Vaettir

Raise a forest spirit by killing greydwarfs beside a planted seed, then house it in a post that sorts your storage.

Quick start

1. Kill greydwarf brutes and shamans until one drops an ancient seed. Vanilla loot; it needs nothing from this mod.
2. Plant it with the cultivator, in bare ground, somewhere greydwarfs will come.
3. Kill greydwarfs within 24 metres of it. It grows on those deaths and nothing else. Roughly thirty ordinary ones, and elites count as four and shamans as three, so a "Forest is moving" raid arriving on top of it can finish it alone.
4. Defend it. It has real health and can be destroyed, and the seed is not refunded. It tells you when something is hitting it.
5. When it opens, a forest spirit rises out of it. Press use once and it folds itself into a heartwood.
6. Build a stowing post with that heartwood: 20 fine wood, 20 iron nails and the heartwood, on the hammer's Furniture tab. That is where the spirit now lives.
7. Tell your chests what they hold with the Holds… button in any chest window, then drop things in the post and close it.

One spirit gives exactly one heartwood, and one heartwood builds one post. Taking the post down gives the heartwood back.

At a glance

Every number above is a config default and can be changed.

Installation

Install BepInEx for Valheim (5.4.2333 is what this is built against), then put the Vaettir folder from the release into BepInEx/plugins/. It is a single DLL plus the .obj, .png and .col files that sit beside it, read at runtime, so they all have to stay in that folder together.

Longhouse Core is optional and not installed for you. Solo you do not need it at all. On a server it matters, for the reason in Multiplayer.

Configuration

One file, BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.vaettir.cfg, written on first run. The sapling and the spirit are under [Sapling], [Spirit] and [Heartwood]; the stowing post is under [Post], [Sorting], [Carrier] and [Keys].

Almost everything is adjustable: what each creature is worth, how far a kill counts, the sapling's health, and the post's size and recipe. BepInEx writes every entry on first run and from then on the saved value beats any new default in code, so changing a default in a later version does nothing on a machine that has already run the mod. Edit the cfg.

TestMode under [Diagnostics] drops a sapling's cost to three greydwarfs so the whole chain can be walked in a minute. It announces itself in the log on every startup, because it is the setting most likely to be left on by accident.

Mechanics

The sapling

It keeps a count, not a clock. Only the creatures on its list feed it, only kills within range count, and only the nearest sapling is fed, so a heap of them planted together does not all grow off the same work. Greylings are on the list at zero.

It can be destroyed, and it says so when something is hitting it and when it is gone. Losing it costs the seed and the time.

The stowing post

A real container, 12 slots, wide and shallow. There is no panel listing your pack to tick through, no selection to remember and no keybind. The interface is the chest window you already know, and "which items" is answered by which items you dropped in.

It empties on close rather than continuously, so two half-stacks can be dropped in and merge. Anything with no home stays in the post and the hover text says how many, so a post holding six things is a post telling you six things need a chest.

The spirit carries the contents out one stack at a time, flying in an arc over whatever is in the way. A full post takes a minute or two to clear. Turn the carrier off in config and the post moves everything the instant you close it; the sorting is identical either way.

It skips wards, privacy locks, chests someone else has open, chests on carts and ships, and other posts.

Telling a chest what it holds

A chest window has a Holds… button under the game's own Stack all. The post has no button of its own: it distributes to the chests around it, so the rules live on them. A chest holds groups, like ore, fuel, seeds or building materials, and where a group will not do, single items. Chests with a rule say so in their hover text, in gold.

A rule can also refuse. Group cells cycle ignored, holds, refused, and a search result is shift-clicked to refuse rather than hold, so "ore, but never tin" is two presses.

The groups are read off the game at runtime rather than written down here:

So a mod that adds black metal ore, or a new crop, lands in the right group without this mod knowing it exists.

Every item asks which chest wants it most, in this order: a chest that names that exact item, then one that holds a group it belongs to, then one set to anything else, then one with no rule at all that already holds some. Ties go to the nearer chest. That last tier is what makes the mod useful before you have configured anything, and a chest you have given a rule never gets it.

Multiplayer

The mod is needed at both ends. This is not caution. The sapling, the spirit, the heartwood and the post are all registered pieces, and a client that cannot resolve one throws the object away rather than erroring, so a server without Vaettir silently destroys everything already standing in the world.

Longhouse Core is what turns that into a refused connection instead of a loss. Without it nothing checks. Solo, none of it applies.

Design notes

Why the seed counts kills instead of ticking a clock, why the heartwood is a home rather than a heart, and why the sorting rules live on the chest: DESIGN.md.

Upgrading from Stow

Stow used to be a separate mod and now ships inside this one as part of it, not beside it. The post keeps its internal name, so every post already standing survives untouched.

Its settings moved into this mod's config file. If you had tuned ezomic.valheim.stow.cfg, copy those values across once and delete it; nothing reads it any more.

Delete BepInEx/plugins/Stow if you are upgrading by hand. Two copies loaded at once is the one thing that will go wrong.

Their history is in archive/, one git bundle each. See archive/README.md.