Where The Crow Flies

Where The Crow Flies is an ultra-lightweight client companion mod for Valheim players. It solves the fundamental limitation of Valheim multiplayer architecture: because combat, damage calculations, and creature deaths are simulated on whichever client owns the local zone, dedicated servers without client reporting cannot witness combat events.

Acting as a silent scout, Where The Crow Flies witnesses combat occurring in the player’s zone and relays batched events to servers running The Raven’s Call via low-bandwidth routed RPCs.

Key Features

👁️ Owner-Gated Combat Observation

Watches local Character.Damage, Character.OnDeath, and FishingFloat.Catch events only when the local client is the authoritative simulation owner (if (!__instance.IsOwner()) return;), ensuring zero duplicate events across multiple nearby players.

🛡️ Smart Damage Accumulator (Anti-Spam Batching)

Instead of firing an RPC for every sword swing or arrow impact, Where The Crow Flies aggregates damage dealt and taken per player and flushes in clean 10-second intervals or when accumulated damage exceeds 500 points.

💀 Intelligent Death Cause Resolution

When a player falls in battle, the mod parses m_lastHit, attacker identity, boss status, elemental damage types (fire, frost, poison, spirit, lightning), and environmental hazards (drowning, fall damage, burning) to provide rich, narrative death descriptions for the server chronicle.

⚡ Zero Overhead & No In-Game HUD

Runs completely silently in the background. No GUI windows, no keybind conflicts, no memory leaks, and zero FPS impact.

🌐 Safe Everywhere (Drop-In Compatibility)

If a player connects to a vanilla server or any server not running The Raven’s Call, the routed RPC silently no-ops without errors or network warnings.

Wire Format: `RavensCall_CombatReport_V1`

Where The Crow Flies communicates with The Raven’s Call using a compact binary payload:

Field	Type	Description
`schemaVersion`	`int`	Wire protocol version (`1`)
`eventType`	`byte`	`1`=Creature Kill, `2`=Player Death, `3`=Damage Batch, `4`=Fish Catch
`victimPrefab`	`string`	Creature prefab name / fish species / death cause string
`attackerName`	`string`	In-game character name credited with the event
`position`	`Vector3`	World coordinate of the combat event
`dmgDealt`	`float`	Batched physical & elemental damage dealt
`dmgTaken`	`float`	Batched damage sustained by player

Installation

Install BepInEx for Valheim on your client.
Download WhereTheCrowFlies-v1.0.0.zip.
Extract and place WhereTheCrowFlies.dll into your Valheim/BepInEx/plugins/ folder.
Launch Valheim — no further configuration is needed!

Configuration

A configuration file is automatically generated at BepInEx/config/com.raveniron.wherethecrowflies.cfg:

[General]
## Send owner-side combat reports to servers running TheRavensCall.
# Setting type: Boolean
# Default value: true
EnableReporting = true