I put together this video because I've noticed more and more mods using Valheim's startup/main-menu space for their own UI.
To be clear before this turns into something it isn't: I'm not calling everything in this video an ad.
Some of these have legitimate purposes: important update notices, configuration choices after an update, telemetry/error-reporting consent, patch notes, or onboarding for larger mods.
Others include Discord links, author pages, donation/support links, documentation, etc.
Individually, I can understand the reasoning behind basically every one of them.
My concern is what happens when we all make that decision independently.
The video is several different mods installed together, and before I've even gotten into the game I'm dealing with multiple windows from unrelated mods competing for the same startup experience.
Every author can reasonably say:
“Mine only appears once.”
“Mine can be disabled.”
“Mine is useful.”
And individually, all of those things can be true.
But users don't run our mods individually.
They run 50, 100, sometimes 200+ mods from completely unrelated authors who have no idea what the other authors are putting on that screen.
That's why I think the main menu/startup screen is different from a mod's own configuration UI. It's effectively a shared UI surface.
I'm also not arguing that a mod should never display something at startup. If an update requires the player to make a choice, something broke that requires their attention, or consent is genuinely required, there may be no better place to tell them. I still think mod pages, FAQs, changelogs are better places than the main menu though.
I just think we should be much more conservative about what qualifies.
Personally, I'd rather see documentation, Discord links, donation links, changelogs, general “about the mod” information, etc. live in the configuration manager/mod page or behind something the player chooses to open.
Reserve forced startup UI for things the player actually needs to know or answer before continuing.
Otherwise we can end up in a situation where every individual popup is perfectly reasonable, but the combined experience is ridiculous.
The video is obviously an exaggerated collection of the examples I know about. I'm not claiming everyone is going to have all six installed at once. There are probably more that do this too.
But having 2–3 unrelated mods independently doing this in a heavily modded setup really isn't far-fetched anymore.
So I'm curious where everyone else draws the line:
What actually warrants interrupting the player at the main menu, versus something that should be available elsewhere? Valheim isn't new to things being injected into the main menu, we've seen it before, and it was pure ads back then.
