Valheim

From ArchWiki

Valheim is a survival and sandbox game made by Swedish developers at Iron Gate Studio. It is currently in early access since 2nd February 2021 with no full release date announced so far.

This guide is related to the Steam version of the game, which has a native Linux build since it is built with Unity3D engine.

Installation

Without mods

Note: The official wiki says the Valheim Dedicated Server requirements are at least a 4 core CPU with 2GB of RAM and 2 GB of storage. In practice even with a relatively small world (~25 MB) and few players the server will require around 3 GB of RAM.

If you buy the game on Steam you will also have the Valheim Dedicated Server tool, but you can install valheim-serverAUR and edit /etc/valheim/server.conf to change the name, port, password, and world name of the server.

Start/enable valheim-server.service. The server will log into the journal.

If you want to import the world you played previously, you should find your data in ~/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/worlds_local or /path/to/SteamLibrary/steamapps/compatdata/892970/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/LocalLow/IronGate/Valheim/worlds_local when using Proton.

This server uses its own configuration directory at /opt/valheim-server/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/worlds_local

The default port is 2456.

With mods, BepInEx client and server

BepInEx is a plugin/modding framework for Unity games.

Due to an issue with stripped DLLs, the release from the BepInEx page cannot be used.

Denikson's pack contains the fixed DLLs. Download the zip manually, as using the Windows only Thunderstore Mod manager will not be covered here. This will work only with the native version, not when launching via Proton.

In the zip, there is folder BexInPack_Valheim, unpack its contents to the root folder of Valheim, so you have BenInEx folder and start_game/server/bepinex.sh in the same folder as valheim.exe.

Make the start_game_bepinex.sh executable and in Steam go to the game's properties and set the game's launch arguments to: 

./start_game_bepinex.sh %command%

And start the game, you should see in the top left corner that one plugin is loaded and the bottom right corner should have information that Valheim is modded.

Now you can download mods and unpack the .dlls to Valheim/BepInEx/Plugins.

Server

Note: The following instructions might be possible with valheim-serverAUR, but pointing it to that binary failed.

For the server, you will need to have Valheim Dedicated Server tool installed (available in Steam), unpack the same Denikson's pack to the root of a dedicated server. Edit the start_server_bepinex.sh and edit the name, password, etc... parameters.

Run the script and the server should create BepInEx/config/org.bepinex.valheim.displayinfo.cfg.

Some mods will require the .dll to be in the plugin folder on both the client and server.