Deep North spoilers — reveal article
Protection and Cleanup
Jotun invasions create a persistent hostile area around a central core. They begin when the Malicious Ice at the end of Mörkhalla is destroyed. Invasion trigger reference Unconfirmed
Sunshine Alley adds placement safeguards and automatic cleanup to keep invasions away from established building areas and remove their remaining creatures when they end.
How does an invasion find a location?
When an invasion is triggered, the server searches for a suitable site. Each candidate must meet the event’s normal requirements, including:
An allowed biome and distance from the world centre.
Suitable terrain height and slope.
Enough separation from other invasions.
Availability for any location the event needs to generate.
Clearance from players, workbenches and wards.
The server tries up to 1,000 candidate positions. If none passes the checks, that creation attempt ends without placing an invasion.
The event’s configured limit on simultaneous invasions also applies.
How far away from players must it spawn?
The candidate centre must be at least:
Maximum invasion radius + 150 metres
from every player character checked by the server.
This uses horizontal distance, so being far above or below a candidate does not remove that player’s exclusion area.
The check applies when the invasion is created. Players can approach an existing invasion afterward.
What building areas does it avoid?
New invasions avoid:
Workbenches, using their build radius.
Player wards, using their ward radius.
Admin wards, using their protection radius.
The check covers the invasion’s maximum possible radius, with another 10 metres of clearance.
For each workbench or ward, the required separation between its centre and the invasion centre is:
Maximum invasion radius + protection radius + 10 metres
This keeps the potential invasion area clear of those protection circles, rather than checking only whether the core itself would land inside one.
Protection uses horizontal distance and includes objects stored in the world even when no player is nearby. Ward activation, permissions and creator identity are not checked for this particular placement safeguard: the ward’s presence provides the exclusion.
These are creation rules. Placing a workbench or ward afterward does not automatically remove an existing invasion or its enemies.
What spawns during an invasion?
An invasion creates its core and associated event objects. Its creatures can then appear through both the core’s local spawning and roaming spawns associated with the active event.
Sunshine Alley records which invasion these objects and creatures belong to. That association remains even if a creature wanders away from the original invasion area.
When does an invasion end?
An invasion is retired when:
Its central core is destroyed.
The event is stopped.
Its core reaches six hours of real elapsed time.
Cleanup finds that its associated event no longer exists.
The six-hour limit uses a saved real-world timestamp, rather than in-game days. Restarting the server does not renew the lifetime of an invasion that already has that timestamp.
Expiry is handled when the server checks the core, so removal may happen shortly after the six-hour point.
What gets cleaned up?
Retiring an invasion removes its active event and queues its tracked remains for removal, including:
The core.
Associated event objects.
Creatures belonging to that invasion.
Tagged invasion meteor projectiles.
Creatures remain eligible for cleanup even after wandering outside the event area.
Cleanup runs in batches and waits during pending world saves, so everything may not disappear at exactly the same instant.
The server also removes orphaned tracked objects whose invasion no longer exists. Older, untracked invasion-type creatures outside the Deep North are removed during cleanup checks; ordinary untracked populations inside the Deep North are preserved.
Player buildings, containers and unrelated wildlife are outside this invasion cleanup.