Cartur's Compass and Clock

Free, and always will be — if it improved your game you can tip me on Patreon.

More from Cartur: HD Blood · Map Pins · Safe Stamina · Follow Command · Flooring

A Skyrim-style compass bar across the top of the screen.

Your heading runs across a carved wooden bar — N, NE, E and the rest, with a tick every 15° between them — and every map pin within range sits on it at its real bearing, so a pin at your two o'clock appears at your two o'clock.

What it does

• Pins at their true bearing. Read straight from the in-game map, so whatever you have pinned is what you see, with the same icons.
• Distance you can read at a glance. Icons grow and brighten as you close on them: small and faded at the edge of range, twice the size and fully opaque when you are nearly on top of them.
• One name at a time. The pin nearest the centre of the compass gets its name and distance under the bar. No wall of overlapping text.
• Stays out of the way. Hides itself while the big map, your inventory or the game menu is open, and when you toggle the HUD off.
• Clock. In-game time above the bar, in Valheim's own serif, and it names the part of the day with it - Dawn 42 - 6:40 AM, Dusk 42 - 5:20 PM, Night 43 - 12:15 AM. Night runs 18:00 to 06:00, the same hours the game's own spawns and sleep rules use, so the word tells you whether it is safe out without doing the arithmetic. Dusk is the two hours before dark, as a warning.

Pins it deliberately hides

• Pins you have checked off on the map — you are done with those.
• Chests emptied out, if you also run Cartur's Map Pins — it reads that mod's own looted-chest icon setting, so cleared chests drop off the compass while staying on your map. Not installed? Nothing changes.
• Anything within 8 metres. A pin you are standing on has no meaningful direction, and it would otherwise swing wildly across the bar as you move.

Install

Use a mod manager (r2modman / Thunderstore / Gale) — it will pull in BepInEx for you.

Manually: drop CarturCompassAndClock.dll into BepInEx/plugins.

Config

BepInEx/config/com.jekkle.valheim.carturcompassandclock.cfg, written on first run. Changes apply live — no restart needed.

Moving and resizing it

Rather than working the numbers out by hand:

1. Turn on EditMode in the config manager.
2. Open your inventory. You need a free cursor - without a menu open the mouse is driving the camera, and clicking swings your weapon.
3. Drag the box to move it. Drag the grip on its right edge to resize it.
4. Turn EditMode back off.

Where you drop it is written straight back to FrameWidth, FrameOffsetX and FrameOffsetY, so it survives restarts and you can still fine-tune the numbers by hand afterwards.

Compatibility

No Harmony patches — the compass is its own UI canvas that reads the map's pin list. It doesn't touch the map, the HUD, or anyone else's UI, so it should sit alongside other mods without argument.

Single-player and multiplayer, client-side only. The server does not need it, and other players do not need it.

Changelog

1.4.0

• The compass hides during a cinematic. Sleeping after a boss kill plays a full-screen video and the compass was drawn straight over it.
• Grave markers no longer have to crowd the bar. New DeathMarkers setting. Graves were exempt from the range test entirely, so every grave a character had ever left was drawn at any distance, and a long-lived character ended up with a bar full of skulls. All keeps that behaviour, InRange makes graves obey PinRange like every other pin - so the one you just made still shows while you walk back to it - and Off draws none. Your map is untouched either way.

1.3.1

• Markers no longer freeze at the edge of the compass. The sweep that retires a marker and the draw loop disagreed about how far is too far, so a pin in the gap between them was dropped by the draw without ever being hidden, and its marker stayed on screen.

1.3.0

• Home is always on the compass, in gold. The bed you last slept in shows at any distance, at a fixed size, and does not fade out - the whole point of a home marker is the walk back from somewhere you have never been. The name under the frame reads "Home".
• Graves show in dark red, at any distance, over everything else. A grave whose tombstone you have emptied stops being drawn, so only the ones still holding your gear stay on the bar. That lasts for the session; the pin itself is left alone on the map.
• A crowded bar stays readable. When several pins land on the same stretch of the compass, the nearest one keeps the spot and the ones behind it are hidden until the view thins out. Nothing is filtered by distance or by type, and home and graves are never the ones dropped.
• Pins take their colour from Cartur's Map Pins. A pin you have coloured on the map is drawn in that colour on the compass, ore tints included. Without that mod, or with a pin left at its default style, nothing changes.
• The clock says what time of day it is, and names the day. Three phases now - Morning 06:00-12:00, Afternoon 12:00-18:00, Night 18:00-06:00 - and the day number is labelled, so it reads "Morning, Day 106 - 9:14 AM" instead of "Night 106". Dawn and Dusk are gone: they were narrow bands that told you nothing the clock beside them did not. Translated into the same eleven languages as the rest of the clock.
• The name under the frame clears when you turn away. It only names a pin within 12 degrees of centre now, instead of anywhere in the visible arc.

1.2.1

• The compass no longer eats mouse clicks. Three of its parts - the centre tick, the clock and the name label under the frame - were set to catch clicks, which they have no use for, so anything of the game's sitting behind them could not be clicked. All three now let clicks straight through. Only the edit-mode box and its resize grip catch clicks, which is what they are for.

1.2.0

• Emptied chests drop off the compass again. If you also run Cartur's Map Pins, the compass hides chests you have already cleared out - it reads that mod's looted-chest icon to know which those are. Map Pins 1.3.0 renamed that setting, changed its type and moved where its icons live, so the compass stopped recognising them and looted chests came back. It now reads all three rather than assuming them, and asks Map Pins directly where its icons start, so a future icon set will not break it the same way.
• Links to Cartur's Flooring.

1.1.3

• Store page only - the plugin is unchanged from 1.1.2. Added in-game screenshots, a new icon taken from one of them, and a link to Cartur's Follow Command.

1.1.2

• Moved the links to my other mods to the top of the page.

1.1.1

• Added links to my other mods.

1.1.0

• Edit mode. Turn on EditMode and a box appears around the bar: drag the box to move the compass anywhere on screen, drag the grip on its right edge to resize it. Position and size are saved when you let go. The compass stays visible in menus while edit mode is on, so you have a free cursor to drag with.
• New FrameOffsetX setting for horizontal position. The bar could only be moved up and down before.
• The slim tick-marked bar is now the frame you actually get. 1.0.0 shipped the older wide Nordic frame by mistake - the store icon has shown the slim one all along.
• New defaults: a little wider, a little further down, horizontally centred. Existing configs are left exactly as they are - this only changes a fresh install.
• The clock is set in Valheim's own serif, Averia Serif Libre, instead of Arial.
• New TwelveHourClock setting, on by default: the clock reads Day 42 - 1:05 PM. Turn it off for Day 42 - 13:05.
• The clock names the time of day - Dawn, Morning, Afternoon, Dusk, Night - so the hour means something at a glance. Night keeps the game's own 18:00 to 06:00, the boundary its spawns and sleep rules run on, so the word still answers "is it safe out". Dusk is the two hours before dark, as a warning.
• Pin names under the bar are readable again. A chest read $piece_chestwood rather than its name. Pins store a raw localization token and the map translates it on the way to the label; the compass was printing the token straight through.

1.0.0

First release.

• Compass bar with cardinal and intercardinal headings and a tick every 15°.
• Map pins placed at their real bearing, scaling and fading with distance.
• Name and distance shown for the pin nearest the centre of the bar.
• Checked-off pins, emptied chests (with Cartur's Map Pins) and pins within 8 metres are left off the bar.
• Hides with the HUD, the large map, the inventory and the game menu.
• In-game day and time above the bar.