FireFront turns Valheim’s fire into an actual moving front. Torch a wall and it can take the whole build with it, jump to the treeline, and crawl across open ground to get there — not just “this one piece is on fire.”
What It Does
🔥 Real Spread, Real Destruction
Structures, standing trees and felled logs all burn down for real: buildings leave their drops, while trees and logs burn to charcoal. A tree the fire kills chars in place — the bark blackens and splits into ember-lit char plates — then three seconds later either collapses with the game’s own felling crash and drops a little coal, or is left standing as a blackened snag you can chop later for the same coal; charred wood never drops ordinary wood or seeds and never relights. Fire spreads structure-to-structure, tree-to-tree, and structure-to-tree.
🌲 Fire Scales To What’s Burning
A burning tree used to get the same campfire-sized flame at its foot regardless of how tall it stood. Fire now climbs a tree as it takes real, unseen fire damage — the front starts at the foot and works up the trunk as the tree weakens, so flames in the crown mean it’s about to go — and on anything over 3m the flame column also spans the burner’s own measured height, with smoke starting at the canopy instead of the ground and the light reaching further, bounded by MaxFlameHeight (30m default) so a fire is never drawn taller than that no matter the tree under it. Tall, actively-burning trees also throw sparks off their crown, which stop the moment that tree drops to smouldering. A broadleaf’s solid canopy hides the trunk column under its own leaves, so a tall broadleaf gets a wide shell of flame sized to its measured crown, sitting on the outside of the foliage so it shows through instead of getting swallowed by it; a conifer keeps its column and gains a narrower shell of its own around the middle. TallFireMaxConcurrent (12 default) bounds how many tall fires exist at once — past it, further ignitions still burn, spread, and damage exactly the same, just with the ordinary small flame. Fire itself renders additively rather than as flat discs, so a mass of it reads as a body of fire instead of a pile of dots. fireset lowspec true (or the LowSpecPreset config) trims this back for weaker machines: no crown sparks, crown flame at half cost, a 12m height cap, 4 concurrent tall fires.
🌬️ Wind-Driven Behavior
The front stretches downwind and thins upwind using the game’s real wind, and strength matters: a gale drives a long narrow tongue of fire, while a calm day burns a lazy, even circle. Fires start small and ramp up over roughly ten minutes instead of instantly raging.
🌱 Ground Fire, Firebreaks & Rain
Fire crawls across open ground between things too far apart to ignite each other, visible as ember flickers advancing through the grass. Dirt paths and cultivated ground act as real firebreaks in a hosted game — on a dedicated server that only holds in the handful of zones the server itself keeps loaded near the world’s centre, so everywhere else only water stops ground fire. Rain douses ground fire and reaches burning objects too — on a dedicated server as well as in single-player, because the server replays vanilla’s own per-period, per-biome-sector weather roll for the fire’s exact position instead of asking a headless, camera-less EnvMan that never picks an environment at all. Two cases are deliberately left out of that replay: a per-player EnvZone trigger volume, and the Ashlands/Deepnorth edge fixup that needs a loaded heightmap. Rain stops spread and shortens the burn clock on anything it falls on, by a multiplier you set. A direct ignition still catches in the rain (a torch, a lightning strike) — rain doesn’t forbid fire, it just stops it from spreading and burns it out sooner. Ground fire stays within about 40m of its origin.
🪵 Burn Scars & Regrowth
Burnt ground can’t relight for about 90 seconds, so the front advances instead of churning in place, and leaves a scorch mark that fades after about five minutes. A tree that fully collapses regrows after roughly fifteen minutes if the spot is still clear.
❄️ Fire Keeps You Warm
Stand near a burning tree or building and it holds off Cold and Freezing the same way a campfire does, through the game’s own near-a-fire check — shelter, frost resistance, and being wet all still matter the way you’d expect. It’s felt a little further out than it can burn you, and it’s on by default.
🕵️ Arson Attribution
Fires remember who lit them — the whole spreading front carries its arsonist, even fire that crawled far from the first spark. Natural and creature-caused fire belongs to nobody.
💾 Restart Persistence
Fires survive a server restart. Burning objects and ground fire return with their remaining burn time, spent fuel stays spent, and trees waiting to regrow still regrow.
Technical Specifications
| Parameter | Detail |
|---|---|
| Runs On | Client & Server (both required) |
| Target Runtime | BepInEx 5.4.2350+ |
| Engine Target | Valheim (Unity Engine) |
| Current Version | 1.0.0 |
| Licence | MIT |
| Configuration | Fully config-tunable — every setting but the extinguish keybind can be changed live via fireset, no restart required; changes that reach the server need you on its admin list |
| Companion Mod | Ragnarok’s Wrath |
Console Commands
Press ` to open the console.
| Command | Effect |
|---|---|
firestatus |
What’s burning, plus every live setting |
ignite |
Ignite what’s under your crosshair |
startfire [radius] |
Ignite everything burnable within radius of you |
stopfire |
Extinguish what’s under your crosshair |
clearfires |
Extinguish everything instantly |
firedebug |
Toggle verbose fire logging |
fireset <key> <value> |
Live-tune any setting, no restart |
fireweather [force <EnvName> | reset] |
Print the weather FireFront resolves at your position, next to vanilla’s own read and the server’s; force/reset overrides the server’s weather for testing (admin-gated) |
Press G in-game to extinguish what you’re looking at, plus ground fire, burning structures, and burning trees around you.
Installation
Via mod manager: install and play — no config needed.
By hand: drop FireFront.dll into BepInEx/plugins/ on both server and clients. The server runs the fire, and a client without the mod can light fires the server never learns about, since ignition processes on the piece’s owner. Keep the version matched on the server and every client. Since 0.24 a mismatch is never silent: the player sees it on screen, and both sides’ logs name the versions that met.
Requires Valheim 1.0.15 — built and tested against that build; older Valheim releases, including the 0.2x line, aren’t supported.
Plays Well With
Ragnarok’s Wrath — the world-simulation mod this fire feeds. Burning zones scar the land itself, arson is booked into the land’s memory, and Devastating Storms hurl lightning that starts real FireFront fires. Each mod runs fine without the other.
Part of the RavenIron Suite
FireFront's fires feed Ragnarok's Wrath: burning zones scar the land itself, and arson is booked into the land's memory. Each mod runs fine without the other.