Odin the Red

Software developer · twenty years of it

Odin the Red

I write the layer under the game: mods, Discord bots and the servers that keep a community standing at 2am. No team and no agency. Everything here is in production, and I’m the one who answers when it breaks.

See the work Write to me →
Odin the Red: an armoured, horned figure with glowing red eyes and a rune-carved staff
Odin the RedLMLGamingTV
20+Years writing software
3Projects running in production
19MidgardPlus releases in one day
22,000Verified spawn points in Vardyn

Selected work

Three things, all of them live

Not prototypes and not demos. A free mod people install every day, a paid bot with subscribers, and the server all of it was built for. Every line is mine, and so is the maintenance.

A fog-filled Nordic valley at dusk, dark pine forest below snow-dusted mountains
Valheim · a mod by Odin the Red

FreeValheimThunderstorev1.2.3

MidgardPlus

One mod to tune Valheim the way you want it, instead of twenty that fight each other. The game ships as compiled assemblies with no source, so I read the shipped DLLs to find every method worth hooking and patch them while the game runs.

It keeps growing because players keep telling me what they want. Companions who fight, fetch and look after your base. Crafting straight from the chests around you. A desktop launcher that installs the lot.

Built with
C#, BepInEx, HarmonyX, Jotunn
Settings
33, and every one starts at vanilla
On a server
The host’s rules win, pushed to every player
Shipped
19 releases on 10 September 2026
irm https://midgardplus.odinthered.dev/install.ps1 | iex
Open the mod site Thunderstore →
A warden watching over a fortified island at dusk
Discord · hosted for game servers

$10 a monthSaaSDiscord

Vardyn

A hosted Discord bot that runs a living world on someone else’s game server, sold as a subscription. One box, many customers, and each of them sealed off from the others with its own process, subdomain, certificate and secrets.

Built with
Node.js, discord.js, PHP, Python, nginx, pm2, SQLite
The world
240 named locations that defend themselves, and hunters that remember who got away
Spawns
22,000 player-verified coordinates, so nothing falls out of the sky
Billing
Stripe trials, renewals and cancellation, end to end
Visit vardynbot.com →
A watchtower and razor-wire fence against a red sunset
SCUM · PvPvE

LiveSCUMPvPvE

BetterScum

The server the rest of it was built for, and the reason any of it exists. Open-world PvP with hordes, base sieges and airship raids. Config, economy, spawn tables and uptime are all mine to keep working.

Rules
No safe zones, weekend raid windows, a wipe every quarter
Community
Run and supported by me, in the Discord
Visit betterscum.com →

About

It all started as my own problem

Twenty years of writing software, pointed these days at games. Not game studios: the layer underneath, where the mods, the bots and the infrastructure live.

BetterScum came first. Running it meant hours of admin every night, so I wrote a bot to do the job.

That bot became Vardyn, and other server owners started paying to run it. Then my Valheim mod list started arguing with itself, so I wrote MidgardPlus to replace twenty mods with one.

C# against compiled Unity assemblies. Node.js for the bots. Python and PHP for the web and the tooling, all of it on Linux behind nginx I set up myself.

The rule I keep coming back to is to build it so it can be turned off. Every feature is a switch, the defaults match the base game, and nothing assumes it knows the players better than the person running the server does.

Experience
20+ years writing software
Languages
C#, JavaScript and Node.js, Python, PHP, SQL
Runtime
Linux, nginx, systemd, pm2, Let’s Encrypt
Also
discord.js, HarmonyX, BepInEx, Stripe, SQLite
Games
Valheim, SCUM
Company
Odin The Red Developments

The practice

What I actually write

Anyone can ship something once. What comes after is the part I do: the fixes, the billing, the message at midnight, on projects that stay live long enough to break in interesting ways.

C# · HarmonyX

Game modding

Code against a compiled game, patched at runtime. With no source and no documentation, the real work is reading the shipped assemblies and proving every hook exists before writing a line against it.

Node.js

Bots and automation

Discord bots that do the admin job a person used to do at 2am. Scheduling, state that survives a restart, permissions, and a control panel so the owner never opens a config file.

nginx · pm2

Multi-tenant hosting

One box, many customers, each sealed off with its own process, subdomain, certificate and secrets. Provisioned so a new customer goes live without me being awake.

Uptime · support

Running it live

Billing, support and uptime. The angry message at midnight comes to me, which is a strong reason to write code that doesn’t produce one.

Contact

Work with me

Custom features, a bot for your server, or a mod that does the thing nobody has built yet. Support comes back to me rather than a queue. Discord is fastest, and email is fine for anything you’d rather not post in public.

Email
support@vardynbot.com
Discord
Join the server
Ko-fi
ko-fi.com/odinthered
By card
No account needed, straight through Square