4Game

Just had an offer we placed for a house accepted today, and today has been INSANE. My stress and anxiety is through the roof and I thought answering questions about the Valheim code would be an engaging distraction.

Me: Unity Developer who started playing Valheim months ago and saw some Quality Of Life improvements that could be made, then ranted about some inefficient code that was slowing the game down, and I've been working on stuff for a while now. Have some mods up on NexusMods (Search UnbridledGames on there) but I haven't updated them in a long time because I've been working on a mod manager that would handle easy installs, upgrades, and version management, something the Nexus Mods manager software didn't do (much to my chagrin, as I uploaded some updates, and people's mods started breaking left and right. I assumed their manager would handle the updates. Nope!). Since then I've fallen down the rabbit hole making mods I've not found the time to release. Hoping maybe this post kicks me in the butt enough to get the interest there to release the rest of them.

I've been deep diving the code for months now, and have a personal hatred of the spread of misinformation. When I see people posting rumor or guesses that I know is not true, I try and chime in, but, that's really time consuming, especially answering the same thing 20 times.

So if you have any questions about the mechanics of the game, how a certain thing works, why something works a certain way (or doesn't), the best way to achieve X, or anything related to the internals of the game, I'll do my best to give the most honest and complete answer I can. Any answers I'll give I'll tag as spoilers, because I'm sure a lot of people might not want to know the answers to some of the questions that may be asked here.

No, I do not work with or for Iron Gate, and am purely doing this out of my dislike for misinformation, and my crushing anxiety over this home purchase and all the nightmares that go along with that and me needing something to focus my energy on. Digging into the code to provide an answer to an obscure question is the perfect way to distract my brain.

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I'll start it off with an answer to some misinformation I've seen floating around. The Maypole. I see a lot of posts about it's range, and how it's small, and/or how it's smaller than a campfire etc. ALL comfort items have the same range. In fact, comfort items do not have a range that can even be set. When calculating your comfort level, the game searches for and grabs the highest comfort level item from each category that is within 10m of your avatar.

The reason it probably seems small is that 10m is from your avatar, to the "position" of the comfort item, which is a point in space and has nothing to do with the size of the item. Since the maypole is enormous, it probably FEELS like the distance is smaller, because even though you are 8m away from it, you might still be really close to an arm. The "position" point for the maypole is the center of the bottom of the post. For the player its the center of bottom of the feet. You'll get the most "range" from the maypole by placing it at the same height as the surface your avatar stands on.

Also a note that will likely apply to a lot of answers. Distances. When I reference distance, such as the 10m range for comfort items, the internal range is different than the range listed for build pieces for some reason. The 2m pole? It's actually 4m long internally. The 1m pole is 2m long.

A standard floor tile is actually 2m x 2m. So when I say the range of comfort items is 10m, that means it's actually only 5 "1m beams" or 5 floor tiles distant.

Want the most of your comfort items? Make sure they are all within 5 floor tiles or 5 1m beams of when you're resting.

Speaking of resting. Sitting? It's just an emote. I've seen it suggested to sit so that you will get the rested buff faster. Has no effect whatsoever. Though that's a good idea for a mod.

So, distract me from this anxiety… what do ya'll want a definitive code-based answer to regarding Valheim?