Leash - tame, lead and fight beside your creatures

A leash that fights: your tamed creature walks beside you and goes for the enemies around, but never farther than its rope, and a visible rope hangs from your hand to its neck for every player to see. Around it, a whole way of keeping animals: lasso and thrown bait to catch wild ones, harder taming for adults and easy taming for the young, wild herds with young, new tameable species, saddles for bears and deer, inherited traits and rare coats, names, fenced pens with troughs.

BepInEx mod for Valheim. Every player needs it (new items and pieces). Works on its own; works with AllTameable, Trails and the PlanetPrototype planet.

Leashes and fighting

• Rope leash, troll-hide strap, iron chain - longer and stronger in that order (12 / 16 / 24 m). Each leash holds one creature; a creature stronger than its leash wears it out and breaks it. Repaired where it is made.
• Look at a tamed creature and press L (or use the leash from the hotbar on it). It follows and fights within the leash's reach; when the rope is taut it is pulled back. It goes for whoever you hit and whoever hits you. A strong creature (a lox) pulls you along.
• [ ] shorter / longer. Shift+L - a small window: every creature on your leash, its length, health, how long it stays fed, its age and traits, a Name button.
• Orders: hold G and turn the wheel - heel, stay, guard this spot, attack the target, come (a whistle everyone hears).
• L on a post or beam ties the creatures you lead to it; L on a ship tows them; L on a cart hitches one (it pulls by its strength: a lox a full cart, a boar an empty one).
• Through portals the creatures you lead go with you. Lost ones are on the map with their last known point; Find in the window.

The rope

A real-looking rope (a few points of light physics, no rigidbodies): it hangs from your hand to the creature's neck with the slack you keep in hand, rests on the ground, rocks and fences without going through them. (A collar ring can be switched on in the config.) Each player computes the rope on their own; only who leads whom travels over the network. Quality and distance in the config.

Catching wild creatures

• Lasso: aim at a wild creature (boar, deer, hen, neck, young ones...) within 12 m and press L. The catch jerks away and strains the rope; at full strain the lasso snaps.
• Bait: take a special bait in your hand from the hotbar like a spear - hold the mouse wheel (MMB) to aim (the arc and landing spot show), let go to throw; LMB sets it down in front of you. Thrown crouched, an unaware creature does not notice you. Creatures notice it from 30 m, come and eat; a special bait also calms them for 5 minutes (no attacking, no running) - time for a leash.
  • Sweet bait (berries and honey) - boars; meat bait (meat and dandelion) - wolves; grain bait (cloudberries and barley) - lox. A bait counts as each of its ingredients, so creatures of other mods that eat them come too.

Taming

• Animal husbandry skill: grows with taming. From 25 you see about how long a wild creature's taming still takes and part of what it eats; from 50 all it eats and taming 10 % faster; from 75, 25 % faster.
• Grown creatures tame only while calmed by a special bait, and 1.5 times slower than in the game; without calm, taming slips back a little, a scare (a hit, an enemy near) more.
• Young ones tame six times faster and need no calm. Raised by you, a young one must be fed while it grows or it goes wild again.
• Shut in a pit or a cramped box, a creature is frightened and will not tame: no more "dig a hole and feed it". A pen big enough for its size is fine.
• All of it applies to the game's own taming too, and can be switched off.

Herds, new species, saddles

• Wild herds with young: piglets with boars, cubs with wolves, calves with lox, hatchlings with asksvin; a smaller copy of the adult for species without young of their own. Take one and the adults come for you.
• New tameable species: deer, hare, neck, bears (Bjorn, Unbjorn) - with their food, taming time and breeding. Species already tameable through another mod keep its rules.
• Saddles for bears and deer (the game's lox saddle, scaled to them).

Breeding and names

• Inherited traits: size, strength (health and damage) and shade with a spread around the parents; rare coats (white, black, red, spotted) that pass on.
• Names: shown above your creatures, on the map and in the window.

Pens and troughs

• Troughs (small trough, manger, large iron-bound trough) built with the hammer: put food in, creatures tied to them and tamed ones in the pen around eat by themselves; fed ones breed. Feed piles show how full it is; wear states like other building pieces.
• Pens: a closed fence or walls round a trough is found as a pen by itself (recomputed only when pieces near it change). Inside: no fear of being shut in, the trough feeds only its pen, Trails leaves no trails.

Hints

Hugin the raven explains the leash, the lasso and the bait the first time you get them.

Installation

1. Install BepInExPack for Valheim.
2. Put Leash.dll into Valheim/BepInEx/plugins/.
3. Every player needs the mod; on a dedicated server it is recommended too.

Compatibility

• Multiplayer: the leash is stored on the creature (ZDO); every player sees the rope, names and traits. The player who leads a creature runs it.
• AllTameable and other taming mods: species they make tameable keep their rules; the leash works on any tamed creature.
• Leash only ([General] LeashOnly, a checkbox in F1): for playing beside other taming or breeding mods. Leashes, rope, commands, tying, carts, towing, lasso and the window stay; the mod's taming rules, baits, skill, fear, herds and breeding, traits, new species, saddles, pens and troughs are off. Recipes, troughs, species and breeding change after a game restart.
• Trails (by Chistix): carts pulled by creatures are lighter on roads; no trails inside pens.
• PlanetPrototype (spherical world, by Chistix): "down" is toward the planet's centre for the rope, the pull and landing points; pins and rings on PlanetMap3D's globe.

Settings

BepInEx/config/chistix.leash.cfg (or the F1 configuration manager): keys, leash lengths and strengths, recipes, bait, taming rules, fear, herds, riding, traits, rope quality and distance, map pins and names, pens. No sliders: checkboxes, lists and fields.

Credits

Made by Chistix: idea, design, direction and testing. Code written with Claude Code (Anthropic) as an AI coding assistant, under Chistix's direction. The item and texture art (leashes, baits, rope, strap and chain) is Chistix's own (generated images, cut and fitted for the mod); the trough models were built by code for this mod. Uses BepInEx and Harmony; no game files included. Valheim is (c) Iron Gate AB; this is an unofficial mod.

All rights reserved: you may use the mod, show it and list it as a dependency; re-uploads or changed versions need the author's permission.