Valheim Live Map

Where it is, and where the picture comes from

Open your Valheim server, click Game Tools in the sidebar, and use the Live Map tab. Valheim servers get no separate Live Map entry in the sidebar, so that tab is the only door onto it.

Valheim ships no map. There are no tiles, no minimap export and nothing a host can ask for — the shape of a world exists only in its seed. So the GameGrid Bridge, the server-side plugin the platform installs on every Valheim server start, asks your running server what its own world looks like and draws that. The terrain you are looking at is your seed, drawn by your server. It is not a stock image and it is not an approximation of Valheim’s world generation done somewhere else, which is why it cannot drift out of step with the game.

You can zoom from the whole 21-kilometre continent down to about a third of a metre per pixel. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and click a player in the list to centre on them. The buttons in the corner of the map zoom in and out, fit the whole world, centre on spawn and go full screen. Click the map first and the keyboard works too: the arrow keys pan, + and − zoom, 0 fits the world and F goes full screen.

Point at anything on the map — a player, a landmark, a ship, a portal, a base, a note, a ping — and a tooltip says what it is, where it is and how far it is from spawn. The corner of the map shows the coordinates under the pointer, and the name of the region you are over.

A badge in the other corner shows the in-game day and time, the weather and the wind. On a dedicated server the weather is the server’s own view of it, and players in a different biome can be seeing something else, so the badge says (server view). A Night tint layer darkens the map with the in-game time of day if you want it.

The address in your browser keeps up with where you are looking, the terrain style and the layers you have on, so copying it gives a colleague the same view. That is a panel feature only; a public share link carries none of it.

The first draw on a new world shows a progress bar and takes a minute or two. It is spread thinly across frames so your players do not feel it, and it happens once per world — terrain does not change, so the result is cached and every load after that is instant.

There is nothing to install, no setting to switch on and no restart needed to get a map.

Who can see a player’s position

This is the part your players will ask you about, so it is worth being exact. There are three things going on and they are not the same thing.

The player decides. Valheim has a visible to other players tick on its own 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. Somebody who has not ticked it is listed as online, position hidden: in the player list, with no marker drawn. They are not quietly dropped from the list, because pretending a connected player is not there would be its own kind of lie.

You can override that on your own panel. Turn on Show All Players on the Admin Map in the server’s Settings, under Game Tools. It is off by default. With it on, everybody connected is drawn for you whatever their own tick says. The panel marks this setting as needing a restart, but GameGrid also pushes the change straight to a running server, so it usually takes effect within seconds — restart if it does not.

The override changes nothing in the game. Other players’ in-game maps still follow their own setting. It affects your panel and nothing else.

A position the override revealed is drawn as a hollow marker and labelled as hidden in the list, so it is never presented as one the player chose to share. On a PVP server that difference decides fights.

The override never reaches a public share link. A share link draws a player only when you ticked *Show player markers* as you made the link and that player turned their own in-game tick on. Everybody else is absent from it, override or no override, and no player name reaches a share link at all.

Positions refresh every five seconds. That is as fast as it goes, deliberately: reading positions costs your game server frame time, and a Viking walks at walking pace. Between updates a marker keeps moving the way the player was going, for at most one update’s worth of time, so it walks rather than jumps; a portal trip still snaps straight to the new place. A small arrow ahead of the marker shows which way they are heading once the server’s bridge plugin reports it.

Nothing here keeps a movement history per person. The activity map is folded into 164-metre cells as it is sampled and no trail is kept, which is fine enough to show which coastline your server lives on and far too coarse to pick out one base or the route somebody walks home.

One thing worth knowing before you turn the override on: fog is revealed by whatever positions the map is given. With the override off, a player who is not sharing reveals no fog. With it on, everybody connected reveals fog as they travel. The fog record itself holds no name, no count and no time — see below.

The three terrain styles

A Terrain row above the map offers three, and they are three genuinely different drawings rather than a filter over one.

Each style is drawn by your server as its own set of tiles. A style is drawn on demand the first time you use it, so the first view of Topographic or Old chart takes a moment and fills in as tiles arrive — the panel says how many it is still drawing. Going back to a style you have already used is instant, because each keeps its own cache.

Contour lines are computed from the real height of the ground, not traced off the picture, so they are the heights your players are actually climbing. There are none under water: the seabed heights are real, and drawing them would be a different map from the one anybody asked for.

Zooming past the pre-drawn map draws detail tiles on demand as well, which is why a deep zoom into somewhere nobody has looked before takes a second or two to sharpen. Those tiles are kept on your server up to 512 MB across all three styles, and the ones nobody has looked at longest are dropped first. You do not have to manage any of that.

Fog: only ground somebody has walked

Tick Fog of war to see how much of the continent your server has actually been to. It is off by default, because your first look at your map should be the map.

Ground nobody has walked is dark. The world is divided into cells of about 41 metres and a cell is revealed once a connected player has been near it. The record only ever grows: nothing re-fogs, and a player logging off does not take their ground with them.

A cartography table makes the map fill in faster. When your players write their maps to a cartography table in game, what they pooled there is added to what the panel draws, so ground one player explored alone stops being dark for everyone. The panel tells you which of the two you are looking at, and says plainly when nobody has built a table yet.

The fog record is one bit per cell and nothing else — no name, no count, no timestamp, unioned across everyone who has ever played. It can tell you where your server has been. It cannot tell you who went there or when, because that was never written down.

Fog is a map feature here, not a privacy screen: you can switch it off on your own panel whenever you like. The one place it is enforced regardless is a public share link.

The layers, and what leaving one on costs

Tickboxes above the map. Most are off by default, and that is not just tidiness.

A layer nobody has asked for in five minutes stops being scanned. These are panel preferences rather than server settings, so your server has no standing instruction about which ones matter to you — it does the work only while somebody is asking. Close the map and within five minutes your server stops scanning for all of them. That is the honest reason to leave the ones you do not use switched off: a ticked layer is work your game server keeps doing for as long as a panel is open on it.

Five minutes is long enough to survive a page refresh, so toggling something never feels like waiting for it to warm up. After a quiet spell the first answer can be empty while the scan runs, and the panel says it is scanning rather than saying there is nothing there — "there are no portals" and "we have not looked yet" are different answers, and showing the first as the second is how somebody decides a feature is broken thirty seconds before it works.

The six object layers are re-scanned every thirty seconds while you are watching, and each is capped: 500 portals and beds, 300 ships and wards, 200 graves, 150 carts. A layer that hits its cap says so rather than quietly showing you a partial world. Each row in the layer list shows how many it found and when it last scanned.

With a current bridge plugin the objects carry more than a position: a ship shows its type and points the way it is facing, a portal shows its name and a line to the portal it is linked to (dashed when the other end is not on the map), a grave says whose it is and how long ago they died, a ward shows the ground it protects and whether it is switched on, and a bed says whose it is. Portals with names are also listed by name beside the map; click one to go to it. On a server still running an older plugin the markers show positions only until its next restart.

Landmarks, region names and dungeons are the exception. They are worked out once per world and cached, so showing them costs nothing measurable — which is why the first two are on by default. Dungeons are off only because a large world has hundreds of entrances and drawing them all is a rash across the map rather than a set of landmarks.

Valheim names nothing in its world, so a region name here is ours: a connected run of one biome, named from your seed, the same name in the same place on every restart. Telling somebody to meet you at a named region is safe.

Looking inside a dungeon. Turn on Dungeons, then click an entrance. A window opens with that dungeon’s rooms drawn from above — where each room is, which way it faces, how big it is and what it is called — shaded by height, with any players who are inside it right now. It refreshes every few seconds while it is open.

Three things it does not do. It does not show how the rooms connect: Valheim saves where each room ended up but not which doorway leads where, so no doors or passages are drawn. It needs somebody to have entered the dungeon once: the rooms are generated the first time a player goes in, and until then the window says so. Troll caves and the Ashlands’ Putrid Holes have no room layout at all — each is one fixed interior — so for those the window shows only who is inside.

Players inside a dungeon follow the same rule as the rest of the map: somebody appears only if their position would show on the map anyway. Dungeon interiors are never on a share link. This arrives with a bridge plugin update, so a server shows it after its next restart; until then the map shows entrances and says why there is nothing to click.

Fog, the activity map and the leaderboard are not gated on you watching them, because none of the three can be filled in afterwards. They are also cheap, which is what makes that affordable.

The timelapse is a scrubber rather than a layer: it replaces what is drawn with a recorded frame, and turning it off returns you to live. A frame is taken every hour, kept hourly for two weeks and then one a day for a year. It cannot be back-filled, so a new world has nothing to play yet and says so. Frames carry no player positions and no names, and each one records which layers were not being watched when it was taken, so a thin patch of history reads as a thin patch rather than as an empty world.

Player bases

The layer most people want and the most expensive one on the map, which is why it is off by default and why the first look at a long-running world takes a moment.

There is no list of build pieces to look for. The map asks your server for everything it is holding and checks which of those objects a player placed, using the mark the game itself puts on anything player-built. Nothing to keep up to date as Valheim adds new pieces, and nothing missed because somebody forgot to add one to a list.

Pieces within 32 metres of each other count as one base, and it takes 25 of them to count at all — so a lone workbench and a bit of fence do not become a base on your map. Up to 200 bases are drawn, as circles sized by how much is there.

A base is a shape, not a blueprint. Each piece is folded into a 32-metre cell the moment it is read and its exact position thrown away, so no list of anybody’s walls exists anywhere in this. You get where people built and roughly how big it is. There is nothing else to get.

A finished scan is held for ten minutes, so opening the map twice in that time costs one scan rather than two.

Point at a base to see roughly how big it is and, with a current bridge plugin, the tames kept around it counted by species — never their names.

The panel reports how many objects were looked at beside the number of bases found. "0 bases" on a world nobody has built on and "0 bases" from a scan that saw nothing at all are different problems, and without those figures they look identical.

Notes and pings

Map notes are yours. Tick Map notes, click Add a note, click the spot on the map and type what is there. They live on the panel, they are never in the game, and they are never on a share link — a note saying "silver here" is something your admins wrote to each other. 500 per server, 60 characters each.

The same tick also draws the pins your players wrote to a cartography table in game, so you can see what they have marked and what they called it. If nobody has built a table, the panel says so rather than showing you an empty map and letting you guess.

Pings are the one thing on this map that writes into the running game. Reading shows where players have pointed recently. Ping this in game drops a marker into the world that every connected player sees and hears — a dedicated Valheim server has no other way to point at a place. It needs the same access as sending a broadcast, and every one is recorded in your account’s audit log.

With one player online, incoming pings stay empty, and that is correct rather than broken. Valheim never sends a lone player’s ping to the server, so there is nothing for the panel to read.

The leaderboard

Its own Leaderboard tab on the same Game Tools page: playtime, deaths, distance walked and boss progress, 50 rows.

It is per wipe. The board is tied to your world seed, so a new seed starts a fresh board and the old one is simply a file nobody opens. A world nobody has played on shows an empty board and says why.

Distance is walked distance only. A jump of more than 120 metres between samples is treated as a teleport and not counted, so portals and respawns do not quietly rank whoever built the most portals.

It carries no platform ids. No Steam id, no Xbox id, no account id, nothing that identifies somebody outside your server — a character name and the numbers beside it is the whole row.

Identity is the honest weak point, and it is Valheim’s rather than ours: the game gives a server nothing durable to tell two characters apart. A player who reconnects keeps one row. Two players who choose the same character name may end up sharing one. Where exactly one row already carries a name, a new character arriving under that name takes the row over rather than starting a second; where two rows already share a name, nothing is merged at all, because silently combining two people’s playtime is worse than showing a duplicate.

Sharing the map with a public link

At the bottom of the map controls you can issue a read-only link that anybody can open with no GameGrid account — something to post in your community’s Discord.

What a stranger sees: the terrain, your server’s name, the in-game day, how many people are on, and two kinds of landmark — spawn and Haldor’s locations. That is the entire list.

What they never see: player bases, dungeons, boss altars, Hildir, the Bog Witch and the other game landmarks, region names, raids, the weather, the activity map, the leaderboard, your notes, pings, the timelapse, chat, events, ships, carts, portals, graves, wards or beds. None of that is filtered out request by request — there is no public address that answers for any of it at all, which is a stronger promise than a filter, because a filter has to be right every time and an address that does not exist cannot be talked into answering.

They only ever see ground your players have explored. Fog is enforced on a share link whether or not you have the fog layer on for yourself, and it is enforced in the image itself rather than drawn over the top, so unexplored terrain is not in what gets sent. On a young world that means most of the picture is dark; the playable boundary is drawn underneath so it reads as a mostly unexplored world rather than as a page that failed to load.

Player markers are optional, and doubly gated. Tick Show player markers as you issue the link and a player is drawn only if they have also turned their own in-game visible-on-map tick on. Positions only, never names. Your Show All Players on the Admin Map override does not apply to a share link at all.

A stranger cannot zoom in as far as you can. Deep zoom costs your game server a drawing pass per tile, so a share link stops at the pre-drawn map. Somebody with the link cannot make your server work by panning around at maximum zoom.

The link is shown once. Copy it when it appears. Only a fingerprint of it is stored, so nothing can recover it afterwards — not a backup, not support. Losing one costs you a revoke and a re-issue, and that is the trade that makes it safe to hold.

Revoking is immediate. The link is checked on every single request rather than once when a page loads, so a tab somebody already had open stops working at its next refresh rather than when they finally close it.

Expiry is optional and defaults to Never. You can choose 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days instead. Five live links per server, each listed with its expiry and how many times it has been opened.

Only the account owner and admins can issue or revoke one. Anybody who can see the server can see that a link exists and when it runs out — knowing what your server is publishing is part of running it — but publishing a world to the internet is a different decision from looking at it, so issuing takes the same level of access as deleting a server.

A revoked link, an expired link and a link that never existed all answer identically. Somebody holding a dead link learns that it does not work, and nothing else about your server.

The same data in Discord and the API

The Discord bot’s `/map` command answers from this same map, read-only, and every reply is shown only to the person who asked — /map players in a public channel would otherwise tell the whole channel where everyone is standing.

See Discord Bot Commands.

The Customer API serves part of the same under your server’s `map/` routes: map/capabilities, map/players, map/fog, map/leaderboard and map/share. Ask map/capabilities first — for Valheim it reports players, fog and the leaderboard as available, and tiles, entities, history, region names, land claims and map actions as not. There are no map tiles on the API and nothing on it writes. See Customer API.

When the map says it is unavailable

The map tells you which of a short list is true rather than showing a generic failure, and none of the answers asks you to do anything except start or restart the server.

The mod loader or the bridge is not installed yet — both go in automatically, and the usual meaning is that the server has not been started since they were added.

The bridge’s connection details could not be read — restarting rewrites them.

The server is stopped — the map comes back up with it.

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

A world still being drawn is not a fault, and shows progress rather than an error.

If a plugin update is waiting, it is applied at your next restart. Nothing on the platform will restart your server to deliver a map change.

If the bridge does not answer at all after a restart, that is ours — open a support ticket with your Service ID.

The other games are different

This map is specific to Valheim. 7 Days to Die, Minecraft and Palworld each have their own, built from something else entirely, and none of them behaves like this one — in particular, none of the other three has a public share link.

See The Live Map: What Each Game Shows for the comparison, and Valheim Game Tools for the dashboard, chat and events tabs beside the map.