Why Valheim?(●'◡'●)
It’s been a while — I’ve been playing the game Valheim quite often, and I keep falling deeper in love with its gameplay, graphics, and atmosphere.
This is the kind of game that captivates you with its procedurally generated, vast world, pushing you to explore, face dangers, plan ahead, and ultimately — survive.
It’s already incredibly fun in single-player, but guess what? It also supports multiplayer. You can play with friends using Steam’s built-in multiplayer, host your own server, or use a dedicated server hosting service.
Being broke $, having friends across different time zones 🌏︎, and needing flexibility meant I decided to host a dedicated server on my local machine.
But here’s the thing — it was so annoying to manage the server. Not because it was resource-hungry or overly complicated — it was the repetitive process of running scripts and notifying everyone that the server was up (┬┬﹏┬┬)...
My Solution to the Laziness of Clicking
What I Was Too Lazy To Do
- Manually launching the server’s
.shscript - Notifying friends when the server was up
- Responding to friend requests to start the server
- Providing an easy way for people to check if the server was running
All this made me feel a need of automation of all this task! Hence came up with a discord bot Huginn (‾◡◝).
The Rise of the Bot! (/≧▽≦)/
The bot runs on pure Node.js, executing a series of bash commands triggered by simple in-text slash commands from Discord.
Here’s what happens behind the scenes:
- I set the bot script to autostart on system boot along with Play.it Client (saves me from manual port forwarding).
- Once the bot is live, it has full control over the server's behavior — from start to shutdown.
To top it off, I integrated RCON to remotely access in-game commands like:
- Saving the world manually
- Gracefully shutting down the server without corrupting the world file
- And many more intentionally locked to avoid "griefing".
All handled through Discord, without ever touching the terminal by anyone and from anywhere ╰(°▽°)╯.
The Fall of the Bot¡ o(￣┰￣*)ゞ
In the beginning, everything went so smooth — almost perfectly.
But the happiness didn’t last long. My faulty Wi-Fi card started acting up.
Soon, my OS began freezing and crashing due to the hardware failure.
I tried every fix I could find on the forums — and thanks to DeepSeek, it suggested a firmware update.
So...
I updated the firmware. Spoiler alert: it corrupted my input drivers.
That was the final straw.
The last string it pulled to bring my castle of patience crashing down.
I removed Linux, rolled back to Windows (sadly), and that marked the end of the Huginn bot — at least for now.
The Conclusion...
In this weird adventure project, I learned a lot about:
- Node.js and its powerful package library
- Different tools to work around problems like manual port forwarding, as I didn't have admin access to the router settings
- The importance of good hardware for the functionality of systems
- Hosting and maintaining servers, and running automated scripts to make life easier
But does it mean I will stop working on Huginn bot?
I think I won't, as I already have ideas for Huginn bot V2 with features like:
- Server host rotation with a hosting toolkit to make setting up the environment easy on any computer
- Currency and mob level control for better player experience
- And many more...
So folks, that's enough for today. I might drop updates for the new version — but I found this story worth sharing.
~ Thank you (^///^)
Top comments (0)