SteadyFrame
Smoother Valheim without changing how it looks or plays: fewer hitches around large bases, less work every frame, fast portal travel. Successor of FastLoading.
About this mod Author’s original text
SteadyFrame
SteadyFrame makes Valheim smoother on the CPU side: fewer hitches
while you run around large bases, less work every frame, and fast portal travel. It is the successor of
FastLoading and contains all of it.
Its current benefits are shorter transitions and fewer streaming hitches. Average FPS depends on what limits the
scene: saving time in streaming and rebuilds gives little extra FPS when regular updates and rendering dominate.
The number of enabled optimisations is not a measure of the FPS gain.
The visual world, terrain and building support use the game's own objects and calculations.
Shortcuts either check against the game's own answer or leave that work to the game.
What it does
Portals and dungeons (from FastLoading)
- Prepares the destination's terrain as you walk up to a portal and loads it first during the transition.
- Creates the destination faster while the loading screen is up; distant trees and bushes fill in afterwards.
- Removes fixed waits (the 8-second floor on portal travel; 2 seconds between teleports becomes 0.5), with the
game's area and floor checks kept.
- Optional short fade into and out of dungeons.
- Multiplayer: with SteadyFrame or FastLoading on the host, the destination is sent while you walk to the portal.
Smoother play around large bases
- Skips the game's object create/remove pass while nothing it looks at has changed, and finds objects to unload
by zone instead of checking every loaded object.
- Rebuilds grass after the ground changes within a few milliseconds a frame, nearest first, instead of all at once
(up to a second at long grass distances). Behind a loading screen it still rebuilds at once.
- Keeps ground meshes when a building streaming in or out asks for a rebuild that would change no height.
- Remembers which building piece each collider belongs to when pieces check their support.
- Less garbage from collisions and world-object data.
Fixes
- A loading screen that never lifted after an object near the destination was destroyed without the game knowing.
- An error when a tar pit that had not finished loading was removed; log lines written every frame or on every
chest open.
Requirements
- Valheim with BepInEx 5 on Windows.
Install
- Close Valheim.
- Extract this archive into the Valheim game directory. The DLL should end up at
Valheim/BepInEx/plugins/SteadyFrame.dll.
- If FastLoading is installed, delete Valheim/BepInEx/plugins/FastLoading.dll. SteadyFrame contains it and does
not run while it is present. FastLoading's settings are carried over on SteadyFrame's first start.
Settings
Valheim/BepInEx/config/ru.ivest.steadyframe.cfg, all changeable with Configuration Manager:
- 1 - General: Enabled.
- 2 - Modules: Transitions, Object streaming, Terrain, Structures, Grass, Housekeeping (restart required);
Reuse collision data.
- 3 - Transitions: Dungeon fade, Teleport cooldown, Narrow range while loading, Defer distant nature.
- 4 - Multiplayer: Early object delivery, Send boost.
- 5 - Object streaming: Skip idle passes, Unload by zone.
- 6 - Grass: Rebuild budget (milliseconds a frame; 0 rebuilds grass the game's way, all at once).
- 7 - Structures: Support lookups.
- 8 - Terrain: Keep unchanged ground meshes.
- 9 - Verification: diagnostics that run the game's own computation beside each shortcut and log any
difference. Off for play.
Compatibility
- Replaces FastLoading; do not install both.
- If ValheimCommunityPatch or Valheim Performance Optimizations change the same game code, the overlapping part of
SteadyFrame stands down and says so in the log; the rest keeps working.
- With ValheimCommunityPatch, portal object-creation budgets and ready-zone loading remain active. VCP keeps its
own spawn queue and terrain algorithms; temporary loading-range narrowing stays off. Transition times can differ
from running SteadyFrame alone. These helpers follow the existing Object streaming and Terrain module switches.
- Only errors and such stand-downs are logged.
Install & use Install: BepInEx plugin
- The archive from playbuff is the mod itself — usually a BepInEx plugin (a .dll or a plugin folder once unzipped).
- 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.
- Manual route: install the BepInEx loader in the game folder, then drop the unzipped .dll or plugin folder into BepInEx/plugins/.
- 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.
Install these first, or the mod will not work: