TortalPortal Lite is a strictly server-side portal-network mod (GUID wubarrk.tortalportallite): every feature below runs entirely on the dedicated server, operating directly on the world's raw ZDO data instead of live game objects. Steam, Xbox, PlayFab, and full crossplay parties all get the identical experience, with nothing to download. Forked from the sibling mod Wonderland's own architecture, this is TortalPortal Lite's v1.0.0 — the first packaged release. A large internal R&D pass explored 263 possible portal mechanisms; the product owner picked exactly the 14 below to actually ship. Everything else was cut from the codebase entirely, not just disabled — down from 296 files / ~44.8k lines to 83 files / ~10k lines. A v1.0.1 follow-up added a 15th feature, BarrkBOT Portal Export, for admins who want portal data fed into their own tooling.

🚪 Features

👻 Phantom Anchor Fabrication

A destination that doesn't need a builder. An admin declares a named phantom anchor — Name, Position (X/Y/Z), RotationY, and a Void flag — directly in routing.json's phantomAnchors section, and the server creates and maintains it automatically from there. Void:true keeps it invisible and non-portal, a pure coordinate for other features to point at; Void:false turns it into a real, visible portal anchor players can walk up to. Either way, nobody has to physically carry portal materials out and build the thing by hand — Sealed Gates and Parked Terminals below both lean on phantom anchors as destinations that already exist the moment they're declared.

🔒 Progression-Gated Sealed Gate

A portal that only opens once it's earned. Declared in routing.json's sealedGates section (Name, Position, GlobalKey, Destination, SealedTag, OpenTag), a Sealed Gate resolves to nothing at all until a named global key — a boss defeat, or any custom flag the server sets — becomes true, then opens straight to its declared destination. The server re-checks that key on its own schedule rather than waiting on a player to interact with it: SealedGateEvalSeconds, in config section 11 - Routing: Schedules and Conditions, controls how often (default 1 second).

🩺 HealthScan

A standing check for the portal pairs vanilla itself leaves broken. Running on its own timer (HealthIntervalSeconds, config section 4 - Foundations: Health, default 30 seconds), HealthScan walks the managed portal network looking for two specific problems: odd-count same-tag groups — which vanilla's own pairwise-only pairing always leaves one member of permanently orphaned — and stale, dangling connections. It's deliberately narrow about what counts as broken: a portal whose one-way connection is intentional, like the Corpse-Run Gate below, is excluded from this report entirely, because that's a designed feature, not a defect.

🩹 Repair

Turns HealthScan's findings into fixes you can trust, and undo. Repair only ever acts on what HealthScan actually flagged: retagging an orphaned portal, clearing a dangling link. It's dry-run by default (RepairDryRunDefault, config section 5 - Foundations: Repair) — removekey tpl repair on its own just reports what it would do — and only removekey tpl repair --apply writes anything. Before it does, it automatically snapshots the world's portal state first, so removekey tpl restore <name> can always undo the whole batch if the fix wasn't what you wanted. If AutoRepair is on but Version Migration has the destructive gate closed, the scheduled --apply pass logs that it's idle once and then waits quietly, resuming on its own when the gate opens.

📊 Metrics

Know your portal network at a glance. removekey tpl metrics (config section 7 - Foundations: Metrics) reports total, connected, and managed portal counts, breakdowns per tag, per biome, and per builder, plus a position-based heuristic for transit counts and "top routes" across the world. It's a read-only view straight off server-side ZDO data — nothing to install to see any of it.

🚦 Version Migration

A boot-time seatbelt before anything destructive runs. At startup the mod checks two things: is this a Valheim build it has actually been verified against, and does the game's own portal-prefab registry look intact. If either check fails, destructive passes — specifically removekey tpl repair --apply — refuse to run at all rather than risk corrupting the world. An admin can explicitly opt back in via GlobalConfig.AcceptUnverifiedBuild, but that's a deliberate override, never a default.

🤝 Compat

One command's worth of answer to "my portals keep unpairing." removekey tpl compat reports which Harmony patches exist on the handful of vanilla methods this mod also touches, plus an explicit, named check against two specific sibling mods this server is expected to run alongside — Wonderland and GetOffMyLawn. Both were read directly: both patch ZDO.SetOwner, but both vetoes are scoped only to their own tracked objects (Wonderland's buoyant water items, GetOffMyLawn's ward-held building pieces) and neither ever fires on a portal ZDO. Confirmed: no interference.

🧩 Architecture

Not a player-facing feature — the frame everything above is built on. Under the hood, the mod runs a fixed subsystem tick order with disjoint write ownership at every stage — Census first (what portals exist), then Audit, then HealthScan, and on down the line — each stage reading what came before it and never fighting another stage for the same data. Nothing here has a console verb or a config key of its own; it's simply the reason the other twelve features can coexist without stepping on each other.

🪨 The Ore Gate

A perk written onto one specific portal, not a global setting. Declared in economy.json's oreGates section against a portal's own position, AllowAllItems (bool, default true) lets ore and metal — normally barred from portal travel — actually pass through that one gate, and an optional ExitDistance (float) extends how far in front of it a traveller steps out on arrival. It's a real, vanilla-client-honoured gameplay effect: the client just sees ore go through and a further step-out distance at that gate, because the data lives on that portal's own record, not in a global rule.

🚧 Server-Enforced Portal Caps

A per-player portal limit an unmodified client genuinely cannot bypass. Off by default (PortalCapEnabled, config section 155 - WildcardB: Portal Caps), turning it on caps each player at PortalCapPerCreator portals (default 6). Once a player is at the cap, any portal they build after that is removed about a second after it appears and they're told why — enforced entirely server-side against raw ZDO ownership, unlike a client-side placement limit a modded client could simply ignore. Portals that already exist are never removed: switching the cap on, or lowering it, only affects what's built afterwards.

💀 Corpse-Run Gate

Gear recovery without a bare-handed run back into danger. The instant a tracked player dies, the server automatically raises a private, temporary portal near their claimed bed (or the world spawn, if they have none) leading straight to their tombstone. This is a genuine one-way trip by design, not a round-trip pair — there is no automatic portal back from the grave to the bed.

Both ends always appear. A death is picked up from the tombstone itself, not from the list of connected players, so dying and immediately logging off still gets you a gate — it is standing when you come back, and that is when you are told about it. If a raise can't complete on the first try it is retried rather than dropped, and every maintenance pass afterwards checks both ends and re-builds whichever one is missing, in the same spot it was placed.

Both ends are placed as clear as the ground allows, and on the ground. The server scans outward from the tombstone (and from the bed) in 1 m rings for a spot with ClearanceMeters (default 10 m) of room — measured edge to edge from every tree trunk, boulder, building piece, portal and generated location, using each object's real collider extents rather than its pivot, so a boulder that spans eight metres around its centre counts as eight metres of boulder. Tiny props (mushrooms, flowers, berry bushes) only need 2 m. That figure is a preference: nowhere in a Valheim forest has 10 m of room from everything, so the search steps the requirement down and takes the closest spot honouring the best figure that patch of map can offer — never below MinRoomMeters (default 2 m) of real room, and widening its radius before it settles for less. The ground under the gate is the client's own heightmap recipe re-run on the server — biome blending and hoe/pickaxe terraforming included — and the frame's four corners and surroundings are checked so it neither floats off a slope nor wedges against a cliff. A death inside a dungeon opens the grave-side gate at the dungeon's entrance. A gate raised by a previous server run and forgotten is reaped automatically, so restarts never leave stray portals.

Both gates are immune to all damage — not de-targeted, immune. Valheim never lets an attacker apply damage itself: every source, a troll's AoE swing and a fire's damage-over-time included, ends by sending an RPC to whichever machine owns the portal, and a routed RPC that finds no object on the receiving machine is dropped on the floor. A dedicated server never builds objects where players are, so a portal the server owns throws away every hit aimed at it. TortalPortal Lite holds that ownership against the server's own 2-second hand-off to nearby players, refuses both ways a portal can be deleted (including the one vanilla applies from any client without checking who sent it), no-ops every WearNTear path that could hurt the piece, writes 1,000,000,000 HP and the full wear immunity set for the moments a client holds a copy, blocks hammer removal, and keeps a watchdog that puts health and ownership back and counts every time it had to. Every 5 minutes the log says both ends are still standing and what the protection refused.

The gate self-destroys once the grave is emptied or despawned. It no longer expires on a timer while the grave still stands: GateTtlMinutes (config section 41 - Targeted: Corpse Run) defaults to 0, meaning no limit, because a deep Mistlands or Ashlands corpse run routinely takes longer than the old 30-minute cap allowed.

📡 DestinationPrewarm

No walking through into a portal that just quietly stopped working. The instant any managed portal's destination changes, DestinationPrewarm force-sends the new destination data to nearby players' clients immediately, so a re-point is never followed by someone walking through into a "dead" transit because their client hadn't received the update yet. PrewarmRadius (config section 16 - Routing: Delivery Pipeline, default 30m) controls how far out that push reaches. It's always-on — a safety net, not an opt-in feature.

🚄 Fast-Transit Mode & Parked Terminal

A portal the server walks you through, no swirl required. A Parked Terminal is a managed portal kept permanently "unconnected" on purpose; instead of the normal portal-connection walk-through, the server itself detects a player stepping up to it and teleports them directly. Fast-Transit is the quicker variant of that same mechanism — a roughly 2-4 second fade instead of vanilla's roughly 8-second swirl — used once the destination zone is confirmed already generated and safe to land in; otherwise it automatically falls back to the normal, slower transit rather than risk a bad landing. Both are declared in routing.json's parkedTerminals section: Distant:false is Fast-Transit, Distant:true is the plain Parked Terminal base mechanism underneath it.

📍 Live Portal Markers

A map pin that can actually disappear again. Name any portal with a leading # in vanilla's own rename box — no client mod, just the game's stock UI — and it gets a labelled marker on every connected player's map, injected through vanilla's own persistent-event system. Rename the portal away from that # prefix and the marker vanishes with it; every other feedback surface this mod family uses is permanent once placed, which is exactly why this one exists. Off by default (LiveMarkersEnabled, config section 40 - Ux: Advanced Schemes) and kept to a small radius, since a persistent event's radius also touches nearby spawners and weather.

📤 BarrkBOT Portal Export

A live feed for your own tooling, not just your own eyes. Writes BepInEx/config/TortalPortalLite/barrkbot_portals.json — per-player portal counts, cap/over-cap flags, and world totals — atomically (temp-file-then-swap, so nothing reading it ever catches a half-written file), on a floor of once every 60 seconds. Built directly against BarrkBOT's own published ingestion contract: no HTTP, no webhook, no auth — purely a file on this server's own disk for BarrkBOT (or anything else you point at it) to read on its own schedule. Force an immediate rewrite any time with removekey tpl barrkbot. Config section 84 - Ops: BarrkBot Export (Enabled, default on; IntervalSeconds, default 60, floored at 60).

💻 Admin Console

Every command is typed as removekey tpl <verb> [args] into an admin's own in-game console (F5) or chat — this piggybacks entirely on vanilla's own remote-command channel, so driving TortalPortal Lite from in-game needs no client mod either.

🔧 Configuration

Settings live in BepInEx/config/wubarrk.tortalportallite.cfg, split into numbered sections, each entry documented with its own description and range right in the file. Edits are picked up live: the file is polled every 5 seconds and applied automatically — no server restart needed for a config change to take effect.

Server-Synced (Admin Controlled)

Local to Your Game

Declaration Files

Two of the features above aren't driven by the .cfg at all — they're declared directly in JSON files sitting next to it:

• routing.json — phantomAnchors (Phantom Anchor Fabrication), sealedGates (Progression-Gated Sealed Gate), and parkedTerminals (Fast-Transit Mode & Parked Terminal).
• economy.json — oreGates (The Ore Gate), one entry per upgraded portal.

📦 Dependencies

⚠️ Requires: BepInEx (the Valheim pack, denikson-BepInExPack_Valheim-5.4.2350 or newer) — and only BepInEx.

📥 Installation

TortalPortal Lite is a server-side-only mod — install it once, on the server, and every connected player benefits with nothing to download, on any platform.

1. Install BepInExPack Valheim (denikson-BepInExPack_Valheim-5.4.2350 or newer) on the server.
2. Drop TortalPortalLite.dll into the server's BepInEx/plugins folder.
3. Restart the server. That's it — no client install, no client config, nothing for players to do.