Gjallarhorn

A server-side Viking kill feed. Player deaths land in the top-left message feed and the chat window; boss defeats get the centre-screen banner.

Named for Heimdall's horn — the one sounded to announce across all nine realms.

Who needs to install this

The server needs it. Every client is optional, and the mod is not version-enforced.

• On the server it does all the work — detection, wording, and broadcasting. It reaches players over ShowMessage and ChatMessage, two RPCs vanilla Valheim already registers, so a server full of unmodded players still sees the whole feed.
• On a client it is purely additive. Installed, that player's deaths are reported with the real cause and the real killer. Absent, their deaths still announce, but the killer is a proximity guess and non-combat causes read as generic.

Mixed populations are fine and expected. Nobody is refused at connect.

Why clients change the quality of the feed

Everything specific about a death — who swung, what kind of damage, whether another player did it — lives in Character.m_lastHit, set in Character.Damage. That runs on whichever peer owns the dying character's ZDO, which is the victim's own machine. A dedicated server never instantiates a Player component for a remote client and can never read it.

So the server falls back to what it can see: the dead flag on each connected player's replicated character ZDO, and whatever hostile creatures are standing near the corpse. That gets the ordinary case right — you died to the thing that was hitting you, and it is still there — and gets ranged kills, deaths on a fleeing mob, and every non-combat cause wrong.

Boss defeats are exact either way. The server sees them through ZoneSystem.RPC_SetGlobalKey, which is registered server-side only.

Known limits

• Repeat boss kills only announce for clients with the mod. The global key a boss sets on death is added once per world; a second Bonemass changes nothing the server can observe. A client running Gjallarhorn reports every kill, including repeats.
• The killer guess is a guess. It is labelled as such in the logs ([guess] versus [exact]) so you can tell at a glance which path produced a line.
• Chat lines also appear as floating text at the death site for players standing nearby, or with the map open. That is vanilla Chat.AddInworldText behaviour and cannot be suppressed from the server. Turn off UseChatLine if it bothers you.
• English only. Creature and biome names come from a built-in table rather than Valheim's Localization, whose singleton is set up by the client-side startup path and is not dependable on a headless server.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/com.ragemedia.gjallarhorn.cfg, generated on first run. Everything except VerboseLogging is admin-only and synced from the server, so clients cannot give themselves a different feed.

Compatibility

Do not run this alongside another kill-feed or death-announcement mod. Nothing stops BepInEx loading both, and every death will simply be announced twice.

Safe to add or remove

Nothing is written to the world save. Announcements are in-memory only.

Changelog

0.1.0

Initial release.

• Server-side death detection via the dead ZDO flag on each connected player's character, which fires explicitly once and catches deaths from full health.
• Optional client component reporting real HitData: exact killer, star rank, PvP, and all 24 of Valheim's hit types collapsed into 12 message pools.
• Boss defeats through ZoneSystem.RPC_SetGlobalKey server-side, and through Character.OnDeath on clients that have the mod, so repeat kills announce too.
• Top-left feed and chat line for deaths; centre banner for boss defeats.
• 14 configurable message pools, admin-synced.