Multiplayer Vegetation Reducer

v1.0.4·Updated 2025-12-16

Reworks vegetation of each biome to use 50-80% fewer instances. Already explored areas are not affected. Pair with Multiplayer Location Rework for best results

About this mod Author’s original text

🪨🌲 Multiplayer Vegetation Reducer 🌲🪨

A performance-focused vegetation profile built using Expand World Data

What This Modpack Is

Multiplayer Vegetation Reducer is a preconfigured vegetation profile built using Expand World Data (EWD).

It does not add new gameplay systems or custom assets.

Instead, it uses Expand World Data’s vegetation controls to redesign how trees, rocks, cliffs, and environmental assets generate in your world.

The goal is simple:

  • Reduce excessive vegetation instances
  • Improve performance, especially in multiplayer
  • Preserve biome identity and sandbox freedom

How It Works

Valheim struggles when thousands of objects go through its networking. Particularly in multiplayer with clients from different countries or long-running worlds. Reducing MonsterAI is effective but boring. This modpack aims to reduce vegetation to make combat and building perform better.

Using Expand World Data, this modpack reshapes vegetation generation to:

  • Greatly reduce total instance counts
  • Scale up remaining assets to retain visual presence
  • Group vegetation intentionally instead of scatter spam
  • Occasionally mix assets to prevent biome repetition

The result is a world that is lighter, cleaner, and more stable, without feeling empty.

Vanilla Compatibility (Client-Side)

All changes are applied to your world’s generation, not to client behavior.

  • Players joining your world will see the changes automatically
  • No client-side configuration is required to experience the results
  • No custom assets or visual hacks are introduced

From the player’s perspective, the world simply feels different.

Design Philosophy: Emptiness Has Value

Valheim is a sandbox building game as much as it is a survival game

That means:

  • Open space matters
  • Flat, readable terrain matters
  • Not every area needs clutter

In many cases, emptiness is important:

  • It gives players room to build
  • It improves combat readability
  • It reduces visual and network noise
  • It allows large structures to breathe

This modpack embraces that philosophy when shaping your world.

Why Vegetation Density Matters

Certain biomes such as Meadows and Black Forest can reach extreme vegetation densities.

It is not uncommon for:

  • Dense forest areas to reach 5,000–7,000 vegetation instances
  • Frac objects and player tamed animals to crowd networking updates
  • Performance to degrade as your world ages

Reducing instance count at generation time is one of the more effective optimizations available.

Biome-Specific Notes

🌫️ Mistlands — Mist Is a Bottleneck

Some of the Performance issues in the Mistlands come from the quantity of mist volumes combined with high instance counts.

This configuration:

  • Reduces mist significantly
  • Preserves Mistlands identity via cliffs and Ygga trees
  • Makes the Demister largely unnecessary
  • Improves visibility and performance on many PCs

Most players find the Mistlands more enjoyable, not less.

🌋 Ashlands — Let the Heat VFX Carry the Biome

Ashlands performance is heavily affected by expensive heat distortion effects.

The effect is beautiful and can be used to remove a lot of instances without losing its vibe.

Instead of layering dense geometry on top of those effects, this profile:

  • Aggressively reduces clutter
  • Uses large silhouettes instead of dense detail
  • Opens space for combat and movement
  • Makes sailing near Ashlands coasts less frustrating

The biome remains harsh and dramatic while staying performant.

🏔️ Mountains — Fewer, Larger Forms

Mountains are redesigned to:

  • Remove many small rocks
  • Replace them with fewer, much larger formations
  • Preserve sharp “pointiness” through scale variation
  • Introduce rare unused visual assets for observant players

This often looks more striking while being cheaper to run.

🌾 Plains, Swamp, Meadows, Black Forest

Other biomes follow the same approach:

  • Lower total instance counts
  • Larger trees and bushes
  • Grouped vegetation instead of scatter spam
  • Occasional cross-biome assets for vis

Install & use Install: BepInEx plugin

  1. The archive from playbuff is the mod itself — usually a BepInEx plugin (a .dll or a plugin folder once unzipped).
  2. Recommended: use a community mod manager (such as r2modman) — pick this game, import the mod, and the manager sets up BepInEx and its dependencies for you.
  3. Manual route: install the BepInEx loader in the game folder, then drop the unzipped .dll or plugin folder into BepInEx/plugins/.
  4. Launch the game — the BepInEx console logs every plugin it loads; seeing this mod in the log means it is installed.

Mods with listed dependencies need those installed too, or they will not load. Options are usually changed in-game or in the plugin's config file. In multiplayer, the host and every client need the same mods installed.

Dependencies

Install these first, or the mod will not work:

denikson-BepInExPack_ValheimJereKuusela-Expand_World_DataValheimModding-YamlDotNet

File & checksum

Filename
Multiplayer_Vegetation_Reducer-1.0.4.zip
File size
137.6 KiB