Valheim Floating Items

BepInEx mod for Valheim that makes dropped items float on water instead of sinking to the bottom - lose your ore or your sword over the side of the boat and you can still fish it out.

Unofficial mod. This is a fan-made mod, not affiliated with or endorsed by Iron Gate. It marks your game as modded (the game shows this in the main menu), as Iron Gate asks mod authors to do.

What it does

• Every dropped item floats on water (and on tar), bobbing on the surface the same way wood does in the vanilla game.
• Items that already float in the game keep their own behaviour, and fish are left alone - they still swim away when released.
• Works for items added by other mods too.

Built on the game's own buoyancy

The mod has no physics of its own. Valheim already has a buoyancy component (Floating) - it is what keeps wood on the surface. The mod adds that component to every item as it appears in the world and copies its settings (float height, force, damping, splash effect) from Wood, so everything floats exactly like wood does.

Items that are already lying on the bottom come up after the world is loaded again, because the game creates them anew.

Configuration

BepInEx\config\com.michal.valheim.floatingitems.cfg:

Requirements

• Valheim (tested on 1.0.15)
• BepInEx 5.4.x

Installation (players)

1. Install BepInEx for Valheim if you haven't already (see link above, or use r2modman).
2. Download FloatingItems.dll from the latest release.
3. Drop it into <Valheim install folder>\BepInEx\plugins\FloatingItems\.
4. Launch the game and throw something into the sea.

In multiplayer, buoyancy is applied by whoever owns the item (usually the player closest to it), so everyone who wants floating items should have the mod installed.

Building from source

Requires the .NET 8 SDK (or newer) and a local Valheim install with BepInEx installed.

git clone https://github.com/Ab5oluteZer0/valheim-floating-items.git
cd valheim-floating-items
dotnet build -c Release -p:ValheimPath="C:\Path\To\Valheim"

If you don't pass -p:ValheimPath, the build looks for a VALHEIM_PATH environment variable, then falls back to the default Steam location (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Valheim).

The build automatically copies the built DLL into <Valheim>\BepInEx\plugins\FloatingItems\ for quick in-game testing.

Notes on how it works (and a few gotchas found along the way)

• The component is added in a prefix to ItemDrop.Awake: the game caches it there (it is also used to tell whether an item is stuck in tar), so it has to exist before Awake runs. Patching instances instead of prefabs also covers items registered by other mods at any time.
• Water finds the object to push through its rigidbody and takes a single IWaterInteractable from it. Objects that already have one (floating items, fish) are skipped - adding a second would break them.
• The template's surface ripple (m_surfaceEffects) is not copied: it is a child object of the Wood prefab, shared by all copies, and switching it on and off from many items would toggle the template itself. The splash effect is just a list of prefabs to spawn, so it is shared safely.

Support

All my mods are free and will stay free. If you enjoy them and want to say thanks, you can leave a voluntary tip via PayPal - it doesn't unlock anything, it just helps me keep making mods.

License

MIT - see LICENSE.