PieceBatcher

Client-side FPS for big bases without touching your graphics settings. The game draws every build piece as its own object: one draw call in the main pass, one in each of the four sun shadow cascades and one in each of the six faces of every point light with shadows. A hall with a few torches turns four thousand pieces into tens of thousands of draw calls per frame. PieceBatcher merges the static pieces of every 16 m cell into one mesh per material, so the same geometry with the same materials is drawn in a handful of calls. The picture is the same; the engine just works less.

• Same picture. Same meshes, same materials, same shadows, same lighting; nothing is hidden, simplified or culled. Merged pieces are always drawn at full detail (the game's own LOD switch is only for far away pieces).
• Nothing changes in the game. Client-side only, no server part, nothing written to the world or sent over the network. Building, repairing, damage, wear, rain, chests, highlighting with the hammer all work as before: a piece that changes falls out of its merged mesh at once and is merged again two seconds after the cell goes quiet.
• What is merged: opaque pieces drawn with the game's Custom/Piece shader (walls, floors, beams, roofs, stone, furniture, chests). Doors, carts, ships, portals, item stands, signs' text, windmills, anything that moves or animates, and transparent pieces are left as they are.
• Standing objects are not re-synced for nothing. Every creature, fish and item on the ground that another peer owns is pulled towards its network target 50 times a second. When nothing has changed — no new data, the object already at its target, its body asleep, zero velocity — that step is skipped; the moment anything changes it runs again. No movement is delayed or altered.
• Works alongside ValheimPerformanceOptimizations and ValheimCommunityPatch; they do not touch the same thing.

Console (F5)

• pb — counters and frame times of the last 10 seconds (average and 1% worst), garbage collections, the mod's own time per frame.
• pb scene — the same plus a scan of the scene: renderers, lights with shadows, particles, creatures, smoke.
• pb loop — where the frame goes, by Unity subsystem: physics, scripts, animation, particles, render submission, waiting for the GPU. Averages since the previous pb loop.
• pb prof — which of the game's own per-frame methods cost the most since the previous report (creatures, smoke, network sync, zone streaming…). The timer is on by default (MethodProfiler); pb prof off removes it, pb prof on puts it back.
• pb sync — how many sync steps of standing objects were skipped since the previous report.
• pb cell — the cell you are standing in.
• pb off / pb on — switch merging off and on without leaving the game, to compare FPS.
• pb rebuild — rebuild every cell now.

Config (qua8ion.valheim.piecebatcher.cfg, ConfigurationManager friendly)

• Enabled — switch (live).
• SyncSkip (on) — skip the sync step of standing objects.
• SyncBatchPhysics (on) — hand moved objects over to the physics engine once per sync step instead of one by one.
• CellSize (16 m) — cell edge. Smaller cells cull more precisely off screen, larger cells make fewer meshes.
• RebuildDelay (2 s) — how long a cell waits after the last change before it is rebuilt.
• FrameBudgetMs (3) — milliseconds per frame spent on rebuilding.
• MinParts (2) — a material with fewer pieces in a cell is not merged.
• MaxVertices (60000) — larger merged meshes are split.
• Shaders — shaders allowed into a merge, comma separated.
• ExcludePrefabs — prefab names never to merge, comma separated.
• LoopProbes (on) — keep the frame-loop probes for pb loop; they cost a fraction of a microsecond per frame.
• MethodProfiler (on) — start the method timer for pb prof when entering a world.