being dropped as someone else's; they are now recognised by where your hit landed.
• Changing a setting no longer breaks the numbers already on screen: they switch to the new outline and shadow instead of drawing with a discarded material. The compatibility check also stops writing a log line on every change (every frame while a slider is dragged).
• The Vanilla preset turns off tick merging and the screen-edge flash, which vanilla has neither of; Bold and Festive set them to their defaults.
• The distance limit is only applied while DamageSplash is drawing. Disabled, or standing aside for another damage-number mod, vanilla's own 30 m is back.
• splash reload applies a preset changed in the config file, as choosing it in the dropdown would.
• Only the first hit in a sneak attack's frame is tagged SNEAK; a second hit landing in the same frame no longer is.
• The screen-edge flash measures the health a hit actually takes, after the world's damage-taken setting, and no longer fires in god mode.
• Bounce bounces once, as described, instead of hopping every time it drops back down.
• Sneak and crit hits never merge into other numbers, even with their tag word blanked out.
• A merged number keeps the transparency of its configured colour.
• The screen-edge flash no longer leaks a texture on each world change.
• The development command file no longer bypasses the game's check for cheat commands, and a file it cannot read is retried rather than raising an error every half second.
• splash demo 2.5 and the other console numbers parse the same on every system locale.

0.1.1

• A failure inside DamageSplash can no longer cancel a hit. The number is drawn inside the game's damage call, before the health is taken, so an exception from the mod used to abort the hit itself. Every hook now catches its own errors, logs them a few times, and lets the game (and vanilla's number) carry on.
• A context left behind by a failed hit can no longer tag a later number: contexts now only pair within the frame they were made in.
• A burning or poison tick that kills now gets the kill tag even when it merged into the climbing number.
• Only the killing blow is marked as one. A second hit landing before the game registers the death (arrows, damage ticks) was also tagged KILL.
• HideZeros no longer hides the "too hard" message on rocks and trees your tool cannot damage.
• Packaging: the archive is flat, with the DLL at its root and no directory entries. 0.1.0 shipped with the DLL under plugins/DamageSplash/ and Thunderstore accepted it, so this is tidying rather than a fix.

0.1.0

• First build: replaces the vanilla damage-text renderer with a pooled one. Font, outline, near/far size falloff, pop entrance, arc motion, per-type colours. Vanilla, Bold and Festive presets. splash demo console command.
• Boldness (face dilation) setting: an outline on its own eats a thin face and the numbers read as black blobs, so the presets fatten the strokes first.
• Presets use Valheim-AveriaSansLibre: both Norse faces draw the digit zero as a rune.
• Entrance settles on an ease-out-back curve, with a fade-in and a random tilt per number.
• splash set, splash get and splash rain for tuning the look live.
• Damage-over-time ticks on one victim add into a single number that climbs instead of stacking, and it follows the victim rather than staying where the first tick landed.
• A red bloom at the edges of the screen when you take a heavy hit, drawn from a vignette generated at runtime; nothing is shipped for it.
• Visibility: show every number, only your own fights, or none at all.
• Detects ColorfulDamage and ZenCombat, which claim the same method, and stands aside by default rather than racing them silently.
• Numbers now know the hit behind them: sneak attacks, hits on staggered creatures and killing blows get their own colour and a tag, damage-over-time ticks are tinted by element, and every number is sized by what share of the target's health it took. Vanilla preset keeps all of it off.