ValheimPerformanceOverhaul

Fps mod for Valheim.

By Skarif

https://steamcommunity.com/id/Skarif_W/

Date uploaded	a week ago
Version	5.0.0
Download link	Skarif-ValheimPerformanceOverhaul-5.0.0.zip
Downloads	895
Dependency string	Skarif-ValheimPerformanceOverhaul-5.0.0

This mod requires the following mods to function

denikson-BepInExPack_Valheim

BepInEx pack for Valheim. Preconfigured and includes unstripped Unity DLLs.

Preferred version: 5.4.2202

README

⚡ Valheim Performance Overhaul (VPO) - v5.0.0

----------------- BEFORE ---------------------------- AFTER -------------------

Banner

Verified on this map with these settings

⚠️ IMPORTANT HOTKEYS TO REMEMBER:

- Press F6 at any time to open the in-game, graphical VPO configuration menu.
Adjust any setting, limit, or distance on the fly.
- Press F7 at the base to set a base anchor. This will instruct VPO to remember these coordinates and automatically 
merge the static geometry of your structure after a short loading delay,
reducing CPU rendering overhead without having to manually execute commands in the terminal.
This will help improve your frame rate and reduce CPU load. You can place multiple anchors in different locations.

GENERAL

Valheim is an incredible game, but we have all experienced the dreaded "base lag." Once you build a massive fortress, light up a few dozen torches, tame some wolves, and host a couple of friends, your frames per second can drop into the single digits.

Valheim Performance Overhaul (VPO) is a highly optimized, fully comprehensive system built to eliminate the game's worst CPU, GPU, memory, and network bottlenecks. Rather than simply turning down graphics settings, VPO implements advanced runtime caching, asynchronous processing, time-sliced update loops, and deep engine hooks to make the game run significantly smoother while preserving its visual atmosphere.

🎨 Graphics & Rendering Optimizations

Valheim's rendering engine often chokes on having too many unique draw calls. VPO introduces a complete suite of rendering optimizations:

🍀 GPU Instancing & Material Deduplication: Forces Unity to use GPU Instancing on highly repetitive world objects like grass, flowers, shrubs, and rocks. VPO automatically scans and merges duplicate materials in memory using a fast material hashing key to maximize instancing batch sizes.
🏰 Static Batching & Base Anchors (F7): Combines static geometry (dungeon details, ruins, POIs, cliffs) per world sector using Unity's native StaticBatchingUtility. For player bases, you can place a Base Anchor by pressing F7. When you return to your base, VPO waits for a configurable delay (BaseAnchorBatchDelay) for all assets to spawn before automatically batching them.
🌳 Asynchronous LOD Generation: Uses a background thread to generate simplified mesh levels (LOD1 at 50% complexity, LOD2 at 15% complexity) using a custom Quadratic Error Metrics (QEM) decimator. The process runs smoothly in the background without causing loading screen freezes.
💾 On-Disk Persistent Cache: Saves your generated LOD meshes locally in the BepInEx/cache/VPO folder. The cache automatically invalidates itself safely when either the mod or the game updates.
🗺️ Terrain Mesh Cache: Features a high-performance LRU (Least Recently Used) cache for generated heightmap meshes. This eliminates micro-stutters when crossing zone boundaries. If you terraform or modify the ground, VPO instantly invalidates the cached sector and its adjacent neighbors on Heightmap.Poke to prevent visual mismatches.
🖼️ Runtime Texture Downscaler: Downscales secondary object textures and compresses them to save VRAM. It safely bypasses Unity's write protection, saving raw bytes to the disk cache.

💡 Lighting & Shadows Optimizations

Point lights and dynamic shadows are among the biggest killers of GPU performance in Valheim. VPO rewrites how the game handles illumination:

🔦 Advanced Light Culling: Limits active point lights around you to a configurable maximum (default: 15). Lights outside this limit are disabled.
🌖 Light LOD System: Transitions lights through multiple levels based on distance:
- Full: Standard lighting with shadows.
- No Shadows: Shadows are disabled, leaving only light.
- Emissive: The light source mesh glows, but does not cast actual light.
- Billboard: The light is replaced by a lightweight 2D glow sprite.
- Disabled: Completely turned off.
🕯️ Light Flicker Optimization: Fixes fire and torch light intensity to its base value. This prevents Unity from constantly rebuilding shadow maps every frame, resulting in major GPU performance gains. This is optimized using compiled expression delegates to bypass slow reflection lookups on the hot path.
⚖️ Dynamic Priority Sorting: Uses a fast O(N) selection algorithm to dynamically prioritize which lights should stay on (e.g., players, portals, and hearths are prioritized over common torches).
🕶️ Distance Shadow Culling: Automatically disables shadow casting on lights beyond a set distance (default: 30 meters).

🛠️ Building & Base Optimizations

Building is the core of Valheim, but structures can choke your CPU with continuous stability and rendering updates:

📦 Decor Batching: Combines the meshes of static, non-structural decorations (Misc category) in a 32x32 grid to drastically lower draw calls on detailed bases.
💤 Piece Sleep Manager: Puts static building pieces (WearNTear) to sleep after 2 frames of inactivity, freeing up CPU cycles on large, settled bases.
⏳ Asynchronous WearNTear Loading: Spreads out the loading of building block scripts on scene load (default: 20 per frame) to prevent massive freezing when loading into a large base.
🛡️ Structural Support Cache: Caches structural integrity calculations (GetSupport()) with a configurable lifetime. Recalculations and neighbor invalidation are processed asynchronously (maximum of 5 blocks per frame) on structural collapse to prevent base collapses from freezing your game.
🌧️ Weather Decay Control: Optionally disables rain and water rot damage for wooden structures, saving CPU cycles on continuous decay calculations.

🧠 AI, Physics & Animals

🐑 Tamed Idle Optimizer: Puts idle, tamed animals inside player bases (detected by wards or nearby pieces) into a low-power mode, disabling their AI, Animators, Rigidbody movement, and Colliders. It safely restores colliders first when they wake up to prevent them from clipping through floors.
👁️ Line of Sight (LOS) Caching: Caches monster line-of-sight checks per-target with a 10-second timeout, completely bypassing heavy raycast operations on the hot path.
🧭 Pathfinding Scheduler: Restricts the number of active pathfinding searches per frame based on your hardware class (Weak: 3, Medium: 5, Strong: 8), keeping game performance smooth even if a raid spawns a massive wave of enemies.
🤖 AI Throttling: Monsters beyond 60 meters update their AI only every 5 seconds instead of every frame, and physics updates are staggered.
🌫️ Smoke Physics Overhaul: Replaces complex vanilla smoke aerodynamics with a simple, lightweight approximation. It also fixes a critical vanilla memory leak where faded smoke objects would never get destroyed, slowly piling up in the background. Physics AddForce and mass calculations are heavily throttled for maximum CPU savings.

🔊 Audio & Particle System Pooling

Creating and destroying Unity objects at runtime causes micro-stutters. VPO reuses existing objects using high-performance pools:

🔊 Audio Pooling: Reuses AudioSource components for standard spatial 3D effects (excluding loops, UI, music, and long ambient clips).
💥 VFX Object Pooling: Pools high-frequency combat effects (blood splatters, spark hits, arrow impacts) to eliminate instantiation stutter during fights. This uses a strict, optimized whitelist to prevent floating projectile bugs.
💾 Component Caching: Caches all component references (Rigidbody, ParticleSystem, AudioSource, TrailRenderer, ZNetView, Projectile) inside a custom wrapper to bypass GetComponent calls during reuse.
🌬️ Particle System Culling: Automatically pauses and resumes particle systems based on distance from the player, completely skipping simulation for off-screen effects. This uses a time-sliced manager (100 checks per frame) and a throttled action queue (25 toggles per frame) to prevent performance spikes during movement.
🕯️ Torch Optimizer: Reduces the lifetime of torch and brazier particles and optimizes their gravity modifiers, saving rendering cycles on active lights.

🌐 Network & Multiplayer Sync (Crossplay Safe!)

VPO completely rewrites several core network handlers to keep multiplayer gameplay fluid:

🚀 Steam Socket Uncap: Increases P2P data transfer limits (SendRateMin/Max and Receive Buffers) to solve network lag and desyncs on large bases. It safely detects your platform and disables itself gracefully on non-Steam (Game Pass) builds using reflection to prevent crashes.
📉 Adaptive Throttling: Intelligently reduces network updates to players experiencing high ping (>400ms) to avoid choking their connection.
🎯 Smart ZDO Sorting: Prioritizes players, portals, and ships during network synchronization to ensure smooth movement under load, sending distant entity data last.
👑 Smart Zone Ownership: Automatically transfers AI control to the player with the lowest ping in the sector, preventing laggy mob movement.

⏳ Core Engine, Memory & Debug Tweaks

🧠 GC Control: Blocks Unity's Garbage Collector from running while you are moving, swimming, or in combat, shifting memory cleanup to idle moments. A 45-second safety timer forces collection if you remain in combat for too long to prevent Out-Of-Memory (OOM) crashes.
⚡ JIT Warm-up: Pre-compiles heavy game methods (like combat calculations, building hovers, and inventory UI) on first spawn to eliminate action-based micro-stutters.
📊 Frame Budget Guard: Monitors your 1% Low frame times. If a heavy freeze is detected, it dynamically lowers Time.maximumDeltaTime to prevent the physics engine from entering a "death spiral" of lag (lag -> over-simulation -> freeze).
🔇 PhysX Warning Silencer: Blocks the famous Unity console warning flood: "Setting linear velocity of a kinematic body", which spams the log during structural edits and degrades game performance.
⏩ Skip Intro: Skips the logo screens on launch, getting you to the main menu 5 to 10 seconds faster.
⚙️ Engine Tweaks: Disables soft particles and soft vegetation, optimizes animation skin weights per vertex (1, 2, or 4 bones), and disables Physics.autoSyncTransforms for massive physics CPU savings.
📚 Loading Tips Injector: Replaces basic loading screens with over 40 highly informative, localized tips about VPO systems, mechanics, and optimization facts (available in English, Russian, Ukrainian, and Spanish).

⚙️ In-Game Configuration

VPO features a beautiful, built-in settings menu accessible directly from the Main Menu. You can toggle every single optimization module, adjust distances, change limits, and tweak settings on the fly without ever leaving the game or editing raw text files!

📊 Complete Configuration Guide

To help you configure the mod to fit your hardware and server setup, here are the descriptions and default values of all available configuration parameters.

⚙️ General & Engine Settings

These settings control the core optimizations, JIT compiler pre-warming, Garbage Collection, and frame budget protections.

Section	Parameter Name	Default Value	Acceptable Range	Description
1. General	Enable Debug Logging	`false`	true / false	Enables highly detailed diagnostic logs. Keep off unless debugging.
1. General	Settings Menu Hotkey	`F6`	KeyCode	Hotkey to open/close the VPO settings menu.
2. GC Control	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Prevents Garbage Collector sweeps during movement, swimming, or combat.
5. JIT Warm-up	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Pre-compiles critical methods on player spawn to avoid first-use stutter.
19. Engine Quality Settings	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Activates low-level Unity tweaks (disables soft vegetation/particles, optimizes bone weights).
19. Engine Quality Settings	Particle Raycast Budget	`1024`	64 - 4096	Limits maximum physics raycasts allocated for particle systems.
20. Skip Intro	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Skips the startup developer logos to get you to the main menu faster.
21. Frame Budget Guard	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Dynamically limits maximumDeltaTime during frame spikes to avoid freeze cascades.
21. Frame Budget Guard	Freeze Threshold (ms)	`28f`	16f - 100f	Frame duration threshold representing a freeze (e.g., 28ms is approx 35 FPS).
21. Frame Budget Guard	Throttled MaxDeltaTime	`0.045f`	0.02f - 0.1f	Physics delta time threshold applied during active stutters.
21. Frame Budget Guard	Normal MaxDeltaTime	`0.07f`	0.03f - 0.2f	Standard physics delta limit applied during smooth gameplay.

🎨 Graphics & Rendering Settings

Configure the custom GPU Instancing, background LOD generation, static batching, and high-performance texture compression.

Section	Parameter Name	Default Value	Acceptable Range	Description
8. Graphics Settings	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Enables custom overrides for shadows, reflections, and skin weights.
8. Graphics Settings	Shadow Distance	`50f`	20f - 150f	Maximum rendering range for game shadows.
8. Graphics Settings	Shadow Resolution	`512`	512, 1024, 2048, 4096	Resolution of the main shadow map.
8. Graphics Settings	Shadow Cascades	`1`	0 - 4	Number of shadow splits across distances. Lower values save GPU power.
8. Graphics Settings	Terrain Quality Multiplier	`0.7f`	0.1f - 2.0f	Precision multiplier for heightmap terrain error.
8. Graphics Settings	Enable Reflections	`false`	true / false	Enables screen-space reflections on water and surfaces.
8. Graphics Settings	Enable Bloom	`false`	true / false	Enables bloom post-processing glow effects.
8. Graphics Settings	Skin Weights (Bones)	`2`	1, 2, 4	Dynamic bones calculated per vertex. 4 is vanilla, 2 is optimal, 1 is max FPS.
22. GPU Instancing	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Enables instancing on highly repetitive world structures (flora, rocks).
22. GPU Instancing	Deduplicate Materials	`true`	true / false	Merges duplicate materials to maximize GPU instancing batch sizes.
23. LOD Generation	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Enables background runtime creation of LOD groups for high-poly objects.
23. LOD Generation	LOD1 Mesh Quality	`0.5f`	0.1f - 0.9f	Vertex reduction target for LOD1 (0.5 means a 50% target).
23. LOD Generation	LOD2 Mesh Quality	`0.15f`	0.05f - 0.5f	Vertex reduction target for LOD2 (0.15 means a 15% target).
23. LOD Generation	Min Vertex Count	`300`	150 - 5000	Minimum vertex threshold of a mesh to qualify for LOD generation.
24. Static Batching	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Combines static geometry (dungeons, POI, cliffs) inside active sectors.
24. Static Batching	Settle Cooldown (seconds)	`2.0f`	0.5f - 10.0f	Wait time after the last object spawns in a sector before combining them.
24. Static Batching	Auto Run	`false`	true / false	If enabled, static batching runs automatically. Otherwise, run manually with `F7` or the console command.
24. Static Batching	Max Batches Per Frame	`1`	1 - 5	Maximum sectors to batch per frame in Auto Run to avoid hitching.
24. Static Batching	Batch Now Hotkey	`F7`	KeyCode	Pressing this hotkey sets a base anchor at player coordinates.
24. Static Batching	Base Anchor Delay (seconds)	`10.0f`	3.0f - 30.0f	Seconds to wait after entering base anchor area before automatic batching begins.
27. Texture Optimization	Enabled	`false`	true / false	Activates background texture downscaling and GPU compression to save VRAM.
27. Texture Optimization	Downscale Multiplier	`0.5f`	0.1f - 1.0f	Texture scale factor (0.5 halving width/height cuts VRAM footprint by 75%).
27. Texture Optimization	Min Texture Size to Process	`512`	128 - 2048	Minimum resolution of a texture required to qualify for processing.
28. Terrain Mesh Cache	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Enables caching of heightmap meshes to eliminate biome-border stutters.
28. Terrain Mesh Cache	Max Cached Sectors	`64`	16 - 256	Maximum terrain sectors to hold in memory.
28. Terrain Mesh Cache	Memory Limit (MB)	`64`	16 - 512	Maximum RAM allocated for heightmap meshes before cache eviction triggers.

🏡 Culling, Bases & AI Settings

Fine-tune the distance culling limits, structural integrity caching, and low-power states of monsters and pets.

Section	Parameter Name	Default Value	Acceptable Range	Description
3. Distance Culler	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Puts distant game objects and entities to sleep.
3. Distance Culler	Creature Cull Distance	`80f`	40f - 200f	Distance at which non-player creatures pause their update logic.
3. Distance Culler	Piece Cull Distance	`100f`	50f - 300f	Distance at which static base pieces pause their update logic.
3. Distance Culler	Enable AI Throttling	`true`	true / false	Staggers physics and slows update frequencies for far-away monsters.
3. Distance Culler	Exclusions	`TombStone,portal_wood`	String (CSV)	Comma-separated list of prefab names to never cull under any condition.
4. Object Pooling	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Enables pooling for combat VFX to eliminate spawning stutters.
6. Light Culling	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Actively disables far-away light sources.
6. Light Culling	Max Active Lights	`15`	5 - 50	Maximum number of point lights allowed to cast light simultaneously.
6. Light Culling	Light Cull Distance	`60f`	20f - 150f	Absolute distance beyond which lights are turned off.
6. Light Culling	Max Shadow Casters	`5`	0 - 15	Maximum number of active shadow-casting lights allowed near you.
6. Light Culling	Shadow Cull Distance	`30f`	10f - 80f	Distance beyond which active lights have their shadow casting disabled.
6. Light Culling	Enable Light LOD System	`true`	true / false	Enables multi-stage Level of Detail (LOD) handling for lights.
7. Audio Optimization	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Enables caching and pooling for standard sound effect playbacks.
7. Audio Optimization	Total Pool Size	`32`	16 - 128	Total number of pooled AudioSource instances.
9. AI Optimization	Path Cache Distance	`2.0f`	0.5f - 8.0f	Distance threshold for caching pathfinding routes.
10. Piece Optimization	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Activates structural support caching and sleeping.
10. Piece Optimization	Support Cache Duration (seconds)	`5.0f`	1.0f - 30.0f	Time-to-live (TTL) for cached structural support values.
10. Piece Optimization	Smart Cache Invalidation	`false`	true / false	Instantly invalidates support cache of adjacent structures on collapse.
10. Piece Optimization	Disable Rain Damage	`false`	true / false	Completely disables rot and decay on wooden pieces from rain and water.
11. Particle Optimization	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Activates distance culling and lifetime tweaks for particle systems.
11. Particle Optimization	Particle Cull Distance	`50f`	20f - 100f	Distance beyond which active particle systems are paused.
11. Particle Optimization	Max Active Particle Systems	`30`	10 - 100	Limit on simultaneously simulating particle systems.
11. Particle Optimization	Torch Particle Lifetime	`0.8f`	0.2f - 2.0f	Reduces lifetime of fire particles to save GPU load.
12. Vegetation Optimization	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Enables adjustments for grass density and detail objects.
12. Vegetation Optimization	Grass Render Distance	`60f`	30f - 120f	Draw distance of grass details.
12. Vegetation Optimization	Grass Density Multiplier	`0.7f`	0.3f - 1.0f	Multiplier for grass density (0.7 means 70% density).
12. Vegetation Optimization	Detail Object Distance	`80f`	40f - 150f	Draw distance of minor detail meshes (twigs, small rocks).
12. Vegetation Optimization	Detail Density	`0.7f`	0.3f - 1.0f	Multiplier for detail mesh density.
12. Vegetation Optimization	Terrain Max LOD	`1`	0 - 2	Maximum LOD level of heightmap terrain. Higher values are lower poly.
13. Animator Optimization	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Adjusts Animator culling modes on characters based on player range.
14. Minimap Optimization	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Throttles minimap coordinate updates when closed.
16. Tamed Mob Idle Optimization	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Enables low-power state for idle, safe, tamed animals.
16. Tamed Mob Idle Optimization	Idle Distance From Combat	`5f`	3f - 30f	Distance from the nearest combat threat to allow sleep mode.
16. Tamed Mob Idle Optimization	Base Detection Radius	`30f`	15f - 60f	Search radius around the animal to detect a player base (ward/shelter).
16. Tamed Mob Idle Optimization	Wake Up Distance	`7f`	3f - 20f	Distance in meters at which players wake up idle tamed pets.
17. Light Flicker Optimization	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Disables flickering calculations, fixing light values to save GPU.
18. Smoke Physics Optimization	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Replaces heavy aerodynamics simulation on smoke and fixes memory leak.
18. Smoke Physics Optimization	Smoke Lift Force	`3.5f`	1f - 10f	Vertical lifting force applied to smoke particles.

🌐 Network & Sync Settings

Network tweaks, Steam uncap, adaptive throttling, and zone management. Safely supports crossplay servers.

Section	Parameter Name	Default Value	Acceptable Range	Description
14. Network Optimization	Enabled	`true`	true / false	Activates the network optimization suite (crossplay safe).
14. Network Optimization	Uncap Steam Socket	`true`	true / false	Boosts Steam P2P rate limits. Automatically disables on non-Steam builds.
14. Network Optimization	Steam Send Rate Min (KB)	`256`	Integer	Minimum allocated bandwidth rate (vanilla is 153).
14. Network Optimization	Steam Send Rate Max (KB)	`2048`	Integer	Maximum allocated bandwidth rate (vanilla is 153).
14. Network Optimization	Smart ZDO Sorting	`true`	true / false	Prioritizes players, portals, and ships during network synchronization.
14. Network Optimization	Adaptive Throttling	`true`	true / false	Intelligently drops updates to clients with poor connections to prevent choke.
14. Network Optimization	Smart Zone Ownership	`false`	true / false	[Server Only] Transfers sector AI control to player with the lowest ping.
14. Network Optimization	Zone Ping Threshold (ms)	`120`	50 - 500	Ping latency threshold required to trigger owner evaluation.
14. Network Optimization	Zone Ping Hysteresis (ms)	`30`	10 - 100	Latency difference required to transfer possession to prevent flickering.
14. Network Optimization	Zone Update Interval (sec)	`5f`	2f - 20f	Evaluator tick interval for checking ping latency across active sectors.

📥 Installation

Automatic (Recommended)

Install BepInExPack Valheim.
Install Valheim Performance Overhaul via your mod manager of choice.

Manual

Extract the BepInEx archive into your Valheim installation folder.
Place the ValheimPerformanceOverhaul.dll inside the Valheim/BepInEx/plugins/ directory.
Start the game.

🤝 Compatibility

Fully compatible with Jötunn and content expansion mods (Epic Loot, RtD, etc.).
Fully compatible with crossplay (Steam and Game Pass players can play together safely).
If you prefer the visual flicker of torches, you can disable Light Flicker Optimization in the settings.

CHANGELOG

Changelog

v5.0.0 - The World & Environment Optimization Update

This major release introduces new environment caching systems, background world generation, a robust PhysX warning silencing system, and highly requested stability improvements to the core physics and garbage collection loops.

New Features & Optimizations

Full localization support added for English, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish.
Terrain Mesh Cache: Implemented a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache for generated heightmap meshes. This helps eliminate micro-stutters when crossing zone boundaries. It safely invalidates affected and adjacent sectors on Heightmap.Poke to remain compatible with terrain deformation.
Chunky Pre-generator: Introduced a background world pre-generation queue that generates terrain tiles incrementally. Features configurable generation delays and minimum safety FPS thresholds to keep gameplay smooth during exploration.
Automated Base Anchor Batching (F7): Added custom Base Anchors. Pressing F7 saves your base coordinates, enabling automated static batching after a configurable spawning delay (BaseAnchorBatchDelay) when entering the base zone.
PhysX Console Warn Silencing: Added deep Rigidbody patches that block setting velocities on Kinematic bodies. This prevents the performance-degrading console spam ("Setting linear velocity of a kinematic body") during building or cell destruction. Supports both standard velocities and Unity 6 linearVelocity.
Interactive Loading Screen Tips: Integrated a custom tips injector that submixes over 40 informative, stylized performance and optimization facts directly into the loading screen.

Critical Fixes & Refactoring

A major issue that prevented the main module responsible for buildings from working has been resolved.
Corrected Smoke Aerodynamics: Fixed a bug in the smoke physics throttle where a shared static frame counter caused some smoke particles to freeze mid-air or prematurely extinguish fires. Caching, AddForce application (once every 3 frames), and mass updates (once every 100ms) are now handled per-particle.
Projectiles Excluded from VFX Pool: Removed arrow and weapon projectiles from the object pooling system to resolve network desyncs and floating projectile bugs. High-frequency particle impacts (blood, sparks, arrow hits) remain pooled.
Zero-Allocation Pooling Hot Path: Whitelist checks now compare pre-computed StableHashCode values directly, removing string operations on the hot path. State resets utilize compiled Expression delegates to bypass reflection and boxing.
Refined Garbage Collection Logic: Improved the GC Low Latency manager. It transitions the CLR Garbage Collector to LowLatency mode during heavy player actions (swimming, attacking, teleporting, moving) and gracefully restores it to Interactive when idle. Uses fast delegates and includes a 45-second safety timeout to avoid OOM crashes.
Vegetation Popping Correction: Restored the standard grass patch size. This resolves abrupt popping artifacts at chunk boundaries, leaving grass optimization to the highly efficient GPU Instancing system.
Throttled Minimap & Pin Updates: Skipped map updates when the minimap is closed or inactive. Dynamic pin recalculations are now throttled to run once every 4 frames to lower main-thread overhead.
Smart Zone Ownership Fix: Rebuilt the server-side zone transfer query to iterate through active characters instead of querying ZDOMan, correcting transfer errors and securing server stability.

v4.0.0 - The Ultimate Graphics, Memory & Physics Update

This is a massive overhaul to the core rendering, physics, and asset pipeline of the mod, bringing several major features and deep performance bugfixes.

New Features & Optimizations

GPU Instancing & Material Deduplication: Automatically forces Unity's GPU Instancing on highly repetitive world objects like grass, clutter, and rocks. It also merges duplicate material instances under the hood to maximize batching sizes and cut draw calls.
Asynchronous LOD Generation: Generates simplified LOD1 (50% vertices) and LOD2 (15% vertices) meshes using a customized Quadratic Error Metrics (QEM) decimator. The process runs smoothly in the background to avoid any loading screen freezes.
On-Disk Persistent Binary Cache: Added a custom disk cache system. Generated LOD meshes and optimized textures are saved locally to speed up subsequent load times. The cache is automatically invalidated when either the mod or the game updates.
Static Batching per Sector: Scans and combines unique static geometry (dungeon details, ruins, POI, cliffs) per world sector using Unity's native StaticBatchingUtility. Runs on a configurable settle cooldown after spawning to ensure stability.
Runtime Texture Downscaler & Compressor: Downscales secondary object textures and compresses them to save VRAM. It safely bypasses Unity's write protection by rendering through an off-screen RenderTexture, saving raw bytes to the disk cache.
Piece Sleep Manager: Puts static building pieces (WearNTear) to sleep after 2 frames of inactivity, freeing up CPU cycles on large, settled bases.

Critical Fixes & Refactoring

Physics & Tamed Idle Overhaul: Rewrote the TamedIdleOptimizer to actually disable colliders during animal idle mode (saving significant PhysX CPU cycles). Fixed a potential clipping bug by ensuring colliders are restored before making the Rigidbody non-kinematic.
Fast-Path Decor Optimization: Optimized the DecorOptimizer to use a native fast-path check. It now immediately exits if an object has no Rigidbody, completely bypassing expensive C# array allocations on thousands of static decorations.
Audio Pooling Bridge Optimization: Optimized the parameter-copying code inside AudioPoolManager. It now only copies expensive 3D properties if the sound is actually spatialized, saving costly C# to C++ (FMOD) native boundary transitions.
Safe AI Manager Cleanup: Resolved Unity pseudo-null reference issues in AIOptimizerManager during the cleanup of destroyed entities to prevent silent memory leaks.
Support Cache Cleanups: Added automatic queue clearing on scene unload to prevent null reference errors when switching worlds.

v3.1.0

Campfire & Smoke Fix: Resolved a conflict where campfires could extinguish under certain configurations.
Arrow Pooling Fix: Fixed a potential issue with dynamic arrow projectile spawning and networking.

v3.0.0

Decor Batching: Implemented chunk mesh combining for decorative pieces (Misc category) in a 32x32 grid to reduce draw calls.
In-Game Settings Menu: Added a built-in configuration UI accessible directly from the Main Menu.
Network Optimizations: Restructured and safely re-enabled several network performance tweaks:
- Steam Socket Uncap: Increases P2P data limits (solves lag on huge bases). Safely disables itself if not running on Steam (crossplay friendly).
- Adaptive Throttling: Intelligently drops updates to clients with high ping to prevent choking.
- Smart ZDO Sorting: Prioritizes players, portals, and ships during network sync.
- Smart Zone Ownership: Automatically transfers AI control to the player with the lowest ping in the zone.

v2.7.1

Smoke Patch Adjustment: Maintenance update for smoke physics.

v2.7.0

Light Flicker Optimization: Fixes light intensity, stopping per-frame shadow map rebuilds.
Smoke Physics Optimization: Replaces heavy smoke aerodynamics with a lightweight approximation.
Engine Quality Settings: Enforces low-level Unity QualitySettings tweaks at startup.
Skip Intro: Skips the Iron Gate and Coffee Stain logo screens.
Frame Budget Guard: Prevents physics Death Spiral during heavy load spikes.

v2.6.4

Maintenance Release: Small bug fixes and code cleanup.

v2.6.3

Welcome Screen: Added a welcome screen with a clickable Discord link.

v2.6.0

Refactored Code: Removed old buggy networking; refactored DistanceCuller and AsyncWearInit.

v2.5.1

Initial Release: First public release of Valheim Performance Overhaul.

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