Manger

A feeding trough for your animals.

Build one, use a stack of feed on it, and the feed sits there where tames can get at it. They come over, eat from it one at a time, and the stack goes down. When it is empty, it is empty.

It uses the game's own feeding

This is the whole design and it is why the trough does what you would expect rather than an approximation of it. Valheim already walks hungry tames to food on the ground, already checks whether that particular creature eats that particular thing, already takes exactly one, already plays the eating animation, and already counts it toward taming.

So the trough does not feed anything. It holds a real item where animals can reach it, and gets out of the way. Nothing about feeding is patched.

What falls out of that for free:

• Hunger and breeding work exactly as they do with food thrown on the ground.
• Taming works too. Feeding a wild tameable is how taming happens, so a stocked trough tames boar — and wolves, which are also tameable — that wander in and eat. That is on purpose. TamesWild = false if you would rather it did not.
• Modded creatures are handled without this mod knowing they exist. What counts as feed is read off the animals in your install, not from a list written here, so a mod that adds a tameable that eats mushrooms makes mushrooms trough feed on that install.

Using it

Pressing Use without choosing anything looks for the next viable feed: your own bag first, then chests within 8m (Reach, set to 0 for bag-only). It will not touch a chest somebody is using, one set to anything but public, or one inside a ward you are not admitted to.

A stocked trough only takes more of what it already holds, so this tops up and never swaps.

One food per trough — it holds a visible stack, and a mixed trough would have to lie about what is in it. manger in the console lists everything the animals on your install will eat.

What it will not do

• It will not take feed into a ward you are not admitted to. No baiting or taming things into somebody else's base.
• It cannot duplicate anything. The item on the trough is the contents — there is no second store to drift out of sync with it.
• It will not feed anything untameable. Not a rule this mod enforces; the game checks for a Tameable before it ever looks for food, so a hostile never enters the path at all.

A warning worth reading

A permanently stocked trough will breed a pen unsupervised. That is what it is for, and Valheim handles very large herds badly. BreedingCap stops feeding once there are that many tames near the trough; it is 0 (no cap) by default, because it is your pen.

Settings

BepInEx/config/dafini.manger.cfg

Multiplayer

Client-side. The trough's contents live in the world, so everyone already agrees about them. Everyone who wants to build one needs the mod; nobody else has to.