Feylight Bloom — development preview

A standalone, client-local Valheim mod for the native fey light garland. Built against Valheim 1.0.20 and BepInEx 5.4.23.5. Includes an original druid-themed control panel, custom title and matching controls.

Open /fey in chat. If another mod already registered that name, use /feylightbloom. Existing registrations are never overwritten. If both names are occupied, the mod logs the conflict and the config remains usable. Other mods that intercept chat independently may still conflict; no universal modpack compatibility is claimed.

Choose a named lighting mode and adjust:

• Glow: 0–4×, default 1.35×. Multiplies the modeled bulbs' original cyan emission without changing their hue.
• Illumination: 0–4, default 2. Controls the native shadowless point light independently from visible bulb emission. Native intensity is 1. Zero disables the fey scene light while the mod is active.
• Reach: 1–8 m, default 4 m. Controls the native light's range.

Apply saves your staged choice. Cancel, ×, and Escape discard it. Vanilla saves disabled enhancement and restores captured native material overrides and light settings. The open panel blocks player/chat/menu input and releases its short closing-frame guard afterward. The UI scales down to fit the window.

Five modes

Hearthglow is steady. Moonbreath is a slow pulse. Firefly Dance varies smooth twinkles between strings. Wisp Waltz staggers a smooth whole-string wave by position. Starlit Shimmer combines gentle fades. Animated modes fade deeply enough to show a distinct dim phase at normal and brighter Glow settings. Firefly Dance uses separated soft peaks, and Wisp Waltz forms a traveling band when individual bulbs are enabled. Emitted illumination keeps a smaller modulation depth than visible glow. Native floating particles remain unchanged.

Individual bulbs (nearby) is an optional checkbox, off by default. Checked, it independently animates the 12 modeled bulbs on up to eight nearest strings within 20 m; Wisp Waltz travels along those bulbs. Other strings retain whole-string effects. Unchecked, all strings use whole-string effects. Hearthglow is steady in either setting and uses the original single-part mesh to avoid needless rendering cost. Native particle effects stay unchanged. Position-based phases are client-local, not network-synchronized.

Inspection found twelve disconnected bulb islands inside the combined native mesh. The mod derives a shared 13-part mesh at runtime (cord/leaves plus twelve bulbs), preserving all 1,100 vertices, 1,424 triangles, native shader, texture coordinates, textures and damage variants. Per-bulb emission uses cached property blocks. It adds no per-bulb lights and embeds no extracted game geometry or shaders. Unsupported mesh layouts or failed GPU-buffer reads fall back to whole-string effects.

Individual mode can add up to twelve draw submissions per selected string per rendering pass (up to 96 for eight strings), plus Unity overhead. The shared mesh payload is 43,744 bytes before Unity overhead. The nearby cap bounds this cost; it is not an FPS guarantee. Turning the option off restores the original mesh/material slots.

Scope and performance

Settings affect all verified native piece_FairylightGarland instances on this client, including existing instances when the mod enables and newly spawned instances. They persist in the BepInEx profile across worlds. Other clients may choose different settings. No world data, recipes, resource costs, gameplay logic, ownership, or networking is changed. Servers need no copy.

Inspection found one native point light; the mod reuses it and adds no light emitters. It temporarily attaches its own Valheim LightLod controller, retaining native graphics-quality light prioritization. Up to 24 nearest fey lights within 32 m are eligible; native quality settings may reduce that further. Animated glow is limited to 64 nearby strings within 40 m; farther strings use steady selected glow. Cached registration lists are selected every half-second, not global scene scans every frame. Existing scene discovery occurs only at startup/enable. Material property blocks are cached; shared materials and source prefabs remain unchanged.

Vanilla reset, disable and unload restore captured native settings and remove only owned controllers. No additional emitters or world cleanup are required. Mods that replace the garland hierarchy, edit the same property blocks/lights, or override input handling may conflict. Unsupported prefab structure is left alone. Actual surface lighting depends on rendering path, quality settings, camera distance and surfaces; sliders do not guarantee a given visible brightness on every system.

Installation and compatibility

Only BepInEx 5 is required; Harmony comes with the loader. No dependency on Tunnelheim, Fjordwright or another Smeags mod. Build with the .NET SDK / .NET Framework 4.8 reference assemblies and the locally installed game/loader references in the project file. dotnet build FeylightBloom.csproj creates artifacts/production/FeylightBloom.dll.

Install with a Thunderstore-compatible mod manager, or install BepInExPack Valheim and place plugins/FeylightBloom/FeylightBloom.dll inside your profile's BepInEx/plugins/FeylightBloom folder. The UI artwork is embedded; no loose texture installation is needed. The config is BepInEx/config/smeagsmods.feylightbloom.cfg. Remove the DLL to uninstall; no world migration or cleanup is needed.

Validated offline and in a disposable native Valheim 1.0.20 world with injected UI events at 1280x720 and 960x540. Version 0.1.1 adds continuous rendered time-series checks of every mode in both scopes through actual selector/Apply input and normal production scheduling; animation time and results are not forced. Physical keyboard/mouse, controller navigation, real multiplayer, arbitrary modpacks and other game versions have not been tested. The artwork has been approved; the user has not yet judged animation feel in gameplay. No live installation or publication has been performed.

License and feedback

Original code is MIT, copyright (c) 2026 SmeagsMods. See LICENSE and THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md. Game assets and runtime dependencies are not redistributed.

Feedback and bug reports on Discord.