Merki

Merki

Everyone is on everyone's map, and the server is the one that decides. When somebody dies,

their grave shows up on your map too.

The name is Old Norse merki: a mark, a sign, a banner. That is what it puts on the map:

where everyone is, and where somebody fell.

Why

Valheim already has position sharing. It is a checkbox on the map, and every player answers

it for themselves.

The problem is not that people hide. It is that hiding is indistinguishable from everything

else. Someone who unticks that box does not vanish with an announcement - they just are not

on the map, which looks exactly like being out of range, or dead, or logged off, or standing

somewhere nobody has explored yet. On a server where the whole point is playing together,

the one piece of information that tells you whether to go and look for somebody is a setting

each person can silently turn off, and nobody else can see the state of.

Merki moves that decision to the server. Not by asking nicely - by taking the answer out of

the client's hands, at the place the game stores it.

How it actually works, and why it has to be the server

Worth writing down, because it decides the shape of the whole mod.

A client reports in to the server every two seconds with its position and a flag saying

whether it is sharing that position. The position is sent every time regardless of the

flag - the server needs it for other reasons and does not care what the checkbox says. The

server stores both, and then builds the list it broadcasts to everybody, copying each

player's position into that list only if their flag says yes.

So the hiding happens on the server, using a fact the client supplied. Merki overwrites that

fact the moment it arrives. The client is never consulted again, and there is nothing to

work around: unticking the box still sets a bool, that bool still travels, and the server

still throws it away.

This is also why a client-side version of this mod is not a weaker version. It could not

force anybody onto the map, because the list a client receives carries no map position for

a player who is hidden. The one thing a client does get is the world around it: the game

streams everything in the few zones near you, other players included, so somebody close

enough to see is on your connection either way. Past that, the player list is the only

thing carrying a position, and the server writes it.

Merki leaves each player's own answer to the checkbox alone. The server's rule is applied on

top of it and never saved over it, so a server that turns the rule off, or drops the mod,

hands everyone back the choice they had made.

Scope: the map does not have to show the whole world

Because the server is deciding, it can decide per person. Two settings, off by default,

which combine:

• Range - only players within so many metres appear on your map.
• SameBiome - only players in the same biome as you.

With both off, the server broadcasts its own untouched player list and Merki is only doing

the forcing. With either on, the list is built once per recipient, which is the honest cost

of the feature: the same list has to say different things to different people, so it cannot

be one broadcast any more.

The reason to do this on the server rather than letting each client hide what is too far

away: a rule the server states and does not enforce is exactly the thing this mod exists to

stop being. If every position is on the wire, anybody running their own build sees the whole

server and the scope is decoration.

Two limits worth knowing before picking a number. Positions are reported every two seconds

and the list goes out every two seconds, so the edge lags by a few seconds of travel: a few

steps on foot, tens of metres on a mount or a ship. And a Range smaller than the area the

game streams around you hides nearby players from the map, not from your connection.

Death marks

The game already pins your own death on your own map. Merki puts it on the other players'

maps as well, with the