Tides

Bring Valheim's oceans to life with realistic tides.

Adds a tidal system to Valheim. The sea rises and falls nearly twice per day, transforming shorelines and introducing new gameplay opportunities and challenges for exploration, sailing, building and survival.

Features

• Simulation of periodic tidal cycle based on a real-world frequency.
• Nearly two high tides and two low tides per day, with a full cycle lasting approximately 12 hours and 25 minutes of Valheim daytime.
• As in real life, the tides shift slightly each day, creating a dynamic and ever-changing environment.
• Naturally emerging gameplay opportunities, such as building ports and docks, deciding when to sail rivers, where to leave boats, and how to traverse swamps.
• Swamp movement system restores vanilla movement behavior and balancing during low tide.
• Fully multiplayer compatible, with tides synchronized across all clients.
• Easily added or removed from existing worlds, no need to start a new game.
• Patch 1.1 - Added tide interaction for water lilies and cattails, bringing more life and natural variation to shorelines, creeks, and waterways.

Screenshots

Gameplay

Sailing & Exploration

Landing on an unfamiliar shore now requires planning.

A beach that is deep enough to dock at high tide may become dry land by the time you want to leave, leaving your ship stranded until the water returns.

Likewise, shallow rivers or narrow channels may only be safely navigable during favorable tides, encouraging players to plan voyages around the changing sea level.

Building

Waterfront settlements become more interesting to design.

Ports, docks and boathouses should be built with changing water levels in mind. A harbor that works perfectly at high tide may become unusable at low tide with insufficient depth.

Swamps

Swamps are the biome affected the most. This creates two distinct gameplay experiences depending on the time of the tidal cycle.

High tide floods the swamp, making traversal on foot challenging, but - this also opens up a new and exciting opportunity for brave vikings to try and navigate the swamp by raft or boat.

Low tide exposes more terrain, which on its own would trivialize the swamp, but the ground that is frequently submerged in water is peaty and muddy, making movement through swamps just like in the vanilla game.

Installation

Install with your preferred mod manager or manually place the mod into your BepInEx/plugins folder.

Compatibility

Tides should be compatible with any mod that doesn't directly modify ocean water levels and even with mods that modify ocean waves.

If you encounter any issue, let me know!

About

Changelog

v1.2.1

Added

• Full Support for distant water LODs.
• Distant ocean surface now follows the tide level, eliminating visible height mismatches between nearby and distant water.

v1.2.0

Added

• Automatic synchronization of configuration values between servers and clients.
• Configurable tide settings:
  • Tide amplitude
  • Base sea level
  • Tide speed multiplier
• Configuration can now be changed in-game using Configuration Manager or by editing the config file.

Changed

• Server configuration is now authoritative in multiplayer.

v1.1.0

Added

• Support for dynamic shoreline vegetation during tides.
• Water lilies now dynamically follow the tide level.
• Cattails now better match the water level during both high and low tides.

v1.0.3

Changed

• General compatibility improvements.
• Internal cleanup and code improvements.

v1.0.2

Changed

• Updated mod structure and documentation.
• New README.

v1.0.1

Fixed

• Fixed multiplayer-related conditions.

v1.0.0

Added

• Initial release.
• Dynamic tidal system with realistic semi-diurnal tides.
• Configurable tide cycle.
• Water level changes affect gameplay and exploration.
• Multiplayer support.