WatchPillar

A stone pillar with runes that keeps the land around it alive while nobody is near. Put coal in it and go exploring: the animals in your pens keep growing, breeding and getting tamed, and the kilns and workshops keep working as if someone were standing next to them.

Why

Valheim only simulates the world around players. Crops, fermenters, beehives and smelters catch up on the time they missed when you come back, but animals do not: taming and breeding stop the moment everyone walks away. The pillar keeps its part of the world running while you are elsewhere.

The pillar

• Built with the hammer (Misc), needs a workbench: 25 stone, 10 wood, 1 surtling core, 5 greydwarf eyes.
• Burns coal: one piece lasts 10 real-time minutes, it holds 100 (16 h 40 min). Add coal with the use key or from the hotbar, like a fire.
• While it burns, the runes glow and the land around it stays alive: a 3 x 3 square of zones, 192 x 192 m. When the coal runs out, the runes go dark and the land sleeps as usual.
• Look at the pillar to see the border of the land it holds, marked on the ground like a ward's circle. The border is shown while placing it too. The hover text tells how long the coal lasts.

How it works

Whoever runs the world does the work: a dedicated server, the host, or your own game in single player. It keeps the pillar's zones loaded, creates everything in them and simulates it, unless a player standing there simulates it already. When a player walks up, the game hands things over to that player as usual; when they walk away, the server takes them back.

• Dedicated server without mods: works. The server simulates the pillar's zones itself.
• Dedicated server with server-side simulation (Dedicated Simulation): works.
• Host / single player: works while the game runs.

Nobody on the server. The game stops world time on a dedicated server with no players: nothing grows, no young are born, crops, kilns and fires wait. So by default the pillars rest too until someone joins. With KeepWhenEmpty they keep their land simulated anyway: animals move and taming goes on, everything else still waits, and no coal is burnt.

Buildings in the held zones are not worn by the weather and do not collapse while the server holds them, as in any place far from players.

Installation

Needed on the server and on every client (Jotunn checks it). The pillar is a new piece: without the mod a client cannot see or build it.

• Mod manager: install it.
• Manual: put WatchPillar.dll into BepInEx/plugins. Requires Jotunn.

Config

BepInEx/config/qua8ion.valheim.watchpillar.cfg, section Rules. On a server the server's values are used by everyone.

Notes

• The model is built in code from the game's own textures: the stone of the vanilla stone pillar, the glow of a greydwarf eye. No asset bundle.
• Every burning pillar is extra work for whoever runs the world, about as much as one more player standing there.