RemoteChunk

Keep chosen zones loaded and running while you are away: animals keep breeding and growing tame, and spawner farms keep spawning. RemoteChunk is client-only: it works on vanilla dedicated servers, and nothing needs to be installed on the server.

Why

In Valheim, the players' games run the world, not the server. Every animal, smelter and spawner is run by the game of a player who is near it, and the server only passes the results along. When everybody leaves an area, it freezes. Your pen of boars stops breeding the moment you sail away.

RemoteChunk lets you anchor zones (the game's 64 × 64 m chunks). Your game keeps loading and running them wherever you are.

Features

• Anchor any zone with one key (N). Press it again in the same zone to release it.
• Breeding and taming continue in far-away pens.
• Enemy spawns per zone (optional): fixed spawners and nests in a zone keep spawning while you are away, for mob farms.
• No walking back after you join. Anchored zones are fetched from the server a few seconds after you join.
• Multiplayer-aware. If another player is in one of your zones, it pauses so the two games don't fight. It resumes once they leave, even if they teleported away.
• Zone list in the Configuration Manager window (F1). It shows each zone's status, distance, enemies spawned, animals born, and Spawns / Sleep / Wake / Rename / Release buttons.
• "Why aren't they breeding?" Under each zone, one line per kind of tamed animal: Breeding, or the main reason it stopped (Pen full, Hungry, Alarmed, No partner). The line also shows how full the pen is against the game's limit (4/5 in 10 m, young included), the young, and what each adult is doing. A tip below the list explains the limit, with the numbers for each kind you have. It uses the game's own checks.
• Zone borders on the ground (K), so you can see where zones begin and end.
• Sleep a zone to pause it without losing its name and settings.

Quick start

1. Stand in your animal pen and press N. A message shows the zone, and its borders are drawn on the ground. Press K to keep the borders on; if the pen crosses a border, anchor both zones.
2. Walk, sail or teleport away. In F1 → RemoteChunk → 4. Zones, the zone goes Starting → Simulating.
3. Come back later: the animals have kept living.
4. To stop, press N in the zone again, or Release in the zone list.

Controls

The keys are ignored while chat, console, inventory, map, menus or a text box are open, and can be rebound in F1.

Console commands (F5)

Settings (F1 → RemoteChunk)

Zone statuses

Good to know

• Smelters, kilns, fermenters, crops and beehives don't need this mod. They already catch up from timestamps when you return. The big win is animals (breeding, taming) and spawners.
• Breeding still follows the game's rules: animals must be fed (food on the ground near them), calm (no enemies around), have a partner close by, and the pen must not be full. The animal lines in the zone list show which rule is stopping them.
• Pen limit: a tamed animal stops getting pregnant when too many of its kind are near it, and young count too. For boars the limit is 5 within 10 m, so 3 boars with 2 piglets already fill a pen. Other kinds have their own numbers, which the zone list shows. For more animals, build a second pen at least that far away.
• Newborns can drop under a raised floor, where they're easy to miss. anchor list (F5) says where each young one is.
• Enemy spawns: only fixed spawners and nests are forced; random world spawns still need a player in the zone. Spawned monsters are run by your game and can attack animals and buildings in that zone. Spawns only happen in zones where you switched them on.
• Fetching a zone (after joining, or Wake) takes a few seconds. During that time the server treats you as being at that zone: your map marker (if visible) jumps there, and other players' moving things right around you may pause briefly. You are not moved.
• Ships: fetching waits while you own the ship you are on and another player is aboard or nearby, so the ship can't change owner mid-voyage.
• Several players with the mod: only one game runs a zone at a time; the others pause. Each player has their own anchors.
• What happened while you played: once a minute, RemoteChunk writes the zone list to BepInEx/LogOutput.log. It includes each zone's status, enemies spawned, animals born (with the change since the last minute) and its animals. Look there when something seems off.
• Fair play: keeping zones running remotely is an advantage over the normal game. On shared servers, check that the owner and other players are fine with it.

Compatibility

• Client-only. Install it on your game; the server stays vanilla. It also works when you host a world yourself.
• Requires BepInExPack Valheim. Recommended: a Configuration Manager for the F1 zone list (any BepInEx Configuration Manager that supports custom drawers). Without one, use the console commands.
• Made for Valheim 1.0.20.
• Other mods that change how zones load or who controls objects (e.g. chunk loaders, render-distance mods) may not mix well with RemoteChunk.

Known limits

• An anchored zone needs your game to have received it once per session. That's automatic with Wake zones after joining, or press Wake.
• Things another player creates in your anchored zone while you are away (newborns, drops, buildings) appear after you press Wake or walk past.
• The Enemies and Born counters reset when you restart the game.