Valheim Enhanced Edition

More frames in big bases, with the game looking and playing exactly as it does without it. And, optionally, your builds and the world around them visible all the way to the fog.

Unofficial mod, not affiliated with Iron Gate. A performance and far view mod, not a ReShade preset.

What it does

Big bases are slow in Valheim mainly because the game draws every building piece as its own object. The mod draws the plain pieces of an area as one merged mesh per material instead. Each piece stays a real piece: you can still damage it, repair it, remove it, open it and build onto it. The moment anything about a piece changes, it is drawn the game's own way again. Nothing about the picture changes: we checked it frame by frame against the unmodded game.

It also removes some smaller per-frame costs, each producing exactly the game's own result:

• Merged buildings: one mesh per material per area instead of one object per piece. This is the big one.
• Object streaming: skips the game's 30-times-a-second check for objects to create or remove when nothing near you has changed.
• Water:
  • water surfaces update their animation without asking Unity for their material every frame;
  • the water height under floating things (boats, items, swimmers) is worked out with the per-frame values looked up once. Checked against the game's own heights 1.35 million times, with 0 differences.
• Zones: a faster check of whether a zone still holds objects before it is unloaded.
• Terrain: keeps more finished terrain builds, so zones you come back to don't rebuild their terrain from scratch.

Before and after, drag to compare: https://claude.ai/artifact/Eb7gJWfsmjmnZF6gJCUQh5

How much faster

Measured with the frame rate unlocked, same spot and same camera path, on an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K with an RTX 5090. In big bases Valheim is limited by the CPU, so on a slower CPU the frame times are longer and the gain in milliseconds is bigger:

On 2 and 4 cores, at low and high settings, and from 1080p to 4K it was faster everywhere, by 6 to 28%. How much you gain depends on how many building pieces are in view: big bases gain the most, and open wilderness little or nothing.

Island Castle world: castle build by Hjalmere (Nexus Mods). Used for the measurements and the video with thanks.

Installation

Install with r2modman or the Thunderstore Mod Manager; BepInExPack Valheim is installed automatically.

Manual install: put ValheimEnhancedEdition.dll in Valheim\BepInEx\plugins\ValheimEnhancedEdition\.

Multiplayer: client-side. Players with and without it can play together, on servers with or without it. Nothing is sent over the network. On a dedicated server it does no harm. The drawing features switch themselves off there, and the rest work as usual.

Console commands (F5)

Settings

BepInEx\config\com.chase.valheimenhancededition.cfg (r2modman: Config editor). Every feature has its own switch. The defaults are what we recommend.

Far view (experimental, off by default)

Far view shows your builds, the ground you've flattened, dug or paved, trees and rocks, and ships and carts far beyond the game's normal range, as far as the fog lets you see. Sail towards your base and it is on the horizon long before the game would normally draw it. Switch it on with perf far on (or Far builds / Enabled in the config).

• It draws simplified copies made from your world's save, with the game's own materials, so fog and lighting match. Detail drops with distance so that the error stays under about a pixel. Close up, the real pieces take over without a gap.

• It follows the weather. In thick fog or mist (the Mistlands, storms, night) nothing past the loaded area can be seen, so it goes idle there and costs nothing. It also watches its own cost and draws less far out if a scene gets too heavy.

• With RenderHeim installed, it follows RenderHeim's thinner fog and longer camera range, and leaves the trees and rocks inside RenderHeim's own range to it.

• Single player and hosts only (it needs the world's save). Joining someone else's server, it stays off.

• It keeps a cache on disk (BepInEx\cache\ValheimEnhancedEdition\far), at most 4 GB per world. A small world needs a few hundred MB; a big, forested one about 3.5 GB. Caches of worlds not played for 60 days are removed.

• The first visit to a world builds its far copies in the background (about two minutes in a big world, with some stutter meanwhile). After that they load from the cache. In a big world it uses about 1.5 GB more memory.

• Experimental:

  • it costs some frame time of its own, more with a high Simulation Distance setting;
  • about 2 ms a frame in a big world in clear weather;
  • small bushes and plants aren't in it yet.

  Please report anything that looks different from the real thing up close.

Known issues

• Far view is experimental and off by default. While it loads saved far copies from disk, or swaps their detail as you sail, you can get an occasional single hitch (about 15 to 50 ms). The first visit to a big world builds for about two minutes with some stutter. Leave it off if you notice it; the rest of the mod doesn't depend on it.
• RenderHeim: supported, but lightly tested so far.
• Far view in a big world uses about 1.5 GB more memory and up to 4 GB of disk.

Reports are welcome, with your BepInEx\LogOutput.log.

Compatibility

• Works with VPO, RenderHeim and most other mods.
• Next to another mod that merges or batches building pieces itself (PUP FPS, Valheim Performance Overhaul, Valheim Build Optimization with renderer batching on), this mod's merged buildings stand down, with a line in the log, and its other features stay on.
• With RenderHeim installed, this mod's far terrain stands down.

Like other mods, this marks your game as modded, as Iron Gate asks of mod authors.

1.1.1

• Fix: far forests no longer show up out over the sea or in the wrong place. Far view's saved chunks were laid out by the merged-buildings cell size, but changing that size while playing (the setting, or perf tune trying sizes) never reset far view, so chunks saved meanwhile loaded shifted in later sessions. Saved chunks now carry where they belong and wrong ones are rebuilt, and far view starts over when the cell size changes. Existing caches heal by themselves.
• Fix: felled trees and mined rocks leave far view. Their far copies are built again without them a couple of seconds later; at world load, far tree areas that changed since they were saved (felled while far view was off, or with an older version) are rebuilt once.
• Far trees follow the live trees' look, so mods that change tree materials (Seasons' winter, for example) show in the distance too instead of summer-green copies.
• Fix: a neighbouring piece no longer disappears for a second after you destroy, damage or hover a piece (reported on GTX 10xx and some AMD cards). Taking a piece out of its merged mesh now sends the area's whole index list to the graphics card, once a frame, instead of writing only the piece's part, which some drivers got wrong. New setting Merged buildings / IndexWrites: Full (default), Partial (the 1.1.0 way) or Rebuild.
• Fix: with FarLands' far buildings on, your base stays merged when you come back from far away. When FarLands hides a zone's pieces for its distant copy, the merge now hands them over and takes them back when FarLands shows them again (works with FarLands 1.0.3 to 1.0.7). Before, they came back unmerged.
• Far view uses far less graphics memory for distant buildings. On a big test base (Island Castle) far building meshes went from 345 MB to 51 MB, at the same frame rate. What can't be drawn from where you stand is released and read back before it is needed, and vertices on the card are smaller (20 bytes instead of 32).
• Far view's graphics memory budget follows what your card has free instead of a flat share of the card, up to 512 MB on Low, 1.5 GB on Medium and 6 GB on High, and it gives memory back when the game needs more.
• No increase in system memory use from these changes, measured at a big base and from a distance.
• Existing far chunks are rebuilt once.

1.1.0

• Far view on dedicated servers: with the mod on the server too, it sends the piece lists of distant areas (and terrain edits) to players with far view on, who build the far copies themselves. About 17 bytes a piece, at most about 64 KB/s per player while catching up; vanilla players are unaffected. Setting: Far builds / ServeClients (on).
• Far view for very big worlds: distant cells keep only a stub once drawn, vertices take 32 bytes instead of 60, far chunks get a graphics-memory budget (released farthest first), the disk cache is capped at a tenth of free space (16 GB at most), and beyond 1.5 km only a coarse copy is kept. On a million-piece test world: memory flat at about 11 GB (was past 20 GB and climbing), allocation 6 MB/s (was 229).
• New simplifier for distant buildings, Quadric (default): 68–80% fewer far triangles and 45–55% less graphics memory for them, at the same frame rate and with no visible difference. A quick Cluster copy shows first; the Quadric levels follow in the background at low priority. Far builds / Simplifier or perf simplifier cluster brings back the 1.0.1 method.
• Far view presets: Far builds / Preset (Auto by default) picks reach, detail and graphics memory by your graphics card, processor and free memory: Low, Medium or High. perf preset switches it live.
• Smoother loading: far view's own main-thread work is spread over frames, 1 ms at a time; its worst frames while a big world loads dropped from about 100 ms to about 50 ms. Less garbage while building far chunks.
• Fog: distant bases are drawn to a little past the fog limit, so they disappear into thickening fog instead of popping out.
• Debug views (public): perf viz pieces|cells|far|lod|foliage|off with a colour legend on screen, perf fps big, and a Debug views / CycleKey hotkey. With devcommands on, perfviz, perffps, perfsimplifier and perfpreset complete their choices with Tab.
• Fixes: far view as a server client no longer leaves areas at the edge of its reach unbuilt (about 200 on a big world were fetched again every session); pieces exactly on an area's edge are no longer lost.
• FarLands 1.0.3 and later draw far buildings of their own: switch them off ([Buildings] Enabled = false in ru.ivest.farlands.cfg), or bases are drawn twice. While they're on, the mod says so once per world (log, console, on screen); it never changes FarLands' settings.
• Existing far caches are rebuilt once (new format).

1.0.1

• Works with FarLands (Ivvty): far builds reach as far as FarLands draws land (up to 6 km), FarLands' forest replaces our far trees where it draws them, and our far terrain edits stand down while FarLands draws its own land.

1.0.0

• First release of Valheim Enhanced Edition (unofficial, not affiliated with Iron Gate).
• Merged buildings, faster object streaming, water, zone and terrain checks: more frames in big bases, with the game looking and playing as without the mod.
• Console commands to compare live: perf fps, perf on / perf off, one feature at a time, and perf tune to find the fastest settings on your PC.
• Far view (experimental, off by default): builds, terrain edits, trees, rocks and ships far beyond the normal range, as far as the fog allows. Single player and hosts. It goes idle while fog or mist hides everything past the loaded area (Mistlands, storms, night), and limits its own cost.
• Client-side; works with or without it on the server and for other players.