Herd Bell

Your tamed animals give you resources while they live. It works like a Palworld ranch, built for Valheim.

Build a Herd bell in your pen. Every tamed, grown animal that is kept fed within the bell's reach slowly builds up a yield of its own natural materials: leather scraps from boars, pelts from lox, feathers from hens, pelts and fangs from wolves. With mods that let you tame more creatures, every one of them has a yield ready: hides from trolls, carapace from seekers, resin from greylings. Ring the bell and the herd's yield drops at your feet.

No slaughter needed, and your crops become animal feed.

How it works

• Build a Herd bell (Hammer, Misc tab, needs a Workbench). It's a post with a crossbeam and a bronze bell that swings and rings. Default cost: 6 Wood, 2 Bronze, 2 Leather scraps.
• Keep your animals fed within 20 m of the bell. Each animal builds up one yield per 15 minutes of being fed. Bigger creatures take longer: about 2× for a lox or a stone golem.
• Stars pay off: each star adds 25% to the amount, so a 4-star animal gives twice as much.
• Ring the bell (E) to bring everything in. An animal holds up to 4 yields, then waits for you.
• Look at the bell to see your herd ledger: every kind of animal in reach, how many yields are ready, and who is hungry.
• Look at an animal to see what it yields and when the next yield is ready, or why it isn't producing (hungry, too far from a bell, still young).

What animals yield

Every creature you can tame (with the game itself, LetMeTameYou or the other mods in the pack) has a ready-made yield, each as its own setting under 4 - Creature yields, so you can change one in Gale's config editor. The yields are things the creature could shed, grow back or gather: hides, scales, feathers, bones, resin. There are no trophies, and no meat apart from a neck's tail (it grows back), so meat stays the reward for hunting. A few examples:

Each entry reads Item min-max chance%, separated by commas, for example TrollHide 1-3, Coal 1 50%. Item names are the game's prefab names. Leave an entry empty to use the creature's own drops (minus the excluded items), or write none for nothing.

Variants use their base creature's entry: a sleeping troll yields like a troll, and a Draugr archer like a Draugr. Creatures from other mods that aren't listed yield their own drops; you can give them a yield in Product overrides, for example Boar = LeatherScraps 1-2; MyCreature = Wood 2.

Tamed bosses (Eikthyr, The Elder, Bonemass, Moder, Yagluth, The Queen, Fader) have entries too (Eikthyr sheds an antler now and then, Moder lays an egg), but yield nothing unless you turn on Bosses yield.

Settings (anwo.HerdBell.cfg)

The file is created on first launch. The Ranch and Products settings come from the host (or dedicated server), so everyone plays by the same rules:

• Needs a herd bell (on), bell reach (20 m), only while fed (on)
• Minutes per yield (15), big creatures yield slower (on), max stored yields (4), bonus per star (25%)
• Drop automatically (off): animals drop each yield at their feet as soon as it's ready, for use with auto-pickup chests
• Bosses yield (off), product overrides, excluded items, bell recipe, and a yield for each creature

Each player sets their own Display settings: yield info on animals and bell volume.

Multiplayer

Everyone needs the mod, including a dedicated server if you use one. Yields are counted by whichever game runs the animal, the same way the game handles beehives, and are stored with the animal, so all players see the same numbers. Ringing the bell works for whoever rings it.

Compatibility

• Requires Jotunn.
• Made for Valheim 1.0.17 (Deep North) with BepInExPack 5.4.2351 and Jotunn 2.30.2.
• Built to work alongside taming and breeding mods (LetMeTameYou, Procreation Plus, PortablePals), feeding troughs (an animal fed from a trough counts as fed) and auto-pickup chests. With PenPosts, animals a bell can still collect from keep eating in a full pen.
• It adds no new hotkeys.

Removing the mod

The bells stop loading (the game logs them as missing). Yields an animal has stored stay saved on it and come back if you install the mod again. Nothing else in the world is touched.