Urgent help needed from anyone who knows about advanced valheim commands

so first i guess ill give brief context and then the broader context, because though its honestly awful to be dealing with, i can see a little humour in it from an outside looking in

first, the issue itself

there is a huge area with doors and chests that only people are OPed can access within a set radius, anyone not OPed trying to interact with chests or doors in the radius gets the "no access" when trying to open a door or a chest, and if you try to place anything within the radius without OP, it says "the ward stops you"
-
we put the buildings on iron stits and carved out the land below carefully, after outlining the radius, and found no ward

second, since again, its a little funny and i think you the reader at least deserve to read- what caused this, because we know who did it, just not how.

-
-
-

i own and run a valheim server with a number of players, there is almost always more than 7 players on the server at a time

its relatively vanilla, things like infinity hammer and its other accompanying mods like server dev commands are used by a select few OPs, gizmo etc

we had one OP who was especially gifted, tyler.

tyler had an argument with one of the server members called mack.
they never got along, and argued about a vast number of things, and this one thing was the straw that broke the camals back, since tyler helped mack create his base, i assume sort of in a gesture of good faith after a sort of recent argument

mack decided to start telling server members that he made it himself

he also decided to do this, right in tylers face, in a call with himself, tyler, and 5 other server members

as you can imagine, shit hit the fan immediately

i got messages about it, and not but an hour later, i got a number of @'s from players and my two OPs, reporting that in two areas so far, doors and chests could not be opened in a house unless an OP opened them, same for chests, and doors newly placed by the OP- you get the picture

he reportedly got offline and has since left the valheim server, the discord server, and all attempts to reach him have been met with a block

the only possible hint i could give is that tyler was very gifted when it came to valheim, we have a number of signs with various sizes or letters, shapes, a blue wooden board with a big P on it for parking your carts, floating boards of text above friendly NPCs we have used in market stalls since the server has somewhat of a player driven trade economy and an honor system with NPC traders etc, and i know they have something to do with either wood walls, tool shelfs or something? i remember he told me about it once upon a time but it honestly went right over my head

i genuinely have no idea how hes done this, with the entire area exscavated and nothing there- my worst fear is that hes somehow put some sort of witchcraft in the earth, out of digging range somehow, or far up in the sky? maybe its up there and invisible? because i did try to check and didnt find much of anything, seemingly no matter how high i went

ultimately, its not completely completely awful, i can just keep the doors open in one village and in that one building, the chests are an issue but at least i can retrieve the contents- i dont know it just sucks that the entire village is uninhabitable now, and one building near spawn

hopefully he hasnt done any more damage :/

im honestly not expecting anything from this, but it would be incredible if any of you had hypothesis' and or even a lead for such an odd occurance

thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this, take care, have a nice day / night