Can I install mods on a Valheim server (BepInEx)?

Not at the moment. Server-side mods are not supported on Zeros Host Valheim servers today, and uploading BepInEx to your server will not load it.

Valheim mods load through BepInEx, which has to be injected before the game starts. On Linux that means launching the server through BepInEx's own start script, so it can set the loader up first. Our Valheim servers launch the game binary directly, and the start command itself is not editable from the panel - you can change startup variables such as server name, world name and password, but not the command that runs. So BepInEx files placed on the server are simply ignored, and nothing about them will appear in your Console.

An earlier version of this guide described an upload procedure and told you to watch the Console for BepInEx loading each plugin. That procedure could not work on our servers, and those log lines were never going to appear. If you tried it and saw nothing, you did not do it wrong.

What does still work is client-side-only mods. A mod that changes your own interface, camera or visuals, and does not change how the game behaves, runs entirely on your machine and needs nothing from the server. Mods that change gameplay - ValheimPlus, content mods, balance and difficulty mods - must be loaded by the server as well as every player, so they cannot be used on a Zeros Host Valheim server for now.

If server-side mods matter to you, tell us through the contact form or on Discord. Supporting BepInEx is a change to how the server is started rather than a setting we can switch on, so it is a piece of work rather than a toggle, and demand is genuinely how we decide what to build next.