v1.4.24 — the purple smoke, and eight other things that were silently missing
Players running certain magic mods kept reporting purple smoke around a Skeleton's burning skull. Chasing it turned up something larger than one bad effect: the mod asks the game for things by name, and nine of those names are not in Valheim at all. Each one failed without a word, which is why an item promised since 1.4 had never once dropped and a whole attack had never made a sound.
The purple smoke
From Moder on, a Skeleton wears a Fire Aura that burns anything within five metres. It tried to
show itself by borrowing particles from a prefab called vfx_smoke, and failing that,
vfx_surtling_death.
Neither of those exists in Valheim. There is no vfx_smoke, and the surtling has no death effect
under any spelling. So in a plain install both lookups came back empty and the aura has never been
visible to anybody — it burned things, invisibly, and nobody noticed because the burning skull
above it holds the eye.
A name the game does not use has no game asset to lose to, which makes it a free slot for any mod that ships one. Magic Supremacy ships one. The lookup landed on a child node inside one of that mod's creatures, carrying a weapon trail on an emissive shader — and the aura sprayed that through a 4.5-metre sphere centred on the player, on every client that could see the skeleton.
The aura now draws nothing, on purpose, which costs it nothing it ever had. Its damage, radius and tick are untouched.
The same shape of bug is available to any mod that resolves a name the base game does not define, and it will always look like the other mod's fault. Every name this mod asks for has now been checked against Valheim's own asset manifests: 63 lookups, none unresolvable.
Human Meat exists now
The Bonemass tier has promised Human Meat since 1.4, and this wiki has described it in detail. Two places in the mod looked the item up by name and nothing ever created it, so the drop never happened and the "fatal to the living" warning never fired. The page was right about the intent; the mod had no item behind it.
It is a real item now. A player who dies inside your death aura leaves a piece behind — yourself included — and only a Draugh can stomach it. It takes Blood Pudding's own nourishment, with that pudding's stamina folded into health, since a Draugh has no use for stamina and would otherwise be paying full price for half a meal.
See Draugh → Undead Fortitude.
A Draugh's parry was throwing an error
The poison splash on a successful parry asked for an effect that does not exist and handed it straight to the game without checking. Every parry inside the window failed at that line — and took the North Wind frost nova that runs immediately after it down as well. Both work now.
The Fenrir forms had no voice of their own
Every form's sounds were looked up by name, and most of those names are not in the game. The fallback chains hid it: ask for three sounds in order and the first that exists wins, so a Fenring had been swinging with a wolf's voice through a fallback nobody noticed. The Cultist's double claw asked for three dead names in a row and had never made a sound at all since the day it was written.
Each form now uses its own creature's sounds. The jump attack's impact also moved to where the jump lands, next to the damage, instead of firing before the dash while the form is still standing.
The Cultist says why its fire will not come
Holding Right Mouse as a Cultist with no eitr did nothing whatsoever — no flames, no sound, no reason given. The form unlocks at Yagluth and eitr comes from the Mistlands, so a Cultist meets that silence before it ever meets the fire. It now tells you the flames want eitr.
The gap is not a bug and it closes with a meal rather than a boss, but nothing had ever said so. Fenrir → Fire breath has the numbers.
Howl, in every form
The howl key only ever worked for the Fenring and the Cultist. As a wolf or an Ulv it did nothing — the classes never read it. All four howl now.
The wolf performs its real howl animation and no sound is spawned alongside it, because the sound is already inside the animation: the clip fires an event partway through holding the howl, and the game plays it there. That is why it lands at the moment the animation means it to, rather than the moment a key was pressed.
The Ulv animates a howl of its own but carries no sound with it — same family, same rig, different wiring — so it gets one played over the animation.
The Fenring and the Cultist have no howl of their own in vanilla — not one clip among their nineteen and eighteen — so they keep their taunt animation and borrow the wolf's voice.
Smaller, and still worth knowing
- Transformations have their covering puff back. The Fenrir's, the Skadi's and the Trenta's Muspell all asked for a smoke effect under a name with no size on it, and vanilla only ships the sized ones. The Muspell had no covering effect at all; the other two had their sparks and nothing else.
- The Aswid's Mist Form finally has an effect. Going in and coming out both played nothing. They now use the wraith's own dissolve, which reads as mist and comes from the same creature the form already borrows its body from. Dominating a creature with a thrall was silent too.
- The Aswid's status effects and its Bat Form entry have icons again. They pointed at a bat trophy, and Valheim has no bat trophy.
- Form sounds no longer write into your world save. Some of the game's sound prefabs carry a networked component, and spawning one the ordinary way leaves a persistent record behind — one per claw swing. They are spawned the way the game itself does it now, and leave nothing.
The last point was wrong. Those sounds never wrote into the save: the game deletes each one when it finishes. The change made for it stopped other players hearing the sounds and could play one twice, and v1.5.0 put them back the way the game spawns them.