Valheim Game Tools: Live Map, Dashboard, Chat, Events and Leaderboard

Where it is, and why there is nothing to install

Open your Valheim server and click Game Tools in the sidebar. There are five tabs: Live Map, Dashboard, Leaderboard, Chat and Events.

Every one of them talks to the GameGrid Bridge, a server-side plugin GameGrid installs automatically on every server start. Valheim has no RCON, no Telnet and no API of its own, so without the bridge there is nothing for a panel to look at.

There is no Mods tab on this page and nothing for you to install. A Valheim server without the bridge is not a server with fewer mods, it is a server the panel cannot see into — so the platform puts it in rather than asking you to.

Valheim servers do not get a separate Live Map entry in the sidebar; the map lives on this page. The economy is on the Economy entry.

When the tools say they are unavailable

Each reason is shown with what will fix it, and none of them asks you to do anything except start or restart the server.

The mod loader is not installed yet — it goes in automatically at the next start.

The bridge is not installed yet — same, and it usually means the server has not started since it was added.

The bridge's connection details could not be read, or are incomplete — restarting rewrites them.

The server is stopped — the tools come up with it.

The server did not answer in time — usually a world loading or saving. It clears itself and the page keeps retrying.

The bridge did not answer at all — if that persists after a restart, it is ours; open a ticket.

Live Map

Valheim ships no map tiles, so the bridge asks the running server what its own world looks like and draws it — the real terrain and biomes for your seed, not an approximation.

The first load on a new world shows a progress bar while that pass runs. It happens once and is cached; every load after that is instant. A world's terrain does not change, so it is never redrawn.

Player markers refresh every five seconds, and move smoothly in between. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, point at a marker for details, and click a player to centre the map on them.

Each player in the list shows their distance from spawn in metres, measured from the world's start temple — or from the centre of the world, and labelled that way, when the temple could not be located. The playable boundary is drawn as a circle; beyond it is the endless ocean.

For everything the map shows and what each layer costs your server, see Valheim Live Map.

Live Map: player privacy

Valheim has a per-player visible to other players tick on the in-game map. It is off by default and it resets every session, so most of your players will not have it on — and this map honours it.

A player who has not turned it on is listed under Online, position hidden: shown as online, with no position. They are not hidden from the list, because pretending they are not there would be a lie.

To see everyone on your own panel anyway, turn on Show All Players on the Admin Map in the server's Settings, under the Game Tools category. It is off by default.

It changes nothing in the game. Other players' in-game maps still follow their own setting; this only affects what your panel shows you.

A position revealed by that override is drawn as a hollow marker and labelled "hidden" in the list, so an overridden position is never presented as one the player chose to share. On a PVP server that distinction matters.

The panel marks this setting as needing a restart. GameGrid also pushes the change straight to a running server, so it usually takes effect within seconds — restart if it does not.

Dashboard

Four cards across the top: World, Day, Players online, and Bridge - the last showing the bridge plugin's version when it is up, or "offline" when it is not.

Below them, a table of everyone online: player name, position as x, z, distance from spawn in metres, and map visibility. Spawn is the world's start temple, which sits near the centre of the world but not on it; if the temple could not be located the column says Distance from world centre instead.

Map visibility has three states, not two. "shared" means the player turned on Valheim's own visible-on-map tick. "private" means they did not and no position is being reported. "private (shown by admin override)" means they did not, and you are seeing them anyway because Show All Players on the Admin Map is on for this server.

The cards and the table refresh every fifteen seconds. All of it comes from the bridge, so a stopped server shows the unavailable notice rather than stale numbers.

Chat

A live feed of in-game chat, refreshed every five seconds, newest at the bottom. Each line shows the time, the player name and the message; a shout is labelled as one.

There is a send box under the feed. Type a message, press Enter or click Send, and it is broadcast to everyone in game. The panel tells you whether it was sent.

To mirror chat into Discord in both directions instead, link a channel with /chat-link. See Discord Chat Bridge.

With only one player online, Valheim transmits no chat at all. It sends each message to the *other* players, so a lone player's messages have nowhere to go. The Capture Chat With One Player Online setting (Settings → Game Tools, on by default) fixes this by adding one entry, "GameGrid (chat relay)", to the in-game player list. It holds no position and steps aside when a second player connects.

If this tab is empty while a single player is talking, that setting is the first thing to check.

Events

Joins, leaves, player deaths, raids starting and ending, and boss kills, refreshed every five seconds, newest first, each with its own colour-coded label and a timestamp. A raid is named for what it sends (for example "Bonemass's army" or "Wolf pack"), and a death or a raid that the bridge reports a position for shows where it happened.

Deaths are also what the economy uses for its death reward. There is no kill or level feed.

These are reported for display. They do not pay auto-earn — see Wallets, Awards and Auto-Earn.

Raising the player cap

Valheim itself stops at 10 players and offers no setting for more. GameGrid can install Azumatt's MaxPlayerCount plugin, which raises it - a separate, deliberate action rather than something that happens by default. Open a support ticket to ask for it; there is no self-serve control for it in the panel today.

Once the plugin is on your server, a Max Players field appears in Settings under System. Until it is there, the field is hidden, because the answer to "can this be raised" is whether a DLL is present on the host. The maximum the plugin allows is 64; GameGrid supports up to 16, and above that the setting carries a performance warning — Valheim servers commonly show position desync and rubber-banding past about that point. It takes effect on the next restart.

Like the bridge, that plugin is server-side only. Nobody joining installs anything, crossplay players included.