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.

Changelog

1.2.1 - 8 October 2026

The hoe's panel is readable again. The game gives the build panel's text a box 61 pixels high and shrinks the text to fit it, so the thirteen rows added in 1.2.0 came out a few pixels tall. The box now grows downward to fit its text, the text is a fixed size, and the panel is eight lines: Ground and Height sit side by side, and the workbench and the stone fill switch share a line (Fill: on (J)). The game's own one-line description of the hoe piece is hidden while the readout is up, and the faint headings are lighter. Nothing it says has changed, and the box still never changes size from one state to the next.

1.2.0 - 8 October 2026

A switch for the stone fill, yours alone. AutoRaise is the host's rule, so on a server you could not turn the stone off for yourself. There is now StoneFill, flipped in game with J (StoneFillKey) while a levelling tool is out. Off, a swing is the hoe's alone: its free metre, no stone taken, no price on the panel. The key says what it did in the top left. The host's AutoRaise stays the upper bound, so off there is off for everybody, and the panel says so. The switch is personal: Core never syncs it, and it is kept in your cfg between sessions. jafna stone on|off does the same from the console, for the scenario.

The hoe's tooltip stays one size. The build panel used to grow and shrink as you swept the crosshair, because lines came and went (a warning, a price, the 8 m note) and some were long enough to wrap. It is now thirteen rows in every state, in three groups under a single warning slot: Ground (how far the ground comes up and goes down, how wide the swing is), Height (the crosshair, the height the swing uses, where that came from) and Cost (stone, the workbench, whether stone fill is on). A row with nothing to say holds a dash, and the warning slot reads All clear until the one thing that is wrong replaces it. No row is longer than 40 characters, so nothing wraps. Raise up to and Lower up to are new rows.

Three wordings changed to fit: the stone row reads carry 20, need 14 Stone, the short-of-stone message moved into the warning slot as Short of stone, fills only the middle, and the held height reads HOLDING until LeftAlt. A key name over 14 characters is cut to 14 on that row. The panel is rebuilt only when something it shows changes, and scrolling to another entry of the same hoe no longer shows the old entry's numbers for a frame.

Two development console commands ship with it, jafnareadout and the stone switch one. They only read or flip your own setting and are not cheats. Two Devkit scenarios cover this, jafna-stone-switch and jafna-readout-one-size. Both compile; neither has been played in game yet.

1.1.0 - 30 September 2026

Low ground is raised, and paid for in stone. This reverses the call made on 20 September to keep the one metre ceiling. The hoe's flattening moves a point a metre at most and then stops, so a swing aimed well above the ground never got there. Now the rest is raised, and your pack pays for it at the rate of the hoe's own Raise ground: what that entry costs, divided by the ground one Raise ground swing adds to flat ground. Both numbers are read from the running game and written to the log once. Alternating Raise ground and Level ground by hand can still be cheaper, because every Raise ground gives Level ground its free metre back and a fill does not.

A paid swing lifts its whole circle to your height at once, and leaves a step at the edge of the circle until the next swing beside it that needs stone. A step under a metre is eased away by ordinary swings instead. That shape was picked over letting the stone follow the hoe's easing, which would finish only the middle of a swing and creep outward over the next few: the flat top is faster, and the step is its price. A paid swing takes more stone than one that followed the easing, because it does the work of several at once, but the ground costs the same in the end. Over ground two metres low that is about 7 Stone a swing at the hoe's own reach and about 27 at 12 metres across.

Only the part the hoe could never do is charged. Every point comes up the metre the hoe would have given it for free, less what earlier swings used of it, and you pay for the rest of the way. A swing where every point is within that metre of your height is one the hoe can finish on its own, and it is left exactly as vanilla has it and costs nothing, so the flat top comes with paying and ordinary flattening is untouched. A point less than three centimetres past its free metre is not charged for, so going over flat ground does not cost stone. Stone comes out whole and the remainder carries over to the next swing until you log out. NoBuildCost makes it free, and nocost behaves the way it does for vanilla's Raise ground. It is on by default as AutoRaise, and the host decides it on a server.

Each point comes all the way up or not at all, and you pay only for what came up. Short of stone, a swing lifts the middle of the circle first and works outward as far as the stone goes, and says so. The ground it did not reach gets the hoe's own easing and nothing else, so a short swing leaves a flat patch in its middle with a step round it. The game never lets ground sit more than eight metres above where the world made it, so ground further below the height than that is left alone too, rather than raised partway and charged for a height it can never reach. The build panel says so before the swing, and the swing says "Too far below to raise".

The build panel says what a swing will cost before you take it, and that is what it takes. Short of stone it says what you carry, what this swing fills and takes for it, and what all of it would cost, or that it fills none of it when your stone does not reach even the middle.

Raising with stone needs a workbench nearby, the rule vanilla's Raise ground follows. The station is read off the same Raise ground entry as the price, so on the hoe it is the workbench, within its build range of where you stand. Out of range, a swing that would need stone is left to the hoe, its free metre and its easing, takes no stone, and says Raising needs a Workbench nearby, and the build panel says the same in place of the price. NoWorkbench and nocost lift it and NoBuildCost does not, as for Raise ground.

Alt+Tab no longer pins a height. The hold key now counts when you let go of it, and only when you pressed it on its own with the game in front the whole time. It used to act the moment it went down, and switching windows starts with Left Alt going down while the game still has the focus, so tabbing out with a levelling tool in your hands pinned a height and left it on for the rest of the session. The first scenario run caught it holding a height nobody had asked for. The height held is still taken when you press, not when you let go.

Only your own swing is reshaped. Continuing the flat, the reach Crafting buys and a held height used to apply to any flattening operation, not only to the hoe in your hands: a location shaping its own ground, another mod's operation, a Devkit flatten, and on a zone you own, a swing from a player without Jafna. A scenario log caught a Devkit flatten levelled 0.2 m below its own target, to a flat its circle happened to touch. Now all of them come through exactly as vanilla has them, by the rule raising with stone already followed: the operation has to be your swing, with the entry it came from selected. Your client marks its own swing with the note Jafna already appends, now on every swing and not only a wide or held one, and the zone owner reshapes only what carries that note. A client on 1.0.0 added the note only to a wide or held swing, so an owner on this version no longer continues the flat under that client's other swings. The auto-raise scenario has a new check for it, and no longer lets Devkit level the ground before it starts.

In multiplayer the client that owns the zone raises the ground and sends your client the bill, and your client pays it out of your pack. A zone owner without this version raises nothing and bills nothing, so you are never charged for ground that did not move. How far out your stone reaches rides at the end of the message Jafna already appends, where 1.0.0 stops reading. Whether you stand near a workbench is your client's answer too, and a swing it turns down never asks the owner to raise anything.

Lowering has not changed. Ground well above the target still stops after about a metre, or two where it was raised before.

Verified in game, 29 September 2026

Singleplayer, a fresh test world. The auto-raise scenario passed all 168 of its steps, and it covers this much:

• Digging a mound down further than the hoe's metre takes no stone, and a swing with nothing to raise costs nothing and says nothing.
• With enough stone one swing lifts its whole circle to the height. Ground halfway to the edge is on the height, ground just outside the circle is where it was, and there is a step between.
• With no stone the ground comes up the hoe's own metre and stops, and the screen says "Not enough Stone". With too little, all of it goes, the middle comes up to the height, and nothing is left owing.
• Out of a workbench's range a swing that would be paid takes no stone and comes up the free metre only, and both the build panel and the middle of the screen say a Workbench is needed.
• A Devkit flatten beside a flat at another height levels to its own height, so an operation that is not your swing is left as vanilla has it.

Tapping Left Alt was checked by hand the same day: it holds a height, and Alt+Tab no longer does.

Known and open

• Nothing here has run with a second player. The bill travelling between two machines, and an owner leaving a swing from a player without Jafna as vanilla, are argued from the source only.
• Not watched in a game: the price the build panel shows before a swing, ground past the eight metre limit being left alone and the message for it, leftover stone carrying over to the next swing, NoBuildCost, nocost and NoWorkbench, and a chord pressed with Left Alt spoiling the tap.

1.0.0 - 20 September 2026

First release. Built, played and corrected in one sitting; the "Verified in game" section below is what was actually watched rather than what was argued from the source.

Levelling continues the flat ground it touches. Vanilla's level operation sets every point under the tool to the height of the placement ghost, which sits wherever your crosshair last met the ground, so the height a swing aims at follows the camera. Two swings taken a step apart level their shared overlap to two different heights and the second one wins, permanently. That is the reason a large flat area is miserable to make, and it is worth saying plainly because it looks like the opposite problem: the tool feels too small, and every attempt to tidy an edge is another swing at another height, so working more carefully makes it worse. Jafna reads the per-point "a terrain operation touched this" flag the game already saves in each zone, and a swing covering ground that was levelled before uses that height instead of the crosshair's. A swing covering none is untouched, so starting a new platform at a new height still works. Where two platforms at different heights meet under one swing the heights disagree by more than ContinueTolerance and the decision goes back to the crosshair, rather than averaging them into a ramp nobody asked for.

Reach grows with Crafting, on Skaft's rule and off Skaft's curve, which now lives in core\shared\CraftingReach.cs so the two mods cannot drift into meaning different things by the same sentence. Skaft still carries its own copy of the arithmetic and should adopt the shared file the next time it is opened for a real change; refactoring a published mod is its own release. Nothing at low levels, 12x12 metres at Crafting 60, and never a discount - a swing costs the stamina vanilla charges.

A ward you cannot use blocks the whole swing. Vanilla tests the single point under your crosshair and nothing else, whatever the tool covers, so even the stock hoe can already cut ground from under a neighbour's wall from outside their fence with the ghost showing blue. Jafna tests the square footprint. It is enforced where you swing, not where the world is saved, because terrain is applied by whichever client owns the zone with no server-side validation anywhere in that path. It stops the mod and an honest player, not a hostile one, and that was already true of vanilla.

The build panel carries the numbers while a levelling tool is out: reach and the Crafting it came from, the height the swing will use, and whether that height came from your crosshair or from flat the swing is continuing. That last part is not decoration. A tool that quietly overrules your aim is indistinguishable from a tool that has started misbehaving, which is the complaint this mod exists to answer rather than to join.

Corrected during the first play test

Three things this was built on turned out to be wrong, all of them asset data that only the running game could answer.

The hoe does not use a level operation. Its Level ground entry is mud_road_v2, and it is m_smooth with m_level false, radius 3 metres, power 1, painting dirt over the same 3. Raise ground is m_raise and Path is paint only; nothing in the hoe's table uses m_level at all. Every guard in the mod tested m_level, so it correctly decided the hoe was none of its business and did nothing, with a clean log. Retargeted onto m_smooth || m_level.

The vanilla radius is 3 metres, not 2. The 2 was m_levelRadius, which this op never reads. That moves the whole curve: with MaxRadius at 6 nothing changes until about Crafting 25, and the top of the curve is double the vanilla radius rather than triple.

The agreement test was asking for something the tool cannot produce. Requiring the whole footprint to agree within 5 cm refused nearly every swing on ground that was visibly being flattened, because SmoothTerrain eases from full effect at the centre to nothing at the rim - a smoothed patch is a shallow dish, not a plateau. It now judges only the eight points nearest the crosshair, which are the ones an earlier swing centred on and pulled all the way to its target, takes their median, and defaults to a 0.25 m tolerance.

The hoe's piece table names no skill. So using it raises nothing and GetBuildStamina skips its discount branch - there is no double dip here, unlike the hammer, and reach is the only thing Crafting buys. It also means the reach is not self-earning, which is the same shape as Skaft, where repairing buildings trains nothing either.

Verified in game, 20 September 2026

Singleplayer, one world, Crafting 52, reach 5,4m against the hoe's own 3,0m.

• Continuing the flat holds a height across a working area. Swings metres apart all landed on 32,08-32,10 from crosshairs at 32,66, so over half a metre of drift removed per swing, with the eight nearest points agreeing to within 4-26mm against a 250mm tolerance.
• Holding a height works in both directions. Standing 1,7m above the held number and 1,9m below it, every swing aimed at the held figure rather than at the player's feet. Toggle on and off both clean.
• Non-terrain tools are untouched. piece_repair and woodwall both report no terrain op and the mod attaches nothing to them.

Known and open

• The ward footprint has never refused anything in a test - there was no ward to refuse it.
• A held height above about a metre away cannot be reached, and it stays that way. SmoothTerrain clamps its accumulated movement to one metre per point and only a level or raise operation banks that and frees the budget, so holding 32,08 while standing on 33,76 brings the ground down to roughly 32,76 and stops, short of the number the panel is showing. That is vanilla's clamp rather than anything here. Converting a held swing into a true level operation would remove the ceiling in two lines - decided against, because it would turn the hoe into a tool that sets ground to any height in one swing, and every mod in this suite is meant to be narrower than the thing it replaces. Raise ground first, then hold and flatten. Documented in the README so it does not read as a fault.
• Left Alt is confirmed double booked: mud_road_v2's piece sets both m_groundPiece and m_allowAltGroundPlacement, which is exactly the condition Player.UpdatePlacementGhost requires before it reads AltPlace. In practice a tap captured 32,07 on a flat sitting at 32,08-32,10, so the single frame of alt placement does not appear to shift the reading. Left Alt stays as the default, on that evidence and because it is the key that was asked for; HoldKey is configurable if the ghost ever misbehaves, and a server never takes a keybind over.
• SmoothTerrain clamps its accumulated movement to one metre per point and only a level operation banks that and frees the budget, so flattening with the hoe is capped near a metre per point however the target is chosen. Whether that ceiling is the real obstacle in practice is untested.
• The appended reach travels to a Jafna owner and is invisible to a vanilla one, by design. Two players on very different Crafting levels working the same ground has not been watched.