Monstrum Mac

Therzie's Monstrum, Armory, Warfare and Wizardry, set up to work on a Mac.

On a Mac, Valheim draws everything with Apple's Metal. Mods built on Windows ship their shaders without any Metal code, so on a Mac their creatures, armour, weapons and spell effects can show up pink, invisible, or as dark squares. This pack installs Therzie's mods together with Monstrum-Mac.dll, a small plugin that moves those materials onto Valheim's own shaders (or the closest match), keeping their textures and colours.

On Windows and Linux the plugin does nothing, so the pack is safe to share with friends on any platform.

What gets installed

• Monstrum-Mac.dll (the plugin in this package)
• Monstrum, Armory, Warfare and Wizardry by Therzie, downloaded from Therzie's own Thunderstore pages. All credit for those mods goes to Therzie.
• BepInExPack_Valheim, the mod loader

Installing on a Mac

With a mod manager

Macheim is a Thunderstore mod manager for macOS. Search for Monstrum Mac, install it, and the manager installs everything listed above with it.

By hand

1. Open the Valheim folder: in Steam, right-click Valheim, then Manage > Browse local files. On a Mac this is ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Valheim.

2. Download BepInExPack_Valheim and copy everything inside its BepInExPack_Valheim folder into the Valheim folder.

3. Download each of Therzie's mods above and put its .dll files in BepInEx/plugins.

4. Put Monstrum-Mac.dll from this package's plugins folder in BepInEx/plugins too.

5. Start the game with mods from Terminal. On Apple Silicon, BepInEx only runs under Rosetta, so the command starts the game through it:

   cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Valheim
   chmod +x start_game_bepinex.sh
   arch -x86_64 ./start_game_bepinex.sh "$PWD/Valheim.app/Contents/MacOS/load"
   

   If macOS says Rosetta isn't installed, run softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license first. Starting Valheim from Steam as usual starts it without mods.

Settings

BepInEx/config/Monstrum-Mac.cfg:

If something still looks wrong

Stand where you can see it and press F8. The plugin writes snapshot.txt and audit.txt to ~/Library/Caches/Monstrum-Mac/. Include those two files and BepInEx/LogOutput.log when you report it.

Known limits

• The replacement shaders are close, not identical. Some glows and particles look a little different from Windows.
• Heat-haze (distortion) effects are hidden, because nothing on the Mac can draw them.
• The first load into a world takes a moment longer while the plugin checks which shaders work.
• With mods, Valheim runs under Rosetta on Apple Silicon, which costs some speed. Lower graphics settings help, especially on a MacBook Air.