SONARHEIM
A Valheim world with memory.
Guilds that remember their halls. A gate that knows who you are. Balance tuned by hand, never by guesswork. Built as BepInEx plugins and a Discord companion, running on one real server that is open to testers right now.
The gates are open
Everything on this page is running on one real server right now, and it is open. Come break it. Progress gets wiped when the playtest ends, so build freely and do not get attached to the castle.
Connect
- Server
- playtest.sonarheim.uk:27015
- Password
- valheim
The server is unlisted, so it will not appear in the Community browser. Join by IP, or add it to your Steam favourites.
You will need the mod pack and BepInEx installed first. Full instructions are in the Discord.
What we need from you
- Try to break things. That is the entire point.
- Guilds, halls and the guild panel
- Shops, treasuries and trading between players
- Proximity voice, and who you can or cannot hear
- Report anything odd with /omen in Discord
Expect restarts, and expect things to change under you. Fixes ship daily.
Seven plugins. One foundation.
Every system below is a real BepInEx plugin already running on the test server, not a pitch deck. What's marked In Development is genuinely unfinished, on purpose.
Guilds
Ranks with granular permissions, halls with entrance greetings and locate/compass, chest guards, alliances, and leadership succession. The social core of the server.
Discord Identity
Your character is bound to your Discord account, not the other way around. One character per Discord ID, enforced at the join gate, so moderation in Discord reaches the game too.
Balance
Hand-tuned rather than overhauled: carry weight, stamina drain, resource yield, build costs, early portal metals, sail speed and food buffs. Every number was chosen to stay inside vanilla's own logic.
Proximity Voice
Positional voice chat scoped to who's actually near you in the world. No separate channel to manage, no always-on party call.
Offline Build Protection
A read-only census of every structure and who owns it. It's the groundwork for detecting genuinely abandoned builds, nothing more. Decay and destruction are a deliberate later phase.
HuginBot
The Discord companion: application & vetting flow, a live chat relay between the server and Discord, and the parts of the guild economy that live outside the game for now.
See it in the world
A real screenshot from the test server: the guild panel a founder actually sees, with roster, hall location, and per-rank permission chips, all live.
Guild "Ravens" · founder view · Sonarheim.Guilds v0.27.3
The road ahead
Small, human-scale ideas for making the server feel less like a shared world and more like a shared life in it. None of this is built yet. It's here so the direction is honest, not just the finished parts.
Hearth & Home
The found-family half. What makes a server feel lived-in, not just played on.
Memorial Stones
Death leaves a mark. A small glowing rune stone appears at the site, carrying whoever fell, and for a guild member, their rank too. The world remembers, even when no one's around to see it happen.
Mentor Pairing
Access already knows who just joined. Pair them, loosely, with someone who didn't, and give both a small shared bonus for staying near each other early on, right when a new player is most likely to bounce off a server alone.
Taverns
A social building class of their own, built on the same hall and permission system Guilds already has. Somewhere to be together that isn't a boss fight.
The Hunt & The Sea
What makes going out together better than going out alone.
Group Feasts
Gather at a hearth, cook together, and earn a shared buff for having actually shown up. Not a solo mechanic dressed up to look multiplayer.
Boss Calls
Find an unlit altar and call it: a compass ping to whoever's close enough to help, no Discord message required. Discovery turns into a shared event instead of a solo screenshot.
Co-operative Sailing
Rowing that actually rewards a full crew. Pull together and the ship feels it, building on the sail-speed tuning Balance already ships today.
Trade & Territory
The thriving-settlement half. Reasons to depend on people you didn't recruit yourself.
Trophy Hall
A display case built into the guild hall you already have, showing what the guild has killed together in one place. Bragging rights first, maybe a small buff later.
Guild Granary
The same permission tiers Guilds already enforces on chests, just framed as a shared pool instead of a locked box. Contribute to the guild, don't just stash your own gear in it.
Trade Contracts
Post what you need, someone delivers, escrow handles the trust. Nothing new here: it's the Contract type already sitting in the Economy design, finally given a reason to exist.
…and more in the same spirit. If it doesn't make the world feel more lived-in together, it probably doesn't belong on this list.
HuginBot
The Discord half of Sonarheim. Where Access decides who's allowed into the world, HuginBot is how they get there, and how the guild keeps talking once the game is closed.
- Applications & vetting. A modal-based apply flow through council review, before anyone touches the join gate.
- Live chat relay. Guild chat and Discord stay in sync, both directions, without alt-tabbing.
- Moderation that reaches the game. A Discord ban resolves in-world through the same identity layer Access enforces on join.
Live now, forging next
Live now
- Discord-linked identity & join gate
- Guilds: ranks, halls, alliances, chest guards
- Balance tuning across weight, stamina, yield & sailing
- Proximity voice chat
- HuginBot: apply flow & chat relay
- Economy: market stalls, guild treasuries, contracts & a currency ledger
- A live web map of the world, players and every structure
Forging next
- Offline build protection: thresholds & warnings (off during the playtest)
- Duels: honor matches with stakes
- Rental & property, tied to the guild economy
Everything in the left column is running on the live server today. The right column is what is being built next, in roughly that order.