Skaft

Skaft turns hammer repair into an area repair, and the size of that area is your Crafting skill. Every piece the sweep fixes costs the same stamina, eitr and hammer durability that repairing it by hand would have cost, so the skill decides how far you reach and your stamina bar decides how much of that you can afford in one swing.

Skaft is Old Norse for the shaft of a tool.

Features

• Repairing a damaged piece with the hammer also repairs the damaged pieces around it.
• The radius comes from Crafting: nothing at level 0, about 2m at 10, 4m at 25, 7m at 50, and 8m from 60 upwards.
• Each swept piece is charged the full vanilla per-piece repair cost. Nothing is free.
• Pieces are repaired nearest first, so a swing that runs out of stamina has fixed the wall in front of you.
• The Repair entry in the build menu shows your current reach in metres and the Crafting level it came from.
• The result arrives in the usual corner message as Repaired Wood wall x13, using the game's own text.
• The sweep will not break your hammer inside one click; it stops a durability point short.
• No new prefabs, items, recipes or saved values. A world played with Skaft is an ordinary world, and removing the mod leaves nothing behind.

How the sweep works

Take out the hammer, select Repair, and hit something damaged. Everything damaged within reach of that piece is repaired until your stamina or your hammer durability runs out.

Point at something broken. The sweep only runs when the piece under your cursor was itself repaired by that swing. Hovering an intact wall next to a damaged one does nothing, and a second click within a second does nothing, because vanilla holds each piece on a one second repair cooldown. Following vanilla's own success is how the mod inherits every check the game already makes: build mode, the crafting station a piece requires, ward access, and the full-health test.

The radius is MinRadius + (MaxRadius - MinRadius) * (level / FullLevel)^Curve, read fresh on every swing. With the default numbers:

FullLevel is 60 rather than 100 because Crafting 100 costs roughly 20,300 crafts and level 60 about 5,700, and repairing buildings trains no skill at all. Crafting rises from crafting and upgrading at a station and from repairing worn items.

Vanilla already makes building and repairing cheaper as Crafting rises: the Hammer's piece table names the Crafting skill, so GetBuildStamina subtracts up to half the cost at max level. Measured in game that is 5.00 stamina a piece at Crafting 0, 3.50 at 60 and 2.50 at 100. Skaft does not cancel that, which means the levels above 60 still pay you: the radius stops growing but each swing affords more pieces.

What it does not do

• It does not train Crafting. Repairing a building has never given skill in this game.
• It does not repair anything the hammer could not repair by hand. Other players' buildings yes, exactly as vanilla does, with wards as the permission system in both cases. Objects that are not build pieces, such as dvergr props and Ashlands altars, are skipped.
• It does not fire the build effect, the swing animation or a corner message per piece. One swing already fired those once for the piece under the cursor.

Installation

Install through a mod manager from Thunderstore, or by hand: put Skaft.dll in BepInEx/plugins/Skaft/.

Requires BepInEx 5.4.2350. This is a BepInEx 5 plugin and does not work on BepInEx 6.

Longhouse Core is an optional soft dependency. Skaft runs without it; see Multiplayer for what Core adds.

The config file does not exist until the game has been started once with the mod installed.

Configuration

The file is BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.skaft.cfg. Every entry has a comment above it explaining the number.

[Skaft]

[Diagnostics]

BepInEx writes every setting to disk the first time the mod loads, and from then on the saved value beats a new default in code. If a later version retunes the curve, machines that already have this one keep the old numbers unless the cfg line is edited or deleted.

Multiplayer

Skaft works for whoever installs it. Every decision is made on the client swinging the hammer, from state that client already has, and the only thing that leaves the machine is the repair message vanilla would have sent anyway. Players without the mod are unaffected: they repair one piece per swing.

None of this can be enforced by the server. WearNTear.RPC_Repair has no permission check and the server forwards it without inspecting the sender, so any client has always been able to repair any loaded piece. Checking a radius server-side would mean a second protocol for something that was never constrained in the first place.

With Longhouse Core installed on both ends, the host's settings are applied on connected clients in memory for as long as they are connected. The client's own config file is not written, and their values come back on disconnect. That is what makes the curve a property of the server rather than an agreement between players: without it, anyone can set MaxRadius to 100 and CostMultiplier to 0 in their own file. ShowReachInBuildMenu and Verbose are exempt from the sync, since they are display and diagnostics rather than balance.

Skaft registers with Core as host-only, so a client without Skaft can join a server that has it. From Core 1.2.0 that also works the other way: a client with Skaft can join a Core server that does not have it. On older Core versions the server refused those clients with the game's stock incompatible-version screen, which is why Skaft 1.0.0 shipped outside the Longhouse pack.

Compatibility

Built against Valheim 1.0.7, BepInEx 5.4.23.5 and Harmony 2.9. Version 1.1.0 does not run on pre-1.0 Valheim, and 1.0.0 does not run on 1.0.

Skaft adds two Harmony postfixes, on Player.Repair and Player.UpdatePlacement, and patches nothing else. Another mod that prefixes Player.Repair and skips the original makes Skaft inert for that tool, which is correct: Vaettir's Transplant entry on the cultivator does exactly that, and no sweep should happen there.

Do not run a second area repair mod alongside this one. Both would act on the same swing.

Troubleshooting

Nothing happens when I swing. The sweep only follows a repair that vanilla itself just made, so aim at a damaged piece rather than at an intact one next to it. Below Crafting 10 the reach is under 2m, which will not reach a neighbouring piece.

Only a few pieces get repaired. That is the stamina bar, not the radius. The sweep also stops at DurabilityFloor and at MaxPieces. Turn on Verbose and the log line says which of the four stopped it.

No reach line in the build menu. Either ShowReachInBuildMenu is off, or the repair entry you selected is not named in ReachEntries. With Verbose on, the log names the entry that was actually selected, once per name.

A setting had no effect. Check the cfg file first: BepInEx keeps the saved value. On a server running Core, the host's value is applied over yours while you are connected.

The log says it could not reach Player.GetBuildStamina or WearNTear.m_lastRepair. A game update moved those members. The sweep switches off and repair stays vanilla until the mod is rebuilt.

Status

The sweep has been played in single player and nowhere else. In a live world on 28 August 2026, at Crafting 55, the reach measured 7.5m, which is what the curve predicts, and one swing at a damaged wall repaired the two damaged walls beside it and left the intact ones alone. The radius, the trigger rule, the health filter, the per-piece charge, the corner message and the build menu line are confirmed there.

Not yet exercised: a dedicated server, a second player, another player's buildings, wards, and running out of stamina or hammer durability part-way through a swing. The ward argument is that the sweep inherits vanilla's checks because it only runs on a piece vanilla just repaired, which is a reason to expect it to be right rather than a report of it being right.

Bug reports

Report in the Discord or on the issue tracker. Useful to attach:

• BepInEx\LogOutput.log, ideally with Verbose set to true in the config.
• Whether you were in single player, hosting, or on a dedicated server.
• BepInEx\config\ezomic.valheim.skaft.cfg.
• AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\Player.log if a vanilla mechanic broke. Exceptions thrown mid-frame land there rather than in the BepInEx log.

Discord

The Discord is where mod information, updates, support, bug reports and compatibility questions go.

Server

There is a small EU server running the Longhouse pack if you want somewhere to play. Connection details are in the Discord.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.

Part of Longhouse

Skaft is included in the Longhouse modpack, which pins the exact versions its members run. It behaves identically installed on its own.

Changelog

1.1.1 - 12 September 2026

Changed

• Rewritten README. Same mod, clearer documentation: what it does and how to install it come first, then configuration, multiplayer behaviour, compatibility and troubleshooting. Every config table was checked against the plugin's own Config.Bind calls, so the settings, sections and defaults listed are the ones actually bound. No code changed in this release.

1.1.0 - 9 September 2026

Rebuilt for Valheim 1.0. This version does not run on pre-1.0 Valheim, and the previous one does not run on 1.0.

Fixed

• Reads the right global key on Valheim 1.0. GlobalKeys is the one implicitly numbered enum in the game's API, and 1.0 inserted ten members - moving the no-workbench key from 22 to 27. A compiled ordinal therefore asked about a different key entirely, with nothing logged. Read by name now, taken off the enum member so a rename follows automatically and a removal is a build error rather than a quiet wrong answer.

Changed

• Joins the Longhouse pack. Nothing here changed to allow that; Core was discarding the requirement each mod declares, so a server without Skaft refused every client that had it.

1.0.0 - 2 September 2026

First version. Repairing with the hammer sweeps everything damaged within reach of the piece you hit, and the reach is your Crafting skill.

The reach

Nothing at Crafting 0, about two metres at 10, four at 25, seven at 50, and eight from 60 up. The curve is min + (max-min) * (level/FullLevel)^0.8 and all four numbers are config entries.

It stops growing at 60 rather than 100 on purpose. Crafting costs roughly 20,300 crafts to reach 100 and about 5,700 to reach 60, so a curve normalised to the top of the bar puts its payoff somewhere no character arrives. The exponent sits below 1 for the same reason: the experience curve is already steep at the top, and a second brake stacked on it hides the whole mod behind a wall.

The price

Each piece the sweep repairs is charged the stamina, eitr and hammer durability that repairing it by hand would have cost. That is the difference between this and every other area repair: the radius says how far you may reach, and the stamina bar says how much of it you can afford.

Vanilla's own price does fall as Crafting rises, and that is kept. The Hammer's piece table names Crafting, so building and repairing already cost up to half as much stamina at high skill: measured in game, 5.00 a piece at Crafting 0, 3.50 at 60, 2.50 at 100. Cancelling that would mean writing a rule against a rule the game already has. It also means the levels above 60 are not wasted once the radius stops growing, because they keep buying pieces per stamina bar instead of metres.

What it will not do

It will not train Crafting, because repairing a building never has, and a reward that feeds the skill granting it is a loop rather than a design.

It will not break your hammer inside a sweep. Repairing subtracts durability without checking zero, so a wide sweep can spend a whole hammer on one press. The game does tell you it broke, but it also unequips it, and being dropped out of build mode by a single click is a different thing from wearing a tool down over the swings that did it.

It will not fire the build effect, the swing animation or a message per piece. One swing already fired all three for the piece under the cursor; forty more of each in the same frame is forty particle bursts, forty broadcast animation calls and forty seconds of corner messages, since those drain at one per second.

Point at something broken

The sweep runs only when the piece under your cursor was itself repaired by the swing. That is deliberate. It is how the mod inherits build mode, the crafting station requirement, ward access and the game's own one second per piece repair cooldown, rather than keeping copies of all four and maintaining them through updates.

The visible consequence is that hovering an intact wall beside a damaged one does nothing, and a second click within a second does nothing.

What has actually been run

The sweep works. At Crafting 55 the reach measured 7.5m, which is what the curve predicts, and one swing at a damaged wall repaired the two damaged walls beside it and left the intact ones alone. The radius, the trigger, the health filter and the charge are all confirmed in a live singleplayer world, on 28 August 2026.

The two pieces of feedback are confirmed too, which matters because neither could be proved by reading code alone. The corner message reads Repaired Wood wall x3 - one line rather than three, because the game sums the amounts of two matching messages queued within four seconds, so the count rides vanilla's own text and needs no new translation. And the Repair entry in the build menu carries its reach line.

Not yet exercised: wards, another player's pieces, running out of stamina or durability mid-sweep, and anything at all in multiplayer. Singleplayer is not a weaker version of a multiplayer test, it is a different one - there is no owner to hand a repair to and no gate to pass - so nothing above should be read as covering a server.

What a Core server does to this

Skaft registers with Core's gate as HostOnly, and that word describes one direction only. A client without Skaft joining a server with it is let through, which is the whole reason the requirement is set that way: such a client is genuinely unaffected, it simply repairs one piece a swing.

Going the other way, the gate refuses. The manifest each end sends does include the requirement, but the end reading it discards that field on purpose - its own view is what it enforces - so the check for mods present on the far end and absent here has nothing left to tell it that this one is allowed to be one-sided, and reports it as a mismatch. A server running Core without Skaft therefore turns away every client that has it, showing the game's own incompatible-version screen. On a Core server it is installed on the server too, or on nobody. A server with no Core has no gate and does not care.

That is a Core matter rather than a Skaft one, and it is cheap to change if it should be: the field is already on the wire and only the comparison would move.

These defaults are the ones people keep

BepInEx writes every bound entry to disk the first time the plugin loads, and from then on the saved value beats any new default in code. So the curve, the radius pair and CostMultiplier shipped here are permanent for anybody who installs this version: retuning them later moves new installs and nobody else.

That is worth saying out loud in the first published version rather than discovering it in the second, because the numbers have been measured at exactly one point - 7.5m at Crafting 55 - and reasoned everywhere else.