Jafna

Levelling with the hoe continues the flat ground it touches instead of chasing your crosshair, and your Crafting skill decides how much ground one swing covers.

Jafna is Old Norse for to level, to make even.

Why

Flattening a large area with the hoe is miserable, and it is worth being precise about why, because the obvious answer is wrong. It is not that the tool is small. It is that the tool has no fixed idea of what height you are aiming for.

The hoe's Level ground eases every point under the tool toward the height of the placement ghost, and the ghost sits wherever your crosshair last met the ground. So the reference height follows the camera. Take one swing, walk two steps, take another, and the strip of ground both swings covered is pulled toward two different heights. You cannot aim your way out of that, because the thing moving is not your aim, it is the target. It is also why the ripples get worse the more carefully you work around the edges: every correction is another swing at another height.

Jafna gives the swing somewhere fixed to level to, and the game turns out to have been keeping it all along. Every zone's terrain data carries a flag per grid point meaning "a terrain operation has touched this", saved with the world and shared with everyone. So a swing can look at the ground it is about to cover, find the parts of it a previous swing already shaped, and use that height rather than your crosshair's. Flat spreads outward from wherever you started it, at one height, and keeps spreading in your next session and under another player's hoe.

A swing that covers nothing you levelled before is left completely alone, which is how you still start a new platform at a new height: stand clear of the old one and swing.

What it does

• A level swing continues the flat it touches. If it covers ground you already levelled, it uses that height. If it covers none, it behaves exactly like vanilla.
• It refuses rather than guesses. Where two platforms at different heights meet under one swing, it hands the decision back to your crosshair instead of averaging them into a ramp.
• You can hold a height. Press Left Alt to pin the one under your crosshair, and every swing flattens toward it wherever you stand, until you press again.
• Reach grows with Crafting. Nothing below about Crafting 25, growing to a 6 metre radius at Crafting 60 against the hoe's own 3. Never a discount: a swing costs exactly the stamina vanilla charges.
• A ward you cannot use blocks the whole swing, not just its centre.
• The build panel shows the numbers: the reach you have, the height the swing will use, and where that height came from.
• No new prefabs, items, recipes or saved values. A world played with Jafna is an ordinary world, and the ground you shaped is ground vanilla's own operation shaped.

Holding a height

Continuing the flat answers "what height is this ground meant to be" from the ground itself. That is right most of the time and certain none of the time, and two cases it cannot settle turned up within an hour of playing: a higher platform beside you captures swings you are aiming lower, and a swing crossing a zone boundary has each zone decide from its own half of the footprint.

Both are the mod guessing at an intention you already have, so you can state it instead. With a levelling tool out, press Left Alt and the height under your crosshair is held. Walk anywhere, aim anywhere, and every swing eases the ground toward that one number until you press again. Nothing is searched for and nothing is guessed while it is on.

The panel says HOLDING height, press LeftAlt to release for as long as it lasts. That wording is deliberate: the single mistake this feature can cause is forgetting it is on, and a line that tells you how to stop cannot be read as decoration.

A held height more than about a metre from the ground will not be reached, and that is vanilla rather than this mod. The hoe's flattening eases each point and caps its total movement at roughly one metre; only raising ground banks that and frees the budget again. So hold 32m, stand on 34m, and the ground comes down to about 33m and then stops, short of the number the panel is still showing. Use Raise ground to get within a metre first. Making a held swing ignore the cap was considered and rejected: it would turn the hoe into a tool that sets ground to any height in one swing, which is a different mod.

A held height is not kept across a logout. Coming back, swinging, and watching the ground move toward a number you set yesterday for a reason you no longer remember - with nothing on screen having changed to warn you - is a worse trap than setting it again.

Left Alt is also vanilla's alt-placement key, which does have a meaning for terrain tools. If the placement ghost starts behaving oddly while you use this, move HoldKey to something of its own. A server never takes a keybind over, so it stays yours whatever the host runs.

Reach, and why it is earned

This is Skaft's rule applied to a second tool: Crafting buys reach and never buys a discount. The curve is the same one, out of the same shared source file, so "8 metres at 60" cannot come to mean two different things in two mods.

Reach is deliberately the smaller half of this mod. A wider swing is genuinely useful, because one swing has one reference height and so whatever a single swing covers is flat by construction. But it does not fix anything on its own. The moment an area needs two swings you are back to two heights, and the seam between a pair of 6 metre swings is a far worse thing to repair than the seam between two vanilla ones. Continuing the flat is what makes a big swing a good idea rather than a dangerous one, which is why it is on at every skill level and the reach is not.

The reach used is always the larger of the curve and the tool's own radius, so MinRadius can sit at zero and mean "a new character gets exactly the hoe the game shipped". Worth knowing when tuning: the hoe's own radius is 3 metres, so with the default curve nothing changes at all until about Crafting 25, and MaxRadius of 6 is double the vanilla radius at the top.

Wards

Vanilla checks one point when you level: the one under your crosshair. It does not check what the tool actually covers. So even the stock hoe can already cut ground out from under a neighbour's wall while you stand outside their fence, with the ghost showing blue and the ward never flashing. That is a small hole at vanilla's radius and a wide one the moment Crafting makes the tool bigger, so Jafna tests the whole footprint and refuses the swing if any of it falls inside a ward you have no access to. The hoe's op is round, so the test is a circle; a square one is padded to its corners instead.

Be clear about what that is worth. It is enforced where you swing, not where the world is saved. Terrain in Valheim is applied by whichever client owns that zone, and there is no server-side validation anywhere in that path, so this stops the mod and it stops an honest player. It cannot stop a hostile one. That was already true of vanilla and this does not make it worse.

Installing

Needs BepInEx. Nothing else. Through a mod manager it is one install. By hand, put Jafna.dll in BepInEx/plugins/Jafna/.

Then start the game once and quit. That first run writes the config file. It does not exist before the mod has loaded, which is the usual reason people think it is broken.

Core is optional and soft. With it, Jafna joins the version gate and the host's reach and ward settings are the ones everybody plays by. Without it the mod works exactly the same for you, and the ward rule becomes an agreement between players rather than a property of the server.

Settings

Every setting is in BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.jafna.cfg, and each one carries its reasoning in the file rather than here, so there is only one place to keep up to date. The ones worth knowing exist:

• ContinueFlat turns the whole idea off and leaves you with vanilla levelling.
• MaxRadius is the radius a swing reaches at Crafting 60. It defaults to 6 metres, against the hoe's own 3.
• ContinueTolerance is how far apart the nearby shaped ground may be before the mod stops trusting it. A smoothed patch is a shallow dish rather than a plateau, so this is looser than it looks like it should be.
• RespectWardFootprint is the ward rule above.
• ShowReadout is the build panel lines.

BepInEx writes every entry to disk on the first run and the saved value beats a later default in code, so if a setting looks like it is doing nothing, read the cfg before anything else.

Multiplayer

Terrain is applied by whichever client owns the zone, which is often not the player swinging.

Continuing a flat needs nothing to travel, because the flags it reads are already on that client's machine. The reach does, and vanilla's terrain message has no room for it, so Jafna appends the number in a place nothing reads. An owner running Jafna finds it and uses it; an owner without Jafna never looks and applies a perfectly ordinary vanilla operation. Nothing breaks in either direction, and a player without the mod is never refused the server.

What the hoe actually does

Read off the running game on 20 September 2026, because none of it is on disk. The hoe's Level ground entry is mud_road_v2, and it is a smooth operation, not a level one: m_smooth true, m_level false, radius 3 metres, power 1, painting dirt over the same 3 metres. Raise ground is raise_v2 and Path is paint only. Nothing in the hoe's table uses m_level.

That matters for what this mod can promise. SmoothTerrain eases each point toward the target by 1 - (distance/radius)^power and clamps its own accumulated movement to one metre per point, and only a level operation ever banks that into the permanent height and frees the budget again. So flattening with the hoe is asymptotic by design and capped near a metre per point, which is why a real slope still wants Raise ground first. Jafna does not change any of that. It changes the height all those swings are easing toward, so they converge on one answer instead of following your crosshair.

The hoe's piece table names no skill. Using it raises nothing, and Player.GetBuildStamina skips its discount branch, so unlike the hammer there is no second reward hiding behind the first - reach here is the only thing Crafting buys. It also means the reach is not self-earning: you cannot level your way to a wider hoe, the skill comes from crafting and upgrading at a station. That is the same shape as Skaft, where repairing buildings trains nothing either.

What has not been tested

The mod has been in a world and its patches run, but nothing below has been watched end to end: the height actually holding across a row of swings, the ward footprint refusing anything, and any of it with a second player.