Valheim roleplay servers: rules, mods, towns and trading

A Valheim roleplay server is an ordinary dedicated server with a stronger agreement on top. The game gives you a ready-made setting - the tenth world, the Forsaken, a Valkyrie, Odin's raven - and very little machinery for roleplay itself: no character sheets, no factions, no trade window, no emotes beyond a handful. So the success of an RP server rests on four things you write and enforce yourself: in-character rules that are clear about consent and metagaming, world settings that support immersion (often nomap, a harsher death penalty, restricted portals), a town layout that does not turn the main settlement into a lag point, and a trading system built from coins, chests and signs. Mods can add groups, guilds, markets and NPCs, but every client mod you add makes the server PC-only and adds a maintenance job after every patch.

This guide covers the lore to build on, the rules RP servers converge on, the world settings that suit roleplay, the kinds of mods communities use, how to lay out towns, how trading works without a trade window, and how to moderate a community whose disputes are half story and half real.

What the game gives you to build on#

Valheim's story is thin but well suited to roleplay, because it leaves almost everything to the players. Every character is a fallen warrior, carried by a Valkyrie to Valheim - the tenth world of Norse cosmology - and set down at the sacrificial stones. Odin wants the Forsaken, his old enemies, destroyed; each boss defeated is a step towards proving yourself worthy of Valhalla. Hugin the raven appears with advice, and the vegvisirs, runestones and ruins scattered across the world hint at the people who lived there before.

That leaves a lot of room for invented history:

• Who came before. The ruins, burial chambers, Dvergr outposts and abandoned towers are evidence of earlier settlers. A server can decide who they were.
• Factions. The game has none, so players create them: clans, a jarl's hall, a guild of shipwrights, a band of exiles, worshippers of a particular god.
• The traders. Haldor, Hildir and the Bog Witch are neutral merchants in the lore and natural neutral ground in the story.
• The biomes as frontier. Each biome is a step further from safety. A roleplay timeline can follow the boss progression: settlement in the Meadows, the first iron age after the Swamp, the great expedition to the Mistlands.

Write a short setting document - one page, not twenty. Who the settlers are, why they are here, the main factions, and what counts as common knowledge. Newcomers need to be able to read it in five minutes before their first session.

Roleplay rules that hold up#

Most RP servers end up with a similar set of rules after their first few disputes. The core ones, with the reason each exists:

1. Stay in character in public chat. Use (( double brackets )) for   out-of-character speech, and keep it short.2. No metagaming: your character only knows what they saw or were told   in character. Discord and map knowledge stay out of the story.3. No powergaming: you cannot decide the outcome of an action on   another player's character. Offer, do not force.4. Combat between characters needs consent from both players,   agreed out of character first. PvP is off otherwise.5. Character death is the player's choice unless they agreed to a   permadeath arc in advance.6. Names fit the setting: Norse or invented Norse-style names only.7. Settlements need admin approval and must keep 300 m from others,   except planned towns.8. Do not loot, burn or take apart another player's work, even in   character, without their out-of-character agreement.9. Disputes go to admins out of character, never fought out in chat.

Two of these need explaining to new players more than the others.

Metagaming on Valheim is easy because so much information is shared out of character. Discord voice, map pins and the cartography table all leak knowledge. A rule that a character only knows what they learned in character keeps a rival clan's secret base from being found because someone mentioned it in voice.

Consent for combat matters because Valheim's PvP is a toggle each player controls, and anyone with PvP on can hurt anyone else who has it on. On an RP server a fight is a scene, and both players should agree to it and to its stakes before anybody draws a sword. If your server is mainly about conflict between factions, the rules look different - the Valheim PvP server guide covers raiding rules and teams.

For the non-roleplay rules every public server needs - base spacing, tames, admin conduct, enforcement - start from Valheim server rules and add the RP layer on top.

World settings that suit roleplay#

Valheim has no configuration file; the world's rules are set at launch with world modifiers and keys, and stored in the world. Several of them change the feel of a roleplay world a lot.

The immersive preset bundles several immersion-focused changes; check exactly what it sets in Valheim world modifiers and presets before relying on it, because individual modifiers override presets and the set has changed with updates.

nomap is the single most effective immersion setting and the most divisive. Without a map, players have to describe routes, build roads and put up signs - all things that generate roleplay. It also makes new players get lost, so pair it with a well-signed road network from the starting area. Valheim global keys and setkey covers how keys like nomap are applied and removed.

Restricted portals do a lot of work on an RP server. Under the default rules metals cannot be taken through portals, which already makes trade routes and shipping meaningful. portals veryhard removes portals altogether, so everything travels by ship, cart or on foot - slow, but it gives merchants and sailors a role. Portal behaviour in detail is in Valheim portal rules and teleport restrictions.

Permadeath (deathpenalty hardcore) is rarely right for a whole RP server: it deletes characters, and deleting a character someone has played for two months over a lag spike ends their interest in the server. Offer permadeath as an opt-in arc instead, enforced by agreement.

Mods RP servers often use#

Mods can fill the gaps in Valheim's roleplay tools, and most roleplay communities use some. Before adding any, settle one question: does the mod have to be installed by every player? If yes, Xbox and other console players are excluded, and every game patch now means waiting for that mod's author before your server can update.

The kinds of mods roleplay communities reach for, with examples to search for on Thunderstore:

Mod names, authors and maintenance change; check the current page on Thunderstore, the date of the last update, and the compatibility notes before you commit. Many Valheim mods depend on the Jotunn library and enforce matching versions between server and client, so a player with the wrong version is kicked at connection - Valheim mod version mismatch kicks explains how to read the message.

For a modded RP server, use a shared mod profile. r2modman can export a profile code that every player imports to get exactly the same mod set and versions; see Thunderstore and r2modman for groups. Keep a copy of the server's working BepInEx folder before every update, because the first day after a game patch is when mods break. The general install is in Valheim mods with BepInEx on a server.

A sensible approach for a new RP server is to start vanilla, find out what the community actually lacks after a month, and add the fewest mods that fix it. Servers that launch with forty mods spend their first season debugging rather than roleplaying.

Building towns without killing performance#

Roleplay pulls players together into towns, and towns are exactly what Valheim's simulation handles worst. The world is split into 64 by 64 metre zones, each simulated by the first player who arrives. A dense town of ten houses, a market and a smithy is a cluster of heavy zones that everyone loads when they go home, run by whichever player got there first. If their connection is poor, the whole town rubber-bands.

You cannot avoid that entirely - a town is the point - but you can keep it manageable:

• Plan the town. Lay out a street plan before anyone builds: a main road, plots of fixed size, a square. Unplanned towns grow outwards in all directions and end up both sprawling and dense.
• Keep the heavy pieces outside. Smelter rows, kilns, charcoal kilns, big farms and animal pens belong on the outskirts or in separate hamlets. A market square with forty item stands and a pen of thirty boars is the worst combination.
• Limit tames inside the town. A per-player cap and no breeding inside the walls. Tames are creatures the zone owner simulates every frame. Valheim tames, breeding and server load has the detail.
• Build on flat ground. Every terrain edit is stored in the world. A town on natural meadow costs far less than the same town on a levelled hillside. See terraforming on servers.
• Separate settlements. Other factions' towns and individual homesteads should be at least 300 metres away, so they are not loaded together.

Valheim base placement for shared servers goes deeper into zones and spacing.

A town also needs wards. A single ward protects a sphere of about 32 metres, so a town is many wards, each with its own permitted list. Decide who places them: one per house owner, plus a few town wards owned by the jarl or an admin over public buildings. Ward spam - wards dropped to claim land - should be against the rules.

Player trading without a trade window#

Vanilla Valheim has no trade window. Items change hands by being dropped on the ground, put in a chest the other player can open, or placed on an item stand. That sounds primitive, and on an RP server it is an advantage: every trade is a scene.

The currency. Coins are a real item: found in chests and burial chambers, dropped by some creatures, and earned by selling valuables such as amber, rubies and silver necklaces to Haldor. They are a natural shared currency. Some servers use trade goods instead - iron bars, wolf pelts, mead - and let prices find their own level.

Shops. A shop is a building with item stands showing goods, a sign with prices, and a chest behind the counter. The shopkeeper hands over goods in person. Sign text is short, so prices go on several signs or on one sign per item.

Safe trades. The risk of a dropped-item trade is that one side does not hand over their part. Two simple conventions: trades happen at a public trading post, and large trades are witnessed by a third player or done through a chest the trader permits on their ward for the duration.

Admin-run markets. Some servers run an NPC-style market where admins buy and sell at fixed prices. On vanilla that means an admin character staffing a shop at set hours; mods such as Marketplace can automate it. Either way, keep admin-supplied goods modest, or spawned stock will undercut every player craftsman.

Trading also connects to cheating. Characters live on each player's own machine, so an item carried in from another world looks exactly like one made on yours. A sudden flood of one rare item on the market is worth looking into. Valheim character files and cheating explains what a vanilla server can and cannot prevent.

Moderating a roleplay community#

Roleplay disputes are harder than ordinary ones because they are half story and half real. Someone's character was robbed; was it a scene both agreed to, or a player griefing behind a story? A few practices help.

Separate in-character and out-of-character. Players raise complaints out of character, with admins, in private. Admins decide out of character. In-chat arguments about rules are moved to Discord immediately.

Record agreements. Big scenes - a raid on a town, a duel to the death, a heist - are agreed in writing in a Discord channel first, with what is at stake. When a dispute arises later, the record decides it.

Roll back carefully. A backup restore undoes everything since the backup for everyone, not one player's loss. Use restores for griefing or corruption, never to settle a story dispute. On RE:NODE you can take a backup before a big planned scene and lock it so rotation does not remove it, which makes the scene safe to run.

Rotate story roles. Many servers have a lore team that runs story events - a cursed relic, an envoy from another clan, a Fuling warband. Separate it from the admin team where you can, so the people deciding disputes are not also running the plot. Events with commands need a mod on a dedicated server; Valheim community event ideas covers the setup and the commands.

Use the list files. For players who break rules repeatedly, vanilla gives you kick, ban and the allow list. An RP server benefits from an allow list more than most: players apply, read the setting and rules, and are added to permittedlist.txt. It filters out people who wanted a survival server and did not read the description. Valheim adminlist, bannedlist and permittedlist covers the files.

On RE:NODE, story hosts and moderators can be subusers on the server with only the permissions they need - console only, for example - so you do not hand out your account to everyone who runs a scene.

FAQ#

Does Valheim support roleplay without mods?

Yes, and many RP servers run vanilla. The game provides the setting, building, signs, coins and item stands; the roleplay itself comes from rules and the players. Mods add groups, markets and admin tools, at the cost of excluding console players.

Can Xbox players join a Valheim RP server?

Only if every mod you run is server-side. Console players cannot install mods, so any client mod makes the server PC-only regardless of the crossplay setting.

Should an RP server use nomap?

It suits roleplay well, because navigation becomes something players describe and build for. It also loses new players. If you use it, build signed roads from the start area and make sure newcomers travel with someone for their first trips.

How do players trade in vanilla Valheim?

By dropping items, using a chest the other player can open, or item stands. Coins are a real item and work as currency. Convention does the rest: trade at a public post and have a witness for big deals.

How do I stop roleplay from becoming an excuse for griefing?

Require out-of-character agreement for any scene that damages or takes another player's property, record it in Discord first, and treat anything without that agreement as griefing under the normal rules.