SkillCatchUp

Dying hurts less in the long run. The mod remembers your skill levels at the moment you die, and every skill that is below its remembered level gains experience faster until it is back.

Made for worlds with the hardcore death penalty, where death wipes all skills to zero. It works the same way with the normal penalty: the 5% you lose comes back faster.

How it works

• On death, right before the game wipes or lowers your skills, the level of every skill is saved as its target. Targets are stored in the character file, so they travel with the character to any world or server.
• While a skill is below its target, the experience it gains is multiplied: x10 at level 0, going down in a straight line to x3 right before the target.
• Once the target is reached, the skill gains at normal speed again. A message tells you the skill is back.
• If you die again before catching up, the targets are not lost: every skill keeps the highest level it was ever remembered at. One setting switches this to "overwrite with the levels of the latest death".

Example with a target of 88: level 0 gains x10, level 22 gains x8.3, level 44 gains x6.5, level 87 gains x3.1, level 88 and above gains x1.

Skills window

For every skill that is being boosted:

• an arrow on the skill icon;
• a light green bar from your current level up to the target, with a bright end cap;
• the target level as a light green number at the right end of the bar.

Skills wiped by a hardcore death normally vanish from the window until you use them again. The mod lists them right away, at level 0, so you can see everything you have to regain.

Installation

Client-side only. The server does not need it, and other players can play without it — each player who wants the catch-up installs the mod for themselves.

• Mod manager: install as usual.
• Manual: put SkillCatchUp.dll into BepInEx/plugins.

Skills you lost before installing the mod cannot be recovered: there was nothing to remember them.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/qua8ion.valheim.skillcatchup.cfg

Compatibility

• Other skill gain bonuses (Rested, world modifiers, other mods) stack with this one by multiplication.
• Skills added by other mods are remembered and boosted like the vanilla ones.
• Removing the mod is safe: the saved targets stay in the character file as an unused text value.

How to check

BepInEx/LogOutput.log gets a line on every death: Death: remembered targets for N skills …. In game: die, open the skills window — lost skills are listed with an arrow, a light green bar and the target number.