On a Valheim dedicated server, a boss kill belongs to the world, not to the people who were there. When Eikthyr dies, the world records a key, and from that moment every character on the server - including someone who joins next month with a fresh character - lives in a world where Eikthyr is dead. Raids get harder, some trader stock opens up, and the next stage of the game is in play for everyone. What does not transfer is the loot: the trophy, the boss drop and the power at the sacrificial stones are physical things that someone has to carry or claim. Most arguments on group servers come from people expecting one of these to behave like the other.
This post explains what is shared and what is personal, how to handle players who arrive late or fall behind, what a kill changes on the server, and how to take one back when it happened by accident. It assumes a running server; if you are not there yet, start with the Valheim dedicated server guide.
What a boss kill changes on the server#
Valheim tracks world progress with global keys: short strings stored in the world file. Each boss sets one when it dies.
| Boss | Biome | Summoned with | Key it sets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eikthyr | Meadows | 2 deer trophies | defeated_eikthyr |
| The Elder | Black Forest | 3 ancient seeds | defeated_gdking |
| Bonemass | Swamp | 10 withered bones | defeated_bonemass |
| Moder | Mountains | 3 dragon eggs | defeated_dragon |
| Yagluth | Plains | 5 fuling totems | defeated_goblinking |
| The Queen | Mistlands | Sealbreaker to open the vault | defeated_queen |
| Fader | Ashlands | Bells at the altar | defeated_fader |
The internal names are not the display names - gdking is the Elder, dragon is Moder, goblinking is Yagluth - and they are the names you type when you inspect or change keys, so it is worth keeping this table somewhere. The key list itself, and the commands that read and change it, are covered in Valheim global keys and setkey; this post is about what those keys mean for a group.
Because the keys live in the world's .db file on the server, three things follow:
- They survive everything except a world reset. Restarts, updates, mods coming and going and players leaving do not touch them.
- They are the same for everyone connected. There is no per-group or per-player progression in the vanilla rules unless you turn it on (see the section on
playereventsbelow). - They come with the world when you move it. Upload a single-player world where you killed Bonemass and the server will have
defeated_bonemassfrom the first start, whoever joins.
What a key unlocks is narrower than people assume. It does not unlock crafting recipes: those are learnt per character, by picking up the materials. It does not unlock biomes: you can walk into the Plains with no kills at all, and some people do, briefly. What keys mainly drive is the world's own behaviour - which raids can happen, some of the trader's stock, and a few things the game checks before it allows an event. The character still has to earn the gear.
What is shared and what is personal#
The split is easiest to see as a table.
| Thing | Shared by the world | Belongs to one character |
|---|---|---|
| Boss defeated (global key) | Yes | - |
| Raids the world can roll | Yes (unless playerevents) | - |
| Boss trophy | - | Whoever picks it up |
| Boss drop (hard antler, swamp key, wishbone...) | - | Whoever picks it up |
| Forsaken power | Trophy hung once at the stones | Each player activates it |
| Crafting recipes | - | Learnt from materials held |
| Map and explored area | Only via a cartography table | Each character |
| Skills | - | Each character |
The trophy is the part people get wrong most often. One kill drops one trophy. Hang it at its place at the sacrificial stones in the starting meadow and the power becomes available there for anyone: every player walks up to the stone and activates it for themselves. Nobody needs a trophy of their own for that, and a player who never went near the fight can claim Eikthyr's power the evening they arrive.
The boss drops are different, because they are tools rather than flags.
- Eikthyr drops hard antler, which makes the antler pickaxe - the only way to mine copper and tin early. A late joiner can be handed a pickaxe; they do not need the antler.
- The Elder drops the swamp key, which opens the sunken crypts. It is an item, so any player can carry one and open crypts with it. One kill gives one key, and one key is plenty for a group.
- Bonemass drops the wishbone, which finds silver and other buried things. Again a single item; whoever has it does the dowsing.
- Moder drops dragon tears, needed for the artisan table, and Yagluth drops torn spirit. These are crafting materials rather than keys to anything; a group needs a few between them, not a set per player.
Recipes are where late joiners feel the gap. A character learns to make bronze when it has held copper and tin, not because the world has killed the Elder. Hand a newcomer a stack of bronze and their bronze recipes appear immediately. That is the cheapest way to bring someone up to speed, and it costs the group nothing but materials.
Late joiners: three ways to handle them#
Every long-running group server gets one: a friend of a friend who joins when the rest are in the Mountains. A fresh character in a world where Bonemass is dead faces the full late-game raid list at their own base, an empty map, and nothing to craft. There are three reasonable ways to handle it, and the group should pick one before the person arrives.
Carry them
The fastest option. Give them a set of gear from the base, hang them on the existing Forsaken powers, copy the map with a cartography table, and let them join the group's current trips. They miss the early game entirely. For someone who has played Valheim before, this is usually what they want; for a first-timer it skips the parts that teach the game.
Let them replay the bosses
Most bosses can be summoned again at their altars with a fresh offering, and the fight drops a fresh trophy and boss drop. A late joiner with two experienced players at their side can work through Eikthyr, the Elder and Bonemass in an evening or two, learning each biome on the way. The trophy from a repeat kill is useful as a spare or a decoration; the power is already available at the stones.
The re-summons are cheap for the early bosses: two deer trophies, three ancient seeds, ten withered bones, three dragon eggs, five fuling totems. The later fights work differently - the Queen's vault is opened with a Sealbreaker and Fader is called with bells - so check the current behaviour on the official wiki before promising a newcomer a rematch with those two.
Give them their own raid table
This is what the playerevents switch is for. On a world started with it, raids are chosen from the progression of the player being raided rather than from the world's keys. A newcomer with no kills behind them gets the early-game raids at their base; the veterans keep getting the hard ones at theirs.
# Launch arguments: raids follow each player's own boss record-setkey playereventsIt is set at launch like the other world modifiers, so on a panel host it goes in the extra-arguments field on the Startup tab and takes effect after a restart. Each character keeps its own record of the bosses it was present for, which is what the raid picker reads. Mechanics of how a raid target is chosen, and which raid needs which kill, belong to raids and events on Valheim servers, which goes through them in detail.
Trader stock and the world's progress#
Haldor, the trader in the Black Forest, sells a fixed list of things, and in current versions part of that list is held back until the world has the matching boss key. On a standard server the check is made against the world's keys, so once anybody has killed the right boss the item appears for every player who visits him. That is a convenience for late joiners - the goods they could not earn yet are on the shelf - and an occasional surprise for groups who expected to unlock him themselves.
The exact item-to-boss pairings have moved between patches. Rather than trust a list that might be two versions old, check the trader page on the official Valheim wiki for the version your server runs, and remember that when the stock looks wrong the first question is which keys the world has, not which bosses the buyer has killed.
Haldor's location is also per world but has to be found per character: one player finding him does not put him on anybody else's map. A cartography table fixes that - one person writes their map to it, everyone else reads it - and it is worth building one at the main base early for this reason alone.
Raids: the part of progression everyone feels#
Global keys decide which raids the world can roll. A world with no kills gets only the early events. Each boss kill adds new ones to the pool, and the pool is shared, which is how a player who has never left the Meadows ends up with a late-game raid outside their first hut. Without playerevents, the raid picker uses the world's keys for everyone.
For a shared server this has two practical consequences.
- Killing a boss is a group decision. The day the Bonemass key appears, everyone's base becomes a target for the events that come with it. A player who rushes ahead on a Tuesday afternoon changes the threat level for the four people who were not online. Agree when the next boss goes down.
- Remote bases are exposed. Raids happen near a player who is near enough to a base. A solo player who built a long way from the main hall gets the same late-game events as the main base, with a fraction of the defence.
You can also turn raids down or off entirely with the raids modifier. -modifier raids less or -modifier raids none change the frequency for the whole world without touching anything else, and Valheim world modifiers and presets explains how those values interact with presets.
Undoing a boss kill#
Accidents happen. Someone summons Bonemass to see what the altar does, a visiting friend kills Moder on day three, or a test world gets promoted to the real one with the wrong keys on it. There are two ways to roll the world back, and they cost very different amounts.
Remove the key
The key is a single string in the world. An admin with the console commands available can list the world's keys and remove one:
listkeysremovekey defeated_dragonThat reverses the shared part of the kill: the raid pool shrinks back, trader stock that depended on the key disappears, and the world behaves as if Moder were alive. It does not take back the trophy, the dragon tears or the power already claimed at the stones. If the point is to make the group fight the boss properly, put the trophy and tears in a chest and agree not to use them, or delete them.
Two caveats. First, the key commands are part of the developer console, and on a vanilla dedicated server what an admin can run from that console has changed between versions - the devcommands explainer covers what works today, and the usual dependable route on a server is the ServerDevcommands mod. Second, the boss itself does not come back when the key goes. The altar is still there; summon it again when the group is ready.
Restore a backup
The blunt instrument. Restore the world from before the kill and the key never existed - but neither did anything else anyone did since that save. On a busy server that can be hours of building, smelting and exploring. It is the right answer only when the kill and the restore are close together, or when the world is genuinely broken in other ways.
On RE:NODE, the cheap insurance is to take a manual backup before each boss fight and lock it, which keeps it out of the rotation that replaces older backups. If the fight goes wrong in a way you want to reverse, it is one button on the Backups tab; if it goes well, unlock it and let it age out. The backups section of the guides shows where the lock is. The wider case for off-machine copies is in Valheim server backups and world corruption.
Rules that keep a group happy#
Most fallings-out on group servers are not about the game's mechanics at all; they are about one person changing the world for everyone without asking. A few house rules, written in the group's chat before the first boss, prevent nearly all of it.
- Bosses are fought by appointment. Nobody summons a boss alone or without saying so. The kill sets the world's key for everyone, including the raids at their bases.
- Trophies go to the stones the same night. Hang it, then everyone online claims the power. Anyone who was not there claims it next time they log in.
- Boss drops live in a shared chest. The swamp key and wishbone are one-per-kill tools; a known place for them stops "who had the key" arguments.
- Newcomers get a kit and a choice. Ask whether they want to be carried or to replay the bosses, and plan accordingly. If you did not turn on
playereventsat the start, warn them that their first base will see the world's raids. - One person owns the console. Admin access is a small list in
adminlist.txt, and key changes are announced. Valheim admin console commands lists what an admin can do without cheats.
A schedule helps the first rule. Groups that play two evenings a week often keep boss nights for the evening with full attendance, which also happens to be when the fight goes best. Valheim does scale enemy health and damage with the number of players nearby, but a full group with good food and a plan still has the easier evening.
The final thing worth agreeing is what happens after Fader. The current endgame stops there, and a world that has every key has nothing left to unlock. Some groups keep going as a building server; others archive the world and start fresh, which keeps the characters and their gear - resetting a Valheim world without losing characters covers that move.
Troubleshooting#
A newcomer says they cannot craft things everyone else can. Recipes are per character and are learnt from materials held. Hand them the materials once and the recipes appear.
A boss power is missing for one player. They need to activate it themselves at the stones. The trophy only has to be hung once, but each player has to interact with it.
The world is getting raids nobody expected. Someone killed a boss. Check the world's keys with listkeys and look for a new defeated_ entry. If it was a mistake, removekey it.
Haldor is not selling something the wiki lists. The world does not have the key that item needs yet, or the server runs a version where the list is different. Compare the server's version with the wiki page's.
The world reverted to before a boss fight. Somebody restored a backup, or the server stopped uncleanly and lost the last save interval. The boss key, like everything else, is only safe once a save has written it - check the log for World saved after big moments.
Moving the world to a new server lost our progress. It did not, if the world files moved intact. The keys are inside the .db. If the new server generated a fresh world instead of loading yours, the -world name did not match the file.
FAQ#
If one player kills a boss, does everyone get credit?
The world gets the credit: its key is set for everyone, and so are the raids and trader stock that follow. The loot does not spread. One trophy and one boss drop fall to the ground, and whoever picks them up has them. The power, once the trophy is hung at the stones, is available to every player who goes and activates it.
Can a new player join a server where every boss is dead?
Yes. The character can join any world at any time and will find the full late-game raid list in play unless the world uses playerevents. Give them a starting kit and let them claim the existing Forsaken powers, or take them through repeat boss fights at the altars.
Do boss kills carry over to another world?
No. Keys are stored in the world, not the character. A veteran who joins a fresh world brings their gear and skills, but the new world has no keys until its own bosses die.
Can we fight a boss again?
Most of them, yes, at the same altar with a fresh offering. Repeat kills drop another trophy and boss drop, which is how late joiners get their own swamp key or wishbone. The Mistlands and Ashlands fights are set up differently, so check before planning a repeat.
Does playerevents affect anything besides raids?
Its purpose is raid selection: events follow the targeted player's own boss record rather than the world's. It does not hide trader stock or change bosses, and it does not stop the world collecting its global keys as normal.
What happens to keys if we restore an older backup?
The world goes back to exactly what that save held, keys included. A boss killed after the backup was taken is alive again, and anything built since is gone. That is why a locked backup right before a boss fight is a better rollback point than last night's.
