Lets Build

Found a bug or have a wish? Message me on Discord: dezzycode

A builder's hammer that never wears out, precision building with the hammer, and planting in rows and columns.

The mod speaks the game's language: German in a German game, English in every other one.

The builder's hammer

Never wears out. Not by having a huge durability number — by having none at all, so there is no bar quietly draining either.

Free building and flight while held - if you want it. With creative building on, equipping it switches on the game's own devcommands, debug mode, free placement and flight, and unequipping puts every one of them back. Press O with the hammer in hand to switch creative building off: then it is an ordinary hammer that never wears out, and you build and walk like everyone else. Your choice is kept.

Back, not off. If you had flight or free building on before you picked the hammer up, putting it away leaves them on. It restores what it found rather than switching things off, so it cannot cancel something you asked for yourself.

Flight ends when you land. Cutting flight in mid air would be a fall you did not agree to, so it waits for solid ground. Until then you build normally and can still fly.

A loose camera for building. With the hammer in hand, press P and the camera comes loose - with creative building on or off. Fly it with WASD, jump and crouch, and build exactly as you always do. Press P again, or put the hammer away, and the camera is back behind you.

It comes back if it was lost. The game throws away any item whose mod is not loaded when a character is loaded — one session in a mod profile without Lets Build, and the hammer was gone for good. The mod now remembers how many hammers you carried and hands back any that were lost that way.

Your normal hammer is untouched. This is a separate item, not a change to the vanilla one.

Precision building

With the hammer (the game's and the builder's hammer):

• With the grid off, building is exactly the game's own: its 22.5° rotation step, and N, J and U do nothing. Your choices are kept for the next time you switch it on.
• The keys are shown lower right, in the game's own key hint style.
• Every piece in the build menu snaps to it. The grid lies on whatever you aim at: floors and terrain, and along walls too - but not on water.
• It follows what you look at: aimed at a building piece it takes that piece's turn and tilt and lines up with its edges - a turned floor, a roof slope, a slanted wall. Aimed at terrain it runs north/south and east/west from the world's centre, so foundations placed far apart still line up.
• While the grid is on, pieces snap to the grid only - not onto neighbouring pieces. Q/E still choose which point of the piece sits on the grid.
• The grid lies flat in the plane of the surface you aim at and never runs over anything else.

Planting

With the cultivator and a plant selected:

• Exactly the spacing the game needs. The distance between plants is worked out from the game's own growth rule, so a grid is as tight as it may be and every plant grows.
• Red where it would not grow. Wrong biome, no sky, too little space, ground not cultivated — checked the way the game checks it, before you plant. The reason is shown.
• Continues existing rows in the direction they run.
• Every plant is paid for. Seeds, stamina, cultivator wear and farming skill count for each plant, exactly as if you had placed them one by one. If something runs out, planting stops there.
• The cost shows before you plant. Spots your seeds no longer cover turn red and stay empty, and the build menu shows what the whole grid costs.
• Replant on harvest (off by default): the seed goes straight back into the ground.
• Growth in the hover text: how far a plant has grown and when it is ready; when a picked bush bears again.

More to plant

• Wild plants: raspberry, blueberry, cloudberry and lingonberry bushes, mushrooms, thistle, dandelion, smoke puffs and fiddleheads. What you plant is the game's own object. Only what a player planted can be taken away again, and the cost is not refunded, so nothing can be duplicated. Picked ones grow back like in the wild.
• Debris: branches, flint and stones. Branches and flint grow back after picking.
• Decorations: small bushes, shrubs, young firs and beeches, a young yggdrasil shoot and the ashlands fern. They cost as much wood as chopping them can give back at most, so planting and felling never pays off. Icons are rendered from the models.
• New saplings: ancient (swamp tree), yggdrasil shoot, autumn birch and ashwood.

Rules the server decides

Where crops and trees grow, whether they need cultivated ground, open sky and space, how fast they grow, what can be planted and what the wild plants and debris cost — set on the server, synced to everyone.

Worth knowing

Required on the server and on every client. The new saplings are objects a player without the mod could not even see, and the planting rules come from the server. Jötunn checks this when you connect and says so if something is missing.

The hammer enables cheats. That is the point. Valheim marks a session that used devcommands, and achievements know about it.

On a server you need to be an admin for the hammer. Admin only is on by default.

Settings

All in dezzycode.valheim.letsbuild.cfg. Sections 1–4 are yours; section 5 is the server's and is synced.

Spawn the hammer by hand with spawn LetsBuild_Hammer.

Requirements

• BepInExPack Valheim
• Jötunn 2.30 or newer

Credits

Author: DezzyCode

Ideas taken from PlantEasily and PlantEverything by Advize and PrecisionBuild by awuushy. No code from them is used; everything here is written for this mod.

Changelog

0.7.7

No more crash with other farming mods

• Fixed: together with another mod that works out how long plants take to grow, the game could crash as soon as the plants around you loaded, for example when starting your own server. Rain still makes plants grow faster.

0.7.6

Bugs and ideas

• Found a bug or have an idea? Tell us on the forum: forum.dezzycode.de

0.7.5

Builder's hammer

• Free building and flight are for admins only now.
• Everyone can use the loose camera (P). For players who aren't admins, the character stays where it is, visible to all, and the camera goes up to 64 m away. Admins keep the old camera without a limit.
• Lose admin while holding the hammer and free building and the camera end right away.
• If the server makes area repair cost something, each piece costs what a normal repair costs.
• Other mods' rotation steps for other tools are no longer reset.

Server rules

• On a server, the server decides the hammer recipe, whether grid planting costs stamina and wear, and everything about area repair. In single player your own settings count.
• Switching the recipe off hides it for everyone, even players who made the hammer before.

Key hints

• The key hints now sit on the right of the screen, centred, lined up with the game's own hints.

Planting

• Picked mushrooms, thistle, dandelions, smoke puffs and fiddleheads leave a stump until they grow back (after 240 minutes, fiddleheads 300). Aim at it to see when.
• Stumps of plants you planted can be smashed with any weapon or tool to remove them. Wild ones stay.
• Vines are planted one at a time against a wall again, like in the game.
• The grid no longer misses saplings nearby when checking for room.

Rain and bees

• Rain makes everything you planted grow twice as fast while it rains on it, even when nobody is around. Under a roof there's no rain.
• Plants within 20 m of a working beehive grow a third faster. More hives don't add up.
• Weather set with World Control by DezzyCode counts too.
• The hover text shows how much faster a plant grows right now and why, for example Growth ×3 (rain ×2, bees ×1.5), and when it'll really be ready.
• Each can be switched off and adjusted; the server decides.

BetrValheim

• Fully compatible with BetrValheim by DezzyCode: with it, every Lets Build setting has its own tab in the F11 window, and the server's settings are for admins only.
• BetrValheim's bee boxes speed up growth like beehives, once a queen lives in them and it's warm enough.

Smoother

• Planting and the key hints use less of your computer's power.

0.7.4

• Planting a grid works with seeds from nearby chests, if another mod lets you build from them. Before, only the first plant could be paid that way.
• Fixed an error that showed up every time the planting preview was shown.

0.7.3

• Picked thistle, dandelions, mushrooms, smoke puffs and fiddleheads no longer look pulled out. A small sprout stays until the plant grows back. Can be switched off.

0.7.2

Area repair

• Repairing a piece with a hammer also repairs every damaged piece around it, nearest first. No workbench needed. Radius and on/off in the settings; free by default.

Planting

• A new bed next to another kind keeps its own spacing; only the seam between the two beds is wider.
• Spots keep enough room for saplings around them once those have grown.
• Wild plants and debris stand much closer: mushrooms 0.5 m, dandelion and thistle 0.75 m, cloudberry, smoke puffs and fiddleheads 1 m, berry bushes 1.5 m, branches, flint and stones 0.5 m. Each can be changed.
• Wild plants are only refused where their stem would stand inside something, not where leaves touch.

0.7.1

• Fixed 0.7.0 not starting properly: planting rules, wild plants, debris and decorations were missing.

0.7.0

• The preview shows what the grid costs. Spots your seeds don't cover turn red and are skipped, and the build menu flashes red when you're short.
• Plant branches, flint and stones with the cultivator.
• Plant decorations: small bushes, shrubs, young firs and beeches, a young yggdrasil shoot and the ashlands fern. They cost as much wood as chopping them can give back, so planting and felling never pays off.
• Monsters no longer attack wild bushes, mushrooms and flowers as if they were buildings, unless a player planted them.

0.6.10

• Crops stand closer where they can: kale 0.96 m, carrots, onions and turnips 0.70 m.
• Tree saplings stand a bit further apart (beech 3.4 m, oak 5.2 m), so a tree that grows first no longer takes the room of the one beside it.

0.6.9

• Plants in a grid stand as close as they can while every one still grows, including next to a different kind.

0.6.8

• The building grid follows what you look at: it lines up with turned floors, roof slopes and slanted walls. On terrain it runs north/south and east/west.

0.6.7

• Every piece in the build menu now snaps to the grid, fires included.
• Past the edge of a beam or floor, pieces stay on the grid instead of dropping off.
• No grid on water.

0.6.6

• With the grid on, pieces snap only to the grid, not onto neighbouring pieces. Q/E still pick which point sits on the grid.

0.6.5

• Press O with the hammer to switch free building and flight on or off. Off, it's a normal hammer that never wears out.
• The loose camera (P) works either way.

0.6.4

• The grid stays flat on the surface you aim at instead of dropping onto whatever lies below.

0.6.3

• At most 200 plants per click, so big grids no longer make the game stutter.

0.6.2

• Bushes, mushrooms and flowers can't be planted into rocks, trees, buildings or other bushes any more.

0.6.1

• The grid and fine rotation now only work with the hammer. With the hoe and cultivator, building is like in the game.

0.6.0

• The planting grid now starts lined up with the world.

0.5.9

A big update: Lets Build is now a building and farming mod, not just a hammer.

Builder's hammer

• A hammer lost because you played without Lets Build once comes back. Hammers in chests are never doubled.
• A new icon, and messages in your language.

Precision building (with the hammer)

• H grid on/off, N grid size (0.125–2 m), J rotation step (90° down to 1°), U snap to corners or cell centres.
• With the grid off, building is exactly like in the game.

Planting (with the cultivator)

• Plant in rows and columns with the arrow keys; H lines up with plants already standing.
• The spacing is exactly what the game needs, so every plant grows.
• Spots where a plant can't grow are red, with the reason.
• Every plant costs seeds, stamina and wear and trains farming, as if planted one by one.
• Shift + E harvests everything ripe around you, beehives too. Replanting after harvest is optional.
• The hover text shows how far a plant has grown.

More to plant

• Berry bushes, mushrooms, thistle, dandelion, smoke puffs and fiddleheads.
• New saplings: ancient (swamp tree), yggdrasil, autumn birch and ashwood.
• Only what a player planted can be removed, and nothing is refunded, so nothing can be duplicated.

Everyone needs it, the server and every player.

0.4.0

• With the loose camera, your character comes along unseen, so you can build from wherever you fly.

0.3.1

• Fixed an error when leaving a world with the hammer in hand.

0.3.0

• A loose build camera on P.

0.2.0

• Build while flying the camera around.

0.1.1

• Fixed the mod not loading at all.

0.1.0

• First release: a builder's hammer that never wears out. While you hold it, building is free and you can fly.