v1.4.12 — the bat was never really there

Valheim has exactly one flight, and it is the debug-fly flag the developers use to move around their own game. The Aswid's bat has always flown on it. What nobody had read closely is what vanilla does with that flag: it treats the player as not really present. Six methods act on it, and between them they meant a bat could not be seen, heard, woken for, or hurt.

That, a night-only restriction that had never once been enforced, and Skadi's spells finally paying into a skill.

Nothing could see the bat, and nothing could hurt it

The AI's sight and hearing checks both refuse a debug-flying player on their first line. The hunt-the-nearest-player fallback throws them away. Sleeping monsters will not wake for one. Both damage entry points drop every hit. So a bat could glide through a draugr camp untouched, and could not be killed if it tried.

The flag stays — it is the flight. It is now overridden in exactly the places that decide aggro and damage, and nowhere else. Two toggles under Aswid - Bat Form bring the old ghost back if you liked it: Monsters Notice The Bat and The Bat Can Be Hurt, both on by default.

Dying as a bat is possible for the first time, which needed one more fix: the form is now taken down properly on death instead of leaving the player floating on respawn.

And everyone else saw a man walking

Debug fly has two halves: a local field the flying player's own physics reads, and a networked value every other client reads. Only the first was ever written. A bat flew on its own screen while walking, falling and swimming on everybody else's. Both are written together now.

The daylight restriction had never been in effect

The bat is meant to answer only at night until The Elder falls, and the progression table has said so from the start — but nothing ever read the flag. It is enforced now, with a message rather than a silent refusal, and a night-only bat caught by the sunrise is put back into its body rather than flying on until dusk. Killing The Elder still lifts the restriction for good.

The bat has a speed slider

Flight Speed under Aswid - Bat Form, a multiplier from 1 to 3 on the game's own flight speed. It scales movement the game has already computed, so the acceleration, the ease-off and the standstill at zero input all feel the same — only the ground covered changes. Holding the run key still doubles it on top. Local to your own bat.

Skadi's spells raise Elemental Magic

They never could. Every one of Skadi's casts builds its damage by hand and left the skill field unset, and vanilla's skill code returns immediately on an unset skill — so the experience was not small, it was structurally impossible.

The Cold Spell and all three dragon breaths now pay out through vanilla's own path: nothing for a shot into a hillside, and one cast's worth however many shards it throws, so a ten-shard burst is not worth ten casts. The Frost Aura earns a fraction of a cast per tick that actually burned something, once per tick rather than once per enemy, so a pack does not take the skill to cap in one fight. Both numbers live under Skadi - Elemental Magic Skill and either can be set to 0.

The dragon forms' melee deliberately stays on Unarmed, where it already was, and the Crystal Golem stays a hammer piece paying Building.

Reset Progression on the Race Menu Ward did nothing

The button cleared a console-only debug override — a value that is empty at every launch and that the Ward never writes — and never touched either of the two things the Ward actually stores, the claimed tier and the progression mode. It then reported the unchanged current tier back as the result, which is why it always looked like it had reset you to the tier you were already on.

It now gives back the tiers claimed with boss relics, leaves the mode alone (personal stays personal), and in world mode says there is nothing to reset instead of pretending. The relics are not refunded.

Shipped in the same build: v1.4.13, Valheim 1.0

The version bump to Valheim 1.0 went out with the same commit. On its own it is one line of changelog and a great deal of nothing visible — and then 1.0 turned out to have quietly broken the Bone Servants, the Aswid's blood brews and the faction merchants' shop window, which is what v1.4.15 and v1.4.18 are largely about.