Equipment Experience

A BepInEx mod for Valheim that replaces the random Forge of Potential upgrade with an experience system.

In the base game, refining an item with an idol is a gamble. Every idol succeeds 65% of the time, and every failure destroys the item, giving back only 35% of its crafting materials. The roll comes from a PRNG seeded with the item type, the target level and your player name. With this mod:

• Items gain experience as you use them. This covers every item the Forge of Potential can upgrade, from the moment it's crafted:
  • Weapons and tools gain experience on every hit that raises their own skill: melee hits, arrows and bolts that land, magic, and chopping or mining with the right tool.
  • Shields gain experience on every block. A parry (perfect block) gives 2× by default. If you block without a shield, the weapon you block with gets the experience.
  • Armor pieces you are wearing (helmet, chest, legs and cape) gain experience in two ways:
    • Hits from attackers: experience scales with how big the hit is compared with your max health. Enemy damage and your health rise together from biome to biome, so armor levels at a similar pace everywhere. Damage is measured before your armor reduces it, so stronger armor doesn't slow its own leveling. A hit that is partly blocked only counts the damage that got through the block.
    • Blocks: every block also gives each worn piece a share of the block's experience.
• Experience depends on what you fight. Enemies from a biome below the item's tier give less, and enemies from a biome above it give more, so farming easy targets is slow.
• An upgrade needs a full bar, and then it always succeeds if you have the right idol.
• Every upgrade awakens the forge's guardians. Creatures from the idol's biome spawn around the forge and attack.
• An item's experience shows in its tooltip. At the forge you also see the bar and the success chance.
• Items below their maximum crafting level can't be upgraded at the Forge of Potential. Upgrade them at their normal crafting station first. Experience earned before then counts toward the first forge upgrade, up to one full bar, and carries over through workbench upgrades. An item you've used since crafting it can reach max level already ready for the forge.

Experience is stored in each item's custom data. It is saved with your character and stays with the item when it goes into a chest or to another player. A forge upgrade starts the new level with an empty bar.

Installation

• Mod manager: install with r2modman or Thunderstore Mod Manager. BepInExPack_Valheim is installed for you as a dependency.
• Manual: install BepInExPack_Valheim, then copy plugins/EquipmentExperience.dll into BepInEx/plugins/.

The mod is client-side. You don't need it on the server, and other players don't need it.

Configuration

Config file: BepInEx/config/nerdtastic.equipmentexperience.cfg

Balance

The defaults are tuned so a weapon, a shield and each armor piece fill their bars at roughly the same pace while you adventure. The estimates below are per enemy you fight at your gear's tier.

Two figures here come from the game files: almost every weapon raises its skill by exactly 1 per hit, and every forge recipe costs a single idol per level. Because the idol cost never rises, the experience curve is what makes each level harder to reach:

To level everything faster or slower, change ExperienceRate. To flatten or steepen the curve, change ExperienceGrowth.

Tiers

Items and enemies each have a biome tier: 0 Meadows, 1 Black Forest, 2 Swamp, 3 Mountains, 4 Plains, 5 Mistlands, 6 Ashlands, 7 Deep North. Every experience award is multiplied by LowerTierMultiplier for each tier the enemy is below the item, or by HigherTierMultiplier for each tier above. Fighting at your gear's tier is unchanged.

• An item's tier is the tier of the idol that refines it. Wooden idols are tier 0 and Bloodgold idols are tier 7.
• An enemy's tier, checked in this order:
  1. EnemyTierOverrides, if it lists the creature.
  2. Its faction, if that faction lives in only one biome: Mountains, Plains, Mistlands, Ashlands (Demon) or Deep North. A Fuling raid on a Meadows base still counts as a Plains fight.
  3. Otherwise, the biome the enemy is standing in. Greydwarfs, the undead, animals, bosses and Dvergr appear in several biomes, so their location decides. This also covers creatures added by other mods, with no list to maintain.
• Hits on trees and rocks use the biome you're standing in.
• Blocks use the attacker's tier. Armor hits also use the attacker's tier, and each piece compares it with its own tier.
• Unknown cases count as 1×: the ocean, a biome the mod doesn't recognise, or a non-vanilla idol.

Guardians

Each refinement awakens the forge's guardians about two seconds after the upgrade finishes. They spawn 6–10 m from the forge and hunt you straight away. The upgraded item is already yours: the fight is the price of the upgrade, not a condition for it. Guardians drop their normal loot.

Which guardians appear depends on the idol's tier:

Guardians get tougher as the item does. They gain stars first, then numbers:

A star adds one level to a creature: its health rises by its base amount, its damage by 50%, and its loot doubles. Stars stop at 2, because loot keeps doubling with each level; after that, difficulty comes from numbers instead.

Each tier's setting is a comma-separated list of Prefab:count or Prefab:count:stars entries, giving the guardians at +1. They use the game's prefab names, the same names the spawn console command takes. Keep each tier to one faction, because creatures from different factions fight each other instead of you.

Multiplayer

The config is not synced from the server. Each player's own settings apply to their own items. Experience is stored on the item itself, so an item keeps its experience when you give it to a player who doesn't have the mod. It only gains more experience, or upgrades through experience, for players who have the mod.

After a game update

If a Valheim update breaks part of the mod, that part switches itself off and the rest keeps working. The BepInEx log (BepInEx/LogOutput.log) names the part and the reason. Experience you've already earned is stored on your items and isn't affected. The forge upgrade is the one exception: if it can't load, the forge goes back to the vanilla gamble, and the log says so.

Source and license

Source code and issue tracker: https://github.com/chrisrico/equipment-experience. Released under the MIT license.

Changelog

1.0.1

• The plugin GUID is now nerdtastic.equipmentexperience, so the config file is now BepInEx/config/nerdtastic.equipmentexperience.cfg. To keep your 1.0.0 settings, rename chrisrico.equipmentexperience.cfg to the new name before launching.

1.0.0

• First release. Forge-upgradable items gain experience from use, banking up to one bar before max crafting level, and a full bar at max level guarantees the Forge of Potential upgrade. Every upgrade awakens guardians from the idol's biome.