Valheim hardcore servers: permadeath, nomap and rules

A hardcore Valheim server is a normal dedicated server started with -preset hardcore, or with -modifier deathpenalty hardcore plus whatever else you want harsher. At the hardcore death penalty there is no tombstone: what you were carrying is gone and your skills go with it. What the server cannot do on its own is make a death permanent in the strict sense, because characters live on each player's PC, not on the server. A permadeath world is therefore half launch arguments and half agreement - and the agreement is the part that decides whether the group is still playing in week three.

This guide covers the settings, what each one really changes, what an admin can and cannot enforce, and the community rules that make a punishing world feel fair rather than cruel.

What "hardcore" means on a Valheim server#

Valheim has no separate hardcore game mode. Since the world modifiers arrived in the Hildir's Request update, difficulty is a set of values stored in the world: combat, death penalty, resources, raids and portals, plus a few switches such as nomap. "Hardcore" is two different things that share a name:

• The `hardcore` preset, which moves every modifier to its punishing end at once.
• The `hardcore` death penalty, one value of the deathpenalty modifier, which you can use on its own with otherwise normal rules.

Most groups that say they want a hardcore server mean the second one with a few extras, not the full preset. That distinction matters because the preset also turns portals off and pushes combat to its hardest setting, which together change the game far more than the death rule does.

The in-game world modifier screen prints a one-line description of each value, and that text is the authority. It has been reworded between patches, and third-party pages - including hosting company guides - disagree with each other about exactly what hardcore death does. Before you launch, create a throwaway local world with the same modifiers, read the descriptions on that screen, and die once on purpose with a test character. Five minutes of testing settles arguments that would otherwise happen after someone's first real death.

The settings: presets, modifiers and switches#

On your own machine these are launch arguments; on a panel host they go in the server's startup or extra-arguments field. The full preset looks like this:

$ ./valheim_server.x86_64 -nographics -batchmode \    -name "Last Light" -port 2456 -world "LastLight" \    -password "ash-and-antler-7" -public 0 \    -preset hardcore

The more common build-your-own version keeps portals and the map but makes death expensive:

-modifier deathpenalty hardcore \-modifier combat hard \-modifier raids more \-setkey playerevents

-preset is applied first and sets all five modifiers; each -modifier then overrides one of them; each -setkey adds a switch. -modifier takes two separate tokens - -modifier deathpenalty hardcore, not -modifier "deathpenalty hardcore". A malformed modifier is ignored without complaint, and the first sign is somebody dying and finding a tombstone that should not exist.

If you want the whole picture of every modifier, Valheim world modifiers and presets takes each one apart. For this post, the important point is that the five dials interact. A hardcore death penalty with normal combat is a tense game. A hardcore death penalty with veryhard combat and muchless resources is mostly a game about dying in the Black Forest.

Can you change it after the world exists?

Yes. Modifiers are applied at launch and stored in the world, so restarting with different arguments changes the rules from then on. Admins can also use setworldmodifier and setworldpreset from the console in current versions. Builds and boss progress are untouched. That flexibility is useful when a group discovers that veryhard combat was a mistake - but loosening the rules mid-world is a social decision, not a technical one, and it is covered below.

What the server can and cannot enforce#

This is the part people misunderstand most, so it is worth being blunt about it.

A Valheim dedicated server stores the world and three list files. It does not store characters. Each player's character is an .fch file in characters_local on their own machine, and it carries their inventory, skills, known recipes and their map of every world they have visited. The server sees whatever the client sends when it connects. Character files and cheating goes into the consequences in full; for a hardcore server they come down to this:

In other words, vanilla Valheim makes death costly, and your community makes it final. A player who copies their character file before a boss fight and restores it afterwards has not broken anything the server knows about. On a group of friends this is not a real problem - people who chose permadeath do not usually want to cheat it. On a public server, it is the reason most hardcore communities are allow-list only.

There are server-side character mods that move characters onto the server so a player cannot bring their own file - Server Characters by Smoothbrain is the one most often mentioned. They require BepInEx on server and clients, which makes the server PC-only, and they change backup and restore in ways worth testing before a season starts. Read the mod's current page on Thunderstore for its compatibility with your game version before committing a community to it.

Rules that make a permadeath world work#

The launch arguments take five minutes. The rules are what people will argue about, so write them down before the first login and pin them where everyone reads them - a Discord channel works, and setting up Discord for a game server covers the structure. Rules that tend to hold up:

1. Define death. Does dying mean starting a fresh character, or carrying on with the same character stripped bare? The second is what the game does; the first is a stricter rule you add. Pick one.
2. No character restores. No copying .fch files back after a death. Say it plainly; most people will honour it.
3. Fresh characters only. New characters made for this world, never used anywhere else. This stops someone arriving in Black Metal armour on day one.
4. What counts as a death. Falling off a cliff, a disconnect mid-fight, a server crash. Decide in advance whether an admin restores anything after a death caused by the server rather than the player. The usual answer is: deaths from the host's failure are refunded, deaths from the player's choices are not.
5. Shared or personal loss. Can survivors give a newly dead player starter gear from the shared chests? Most groups say yes, within limits, because a player who loses everything and is then forced to grind alone usually quits.
6. Boss attempts. Who decides when the group is ready. A failed boss fight on a hardcore world can kill the whole group at once.

The admin rule matters most. If an admin uses devcommands or spawned items to undo deaths for friends but not for others, the server is finished. Either nobody gets restored, or the criteria are written and applied evenly. Writing rules for a community server has a fuller template.

nomap, portals and the other extras#

Hardcore servers rarely stop at the death penalty. The common additions, and what they cost:

• `-setkey nomap` removes the map and minimap for everyone. Without pins, nobody can mark a death site, a crypt or a base on a shared map, so navigation becomes landmarks, coastlines, roads and the sun. On a permadeath world it adds a lot of tension and a lot of getting lost. The cartography table still exists as a piece, but without a map it is not much use - maps on a shared server covers how mapping normally works.
• `-modifier portals veryhard` removes portals. Every trip home is by foot, cart or boat. Combined with permadeath, a death far from home costs everything you carried and a very long walk.
• `-modifier portals hard` keeps portals but restricts them around boss fights, so you cannot portal out of an arena. A reasonable middle ground for a hardcore world.
• `-setkey playerevents` makes raids follow each player's own progress rather than the world's. On a hardcore server where people die and restart, this matters: without it, a fresh character gets the raids the world has unlocked, which can mean Fuling raids on a player in leather.

The last point deserves emphasis. A world remembers every boss killed through global keys, and those keys stay set when a character dies. A player who starts over still lives in a world where Moder is dead and drakes can raid. Boss progression on shared servers explains which keys unlock which events.

Keeping morale up on a world that punishes you#

Permadeath groups fail in a predictable way. The strongest player dies first, usually to something silly, loses forty hours of skills, and logs off for good. Then the group loses the person carrying the iron runs, and the rest follow within a fortnight. Some habits that help:

• Start smaller than you think. A hardcore death penalty with normal combat is plenty for most groups. You can tighten the dials after the Elder; loosening them later feels like a defeat.
• Keep a starter chest. A chest at spawn with a club, a bow, arrows and food. It costs the survivors very little and gets a dead player moving within minutes.
• Play together for dangerous content. Crypts, frost caves and the Plains at night kill solo players. A rule of "no solo boss biomes" saves more characters than any armour.
• Celebrate deaths. A memorial board in the main base with each fallen character's name is a classic for a reason. It turns loss into something the group shares.
• Be honest about attrition. If half the group has quit, talk about switching the death penalty down to hard rather than letting the world die quietly.

Changing a world from hardcore to hard halfway through is allowed and sometimes right. What does not work is changing it silently, or changing it right after one person's death and not someone else's.

Saves, crashes and the deaths you did not earn#

On a permadeath world a server problem can kill a character, so the boring operational settings matter more than usual.

Valheim writes the world to disk every -saveinterval seconds (1800 by default) and on a clean stop. A crash or a hard kill throws away everything since the last save - which on a hardcore server can include a boss kill, or can resurrect an enemy that killed somebody. Lower the interval to 600 and make sure restarts are clean.

-saveinterval 600 -backups 6 -backupshort 3600 -backuplong 21600

The built-in backups sit beside the world on the same disk, so keep real backups elsewhere too. Valheim server backups and world corruption covers the details. Note what a world backup does and does not give you: restoring the world rolls back the world, not anyone's character. If a server crash causes a death, a world restore puts the bases back but the dead player still lost what they carried - their loss lives in their own .fch. That is one more reason to write the "deaths from server failure" rule in advance.

On RE:NODE every Valheim plan includes backup slots that can be run on demand or on a schedule from the Schedules tab and restored with one button, and the panel's Restart sends a clean stop so the world is saved first. If a server hits its memory limit it is stopped and restarted rather than left to swap, which is an unsaved stop - so on a large hardcore world, keep the save interval short and size the plan with headroom. How much RAM a Valheim server needs has the numbers.

Running a public hardcore server#

Public permadeath servers are harder than private ones because of the enforcement gap above. If you want strangers on a hardcore world:

• Use an allow list. Put IDs in permittedlist.txt after a short application, so people who cheat their deaths can be removed and not simply come back. The list files guide has the ID formats for Steam and crossplay players.
• Keep it unlisted at first. -public 0 keeps the server out of the community browser while you onboard the first group.
• Decide on crossplay. Xbox players cannot install mods. If you rely on a server-side character mod, the server is PC-only regardless of -crossplay.
• Plan for seasons. Hardcore communities tend to run in seasons, so a group that has mostly died out can start again together. Wipe schedules and seasons covers how to run them without losing the old world.

FAQ#

Does the hardcore death penalty delete my character?

The game controls what happens to the character on your machine, not the server, and the in-game description of hardcore is the authority for your version. What every source agrees on is that there is no tombstone and your carried items and skills are lost. Test with a throwaway character before your real one meets a troll.

Can I make hardcore apply to only one player?

No. World modifiers belong to the world and apply to everyone on it. A player who wants a harsher personal rule can impose it on themselves by agreement, but the server treats all characters the same.

Can an admin bring back a character after a death?

Not from the server's side, because the character is not stored there. An admin running Server Devcommands could spawn items back, but skills cannot be restored that way in vanilla terms, and doing it for one player and not others ends the trust a hardcore server runs on.

Is the hardcore preset a good first experience?

Usually not. It combines the hardest combat with no portals, fewer resources and the harshest death. Most groups enjoy -modifier deathpenalty hardcore with otherwise normal settings far more, and can tighten other dials once they know the game.

Will switching an existing world to hardcore affect what is already built?

No. Modifiers only change the rules from the next start. Bases, chests and boss progress stay as they are. Anything players are carrying is at risk from the first death after the change, so announce it before restarting.