Shadows Of Midgard

v2.0.9·Updated 2026-10-04

A stealth and perception engine for Valheim. Creatures see, hear, remember and doubt - vision cones, line of sight, noise, light, weather and camouflage feed a Stealth Brain that tracks each player se

About this mod Author’s original text

🌙 Shadows of Midgard

"You think the dark hides you. The dark hides nothing — it only makes them work for it. Step off the gravel. Wait for dark. Let the rain do the rest, and the draugr will walk past close enough to touch."

Shadows of Midgard replaces Valheim's perception with one that can be reasoned about. A creature has a vision cone with a real blind spot behind it, casts a real line-of-sight ray against the same layer mask the game uses, and hears you at a distance that depends on what you are wearing and how fast you are moving. It remembers where it last saw you, goes and looks, gives up, calls for help, and runs when it is losing. And it does all of that per player — it can be hunting your friend and completely unaware of you, crouched two metres away, in the same frame.

It does not fight the game's AI. It answers the questions vanilla already asks — can I see this, can I hear this — and lets vanilla decide what to do about the answer.

📜 Contents

  • ⚔️ Features
  • 🕯️ Light and Shadow Are Real
  • 🌿 Cover You Can Actually Stand In
  • 🔊 You Make Noise
  • 🎽 Armour Is a Trade
  • 👁️ Creatures Look, and Can Be Blocked
  • 🧠 Four Rungs, and a Memory
  • 👥 Every Player Tracked Separately
  • 🖥️ The Eye and the Bar
  • 🛡️ It Yields to Other Mods
  • 🍗 Instructions
  • 🛠️ How-To
  • 🥷 Actually Sneak Past Something
  • 🎽 Fix a Mis-Scored Piece of Armour
  • 🖥️ Set Up a Dedicated Server
  • 🐛 Read the Log When Something Is Wrong
  • ⚙️ Configuration
  • 🔒 The Lock
  • Server-Synced (Admin Controlled)
  • Local to Your Game
  • 🔌 For Mod Authors
  • 🔄 Upgrading
  • 🧩 Compatibility
  • 📦 Dependencies

⚔️ Features

🕯️ Light and Shadow Are Real

Your visibility starts from the light actually falling on you, and that light is the sun or the moon. Full daylight makes you easiest to see, a clear moonlit night adds well under half as much, and the dark of a crypt adds nothing. Put a wall, a rock face or a roof between you and the sun or moon and you are harder to see again. Weather joins in — rain and snow cut how far a creature can see you, and fog cuts it harder. None of this is a biome lookup or a time-of-day switch: it is the game's own sun and moon, exactly as bright as the hour and the weather make them. Torches, fires and forges are not counted; a torch in your hand is just one more item you are carrying.

🌿 Cover You Can Actually Stand In

Bushes and tall grass conceal you, sampled from the real vegetation around your feet rather than from what biome the map says you are in. Crouching helps everywhere, and helps considerably more when there is something to crouch in. The three stack: crouched, in grass, inside a bush is a genuinely different proposition from crouched on bare rock.

🔊 You Make Noise

Movement generates noise scaled by how fast you are going, and armour adds to it — plate is loud. Crouching removes most of it. Rain, snow and mist mask a good fraction of whatever is left, so foul weather is the sneak-thief's friend twice over. Hearing is omnidirectional and does not care about walls: a creature that cannot possibly see you can still hear you blunder past in iron.

🎽 Armour Is a Trade

Every equipable item in the game is classified on first launch by weight and material and written to a hand-editable JSON file. Heavy metal is loud and visible. Leather is quieter. Ghillie, forest, swamp, wolf, lox and mist-themed gear grant active camouflage when it matches the biome you are standing in. Modded armour is picked up automatically, and if the classifier gets a piece wrong you can correct it and mark it "Protected": true so your answer survives every future rebuild.

👁️ Creatures Look, and Can Be Blocked

A creature has a configurable vision cone — 120° by default — with a real blind spot behind it, and it casts a line-of-sight ray against the same layer mask vanilla uses. So a closed door works. A rock works. And critically, it keeps working after the creature has noticed you: an alerted creature re-checks line of sight on a bounded interval, which means

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_Valheim

File & checksum

Filename
Shadows_Of_Midgard-2.0.9.zip
File size
256.2 KiB