Dvala
A dungeon left alone long enough fills back up.
- Features
- How the timer works
- What does not come back
- Ore veins and KeepVeins
- Hildir's three
- Installation
- Configuration
- Multiplayer
- Status
- Troubleshooting
- Bug reports
- Discord
- Server
- Licence
- Part of Longhouse
Valheim's dungeons are one-shot. Once you have cleared a crypt it stays an empty corridor for the rest of the world's life. Dvala puts the contents back on a timer: a dungeon left alone for thirty in-game days fills up again.
It restocks, it does not regenerate. Nothing here deletes a saved object, moves a wall or re-rolls a layout. The rooms stay exactly as they are, and anything you built inside a dungeon is left alone.
Features
- Chests refill from their own drop table. It is a fresh roll, not a snapshot of what was in them, so a mod that adds loot to a crypt table is picked up automatically. Only empty chests are touched.
- Pickables reset to unpicked: berries, mushrooms, surtling cores, and the rest of what lies around on the floor.
- Ore veins heal back to full health, including the world level bonus.
- Spawners are re-armed, but only where the creature they produced is provably gone. Re-arming a spawner whose draugr is still walking around would add a second one, and vanilla puts no ceiling on that.
- Player-placed containers are never touched, and neither is anything else you built.
- Each dungeon carries its own timer, stored on the dungeon and shared with everyone in the world.
How the timer works
The count is in in-game days, not real ones. A Valheim day is twenty minutes of a running world, so thirty days is roughly ten hours of play. On a dedicated server the clock keeps turning while nobody is connected, which is usually what you want and occasionally a surprise.
Counting starts the first time Dvala sees a dungeon, not at day zero. Installing this on a world you have played for two years does not restock everything in it on the next tick; each dungeon starts its clock when you next load it.
A dungeon with a player inside is skipped and keeps its old date, so it comes back round as
soon as they leave instead of losing its turn for another thirty days. You can turn that off
with SkipOccupied, but a restock under your feet re-arms the spawners you just cleared.
Membership is tested against the dungeon generator's own room boxes rather than a radius around it. That matters for dungeons that stand on the ground, like Hildir's Sealed Tower: a box around the generator would reach into the Fuling camp next door and claim its contents too.
What does not come back
Two kinds of object are genuinely destroyed when a player takes them rather than flagged as taken, so nothing short of regenerating the room can restore them:
- Pickables with no respawn time and nothing to hide. A few one-off props fall in this class.
PickableItempedestal pieces, which keep no persistent record of themselves.
The Queen's room in an infested mine is never included and has no setting. She is a boss with a summoning ritual and a permanent global key, which is a different argument from a content toggle.
Ore veins and KeepVeins
An ore vein is a cluster of chunks with a health value each. Break the last one and the game does not mark the vein as empty, it deletes the object, and nothing anywhere records that a vein was ever at that spot or which kind it was. A chest keeps its note when you empty it, a vein does not survive being finished.
KeepVeins, on by default, holds that last deletion back. What stays behind is an object with
every chunk dead: invisible, no collision, drops nothing, cannot be hit. It costs the world one
saved object, the same as a half-mined vein already does, and the timer fills it back in like
everything else.
This is the one setting that changes vanilla behaviour rather than restoring it. Turn it off and Dvala is purely restorative, at the price of the obvious hole: strip a crypt bare and only its chests, spawners and pickables come back.
It applies inside managed dungeon rooms only. A copper deposit in the open behaves exactly as it always did, whatever else you have switched on.
Hildir's three
The Sealed Tower, the Howling Cavern and the Smouldering Tomb are included by default, on the same timer as everything else.
If you also run Lur, this changes what its horn is
for. The horn still works and still wakes a mini-boss on the spot; what it stops being is the
only way to fight one again. It becomes the way to do it now rather than in thirty days. Set
HildirRooms to false to keep the horn as the only route.
The two mods do not conflict. Both re-arm the same spawner by clearing the same record, so whichever gets there first finds the work already done.
Installation
Requires BepInEx 5.4.2350. BepInEx 5 only, not 6.
Through a mod manager it is a single install from
Thunderstore. By hand, put Dvala.dll in
BepInEx/plugins/Dvala/.
Start the game once and quit before looking for the config file. BepInEx writes it on the first run, and it does not exist before the plugin has loaded.
Longhouse Core is an optional soft dependency. See Multiplayer for what it adds.
Configuration
The file is BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.dvala.cfg. Every entry has a comment above it in
the file itself.
Dvala
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
Enabled |
true |
Off leaves the plugin loaded and changing nothing. |
Days |
30 |
In-game days a dungeon must be left alone before it fills back up. |
SkipOccupied |
true |
Never restock a dungeon with a player inside it. Off means a dungeon can refill around you mid-run. |
RoomPadding |
1.5 |
Metres of slack when asking whether a point is inside a dungeon room. Raise it only if a player standing in a doorway is treated as outside. A large value starts catching the ground above a shallow crypt. |
CheckSeconds |
30 |
How often to look, in real seconds. This is not how often anything resets, that is Days. It only changes how soon after midnight a due dungeon notices. |
Verbose |
false |
Write what was found and what was changed to BepInEx/LogOutput.log. One line per dungeon and one per item. |
Contents
| Setting | Default | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
Crypts |
true |
Burial chambers, forest crypts and sunken crypts. |
Caves |
true |
Troll caves and mountain frost caves. |
Mines |
true |
Mistlands infested mines. The Queen's own room is never included. |
Ashlands |
true |
Ashlands ruins and fortresses. |
HildirRooms |
true |
The Sealed Tower, the Howling Cavern and the Smouldering Tomb. |
Camps |
false |
Fuling camps, Meadows villages and farms. These come out of the same generator as the dungeons but sit on the surface where people build, so restocking them means re-arming spawners next door to somebody's house. |
KeepVeins |
true |
Stop a fully mined vein inside a dungeon from deleting itself, so it can be restocked later. |
Changing a default in a new version does nothing on a machine that has already run the mod.
BepInEx writes every entry on the first run and the saved value wins, so edit the .cfg if you
want a new default.
Multiplayer
Install it on every client. The work has to happen on a machine that has the dungeon loaded, and on a dedicated server that is never the server: with no local player it has no position to load anything around, so it never instantiates a dungeon's contents at all. Each player restocks the dungeons they walk up to, and that client is also the one that owns those objects, which is what makes the writes stick.
Install the DLL on the dedicated server as well. It does no restocking there, but Core needs it present to enforce the version check.
The last-stocked day lives on the dungeon itself and is shared, so two players cannot restock the same crypt twice, and a player without the mod still sees the restocked contents.
With Core installed, Dvala registers as required on both sides. A client missing it, or on a different version or build, is rejected when it connects. The host's settings are then applied to connected clients in memory only: your own config file is not written to, and your values come back when you disconnect.
Without Core the mod still runs. What is lost is the enforcement, which here means players can
disagree about how long thirty days is. One player with Days set to 5 restocks the world's
dungeons every five days for everybody.
Status
Confirmed in single player on 2026-09-09: spawners re-arm and their creatures return, veins restore whole including partly mined ones, and chests refill when empty and are left alone when they still hold something.
Pickables are unconfirmed. Every run so far reported none restored, and it is not yet known whether nothing was picked in the rooms tested or whether those particular pickables are the class that is destroyed on pick rather than flagged.
Untested in multiplayer.
Troubleshooting
Nothing has restocked yet. The count starts when Dvala first sees a dungeon, so on an
existing world you need Days in-game days from that point, not from when the dungeon was
cleared. Set Verbose to true and the log will say what it found.
A dungeon restocks over and over. Look for a Stamp did not stick warning in
BepInEx/LogOutput.log. That means the write to the dungeon's own record was discarded, which
should not happen on the client that has it loaded. Report it with the log.
The config file is not there. Run the game once with the mod installed. BepInEx writes it on the first load.
A setting has no effect. Check the .cfg on disk before anything else. The saved value
beats a new default in code, and on a server the host's values override yours while you are
connected.
Bug reports
Report in the Discord or on the issue tracker. Please include:
BepInEx/LogOutput.log, ideally withVerboseset to true.- Whether you were in single player, hosting, or on a dedicated server.
- Your
ezomic.valheim.dvala.cfg. - Which kind of dungeon it was, and what you expected to come back.
AppData/LocalLow/IronGate/Valheim/Player.logif a vanilla mechanic broke rather than Dvala itself. Exceptions thrown mid-frame land there and not in the BepInEx log.
Discord
The Discord is used for mod information, updates, support, bug reports and compatibility questions.
Server
There is also a small EU server running the pack if you want somewhere to play. Connection details are in the Discord.
Licence
MIT. See LICENSE.
Part of Longhouse
Dvala is part of the Longhouse modpack, which pins the exact versions used by the Ezomic setup. It behaves the same installed on its own.
Changelog
1.0.2
Fixed
Creatures now come back on a server, not only in singleplayer. A restocked dungeon on a server got its chests, pickables and veins back but none of its creatures. Re-arming a spawner means clearing the record that it already fired, and the game never sends that clear to anyone else: it stayed on the one client that swept the dungeon and was lost as soon as that client dropped the area, logged out or handed ownership on. The day stamp had already synced, so the dungeon then counted as restocked for thirty days with no creatures in it. The sweep now also leaves a note on each spawner it re-arms, which does sync, and whichever client owns that spawner when it next ticks clears the record itself right before the game decides whether to spawn. The note is lifted the moment the spawner spawns. Dungeons already restocked without their creatures fill in properly at their next restock. Tested on a dedicated server: a cleared crypt re-armed all ten of its spawners, and its creatures were there after logging out and back in, which is exactly the step that lost them before.
discuss
1.0.1 in Longhouse
Changed
Rewritten README. Same mod, clearer documentation: what it does and how to install it come first, then configuration, multiplayer behaviour, compatibility and troubleshooting. Every config table was checked against the plugin's own Config.Bind calls, so the settings, sections and defaults listed are the ones actually bound. No code changed in this release.
discuss
1.0.0
First version.
A dungeon left alone for thirty in-game days fills back up: chests re-roll from their own drop tables, pickables return, part-mined veins heal, and spawners whose creature is gone are re-armed. Nothing is regenerated and nothing saved is destroyed.
Every mechanism in it was read out of the game's assemblies rather than guessed, and read twice by different readers. Three of the four are now also confirmed in a running game, singleplayer, on 2026-09-09:
- Spawners re-arm and their creatures come back.
- Veins restore whole, including a partly mined one.
- Chests refill when empty and are left alone when they still hold something.
Pickables are unconfirmed. Every run so far reports none restored, and it is not yet known whether that means none were picked in the rooms tested or whether the pickables in question are the class that is destroyed on pick rather than flagged.
Hildir's three - the Sealed Tower, the Howling Cavern and the Smouldering Tomb - are included
on the same timer as everything else. That changes what Lur's horn is for: it still wakes a
mini-boss on the spot, but it is no longer the only way to fight one again. HildirRooms off
puts it back.
KeepVeins, on by default, is the one setting that changes vanilla rather than restoring it.
A vein deletes itself when its last chunk dies, and nothing records that it was ever there, so
a postfix on AllDestroyed holds that deletion back inside dungeon interiors. What is left is
an invisible husk with no collision that the timer fills back in. Off, and a stripped vein is
gone for good.
Known gaps
Pickables with no respawn time and no hidden child, and
discussPickableItempedestals, are destroyed on pick and cannot be restored.
Every setting · 13
All of it lives in one file, written on first run with each description beside its default. The file is the source of truth; edit it there.
BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.dvala.cfg
server On a server, the host's value applies to everyone while they are connected; your own file is left alone and counts again when you leave. yours Keys and personal settings stay as you set them, on any server.
Contents 7
| Setting | What it does | Default | Whose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crypts | Burial chambers, forest crypts and sunken crypts. | true | server |
| Caves | Troll caves and the frost caves in the mountains. | true | server |
| Mines | Mistlands infested mines. The Queen's own room is never included. | true | server |
| Ashlands | Ashlands ruins and fortresses. | true | server |
| HildirRooms | Hildir's three: the Sealed Tower, the Howling Cavern and the Smouldering Tomb. On, so their mini-bosses return on the timer like anything else. If you use Lur, its horn still works and still wakes one immediately - what this takes away is the horn being the only way. Turn it off to keep that. | true | server |
| Camps | Fuling camps, Meadows villages and farms. These are built by the dungeon generator but they sit on the surface where people build, so restocking them means re-arming spawners next door to somebody's house. | false | server |
| KeepVeins | Stop a fully mined vein from deleting itself, so it can be restocked later. Without this, a vein you strip bare is gone for good and only the chests, spawners and pickables in that room come back. What is left behind is an invisible husk you can walk through, holding nothing, until the timer fills it back in - and it costs the world exactly what a half-mined vein already costs it, one saved object. Interiors only: veins on the surface are never held back, whatever else is switched on here. | true | server |
Dvala 6
| Setting | What it does | Default | Whose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enabled | Off leaves the plugin loaded and changing nothing. | true | server |
| Days | In-game days a dungeon must be left alone before it fills back up. A day is 20 minutes of a running world, so 30 is about 10 hours of play - and on a dedicated server the clock keeps turning while nobody is on. The count starts when Dvala first sees the dungeon, never at day zero, so installing this on an old world does not restock everything in it at once. | 30 | server |
| SkipOccupied | Never restock a dungeon with a player inside it. Off means a dungeon can refill around you mid-run, which re-arms the spawners you just cleared and puts fresh loot in chests you already emptied. It also makes the day it happens unpredictable, since it turns on where people happen to be. | true | server |
| RoomPadding | Metres of slack when asking whether a point is inside a dungeon room. Only raise it if a player standing in a doorway is treated as outside; a large value starts catching the ground above a shallow crypt. | 1.5 | server |
| CheckSeconds | How often to look, in real seconds. This is not how often anything resets - that is Days. Lower costs nothing measurable and only changes how soon after midnight a due dungeon notices. | 30 | server |
| Verbose | Write what was found and what was changed to BepInEx/LogOutput.log. Off unless something looks wrong; it is one line per dungeon and one per item. | false | server |
Discussion
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