Vaettir

Plant an ancient seed in the Black Forest and it grows on greydwarf deaths instead of on a timer. When it opens, a forest spirit rises out of it and folds itself into a heartwood you carry away and build into a stowing post: a shallow container that hands its contents to the chests around it, sorted by rules you set on each chest.

The same DLL also carries two mods that used to ship separately: Stow, which is the post and the chest sorting, and Furrow, which is the cultivator's planting grid and area harvest. Wild plant transplanting and a bonemeal recipe are here too.

Features

• Ancient sapling. Planted with the cultivator, fed by greydwarf kills within 24m, and it calls greydwarfs to itself in waves while a player is nearby. It has 500 health and can be destroyed.
• Forest spirit and heartwood. One spirit per sapling, one heartwood per spirit.
• Stowing post. A 6x2 container on the hammer's Furniture tab. Drop things in, close it, and a spirit flies them to the chests that asked for them.
• Chest rules. A Holds… button in every chest window. Chests hold groups (ore, fuel, seeds, building materials) or single items, and can refuse things.
• Planting grid. From Farming 10 the cultivator's ghost snaps to a lattice so hand-placed beds come out in rows. A ring shows whether a sapling will actually have room.
• Area harvest. From Farming 15, Shift+E on a ripe crop picks its neighbours too, reaching further as Farming rises. Plain E still picks one.
• Transplanting. Dig up wild berry bushes, thistle, dandelion and mushrooms with the cultivator and carry them somewhere else. Gated on Farming, one plant at a time, and the world's plant count never changes.
• Bonemeal. Two bone fragments and an entrail make five at the workbench. A fed crop yields three times when picked and trains Farming.
• Multi-seed sowing. Sow a row or a circle per click, scaled by Farming. Off by default.

The ritual

1. Kill greydwarf brutes and shamans until one drops an ancient seed. Vanilla loot, and nothing here changes the drop.
2. Plant it with the cultivator, in the Black Forest, at least 5m inside the biome and outside anybody's base. The refusal message says which of the two stopped you.
3. Kill greydwarfs within 24m of it. Greydwarf 1 point, shaman 3, brute 4, greyling 0, and 50 points opens it. Only the nearest sapling is fed by a kill.
4. You do not have to go looking for them. A planted seed calls greydwarfs in from 25 to 40m out, 2 to 5 at a time, every 20 seconds falling to every 6 as it fills. Everyone within 48m is told once that the forest is enraged. It only calls while a player is within 48m, and it stops calling if a base grows around it.
5. Defend it. 500 health is about ten hits from a brute, and the seed is not refunded if it dies. It says when something is hitting it and when it is gone.
6. When it opens a forest spirit rises out of it. Press use once and it folds itself into a heartwood.
7. Build a stowing post: 20 fine wood, 20 iron nails and 1 heartwood, hammer, Furniture tab. Taking the post down gives the heartwood back.

The sapling's hover text carries its stage and its exact count, so rooting ( 18 / 50 ) tells you what is left. It looks the same the whole way through, so the hover text is the only thing that reports progress. It is pinned on your own map while it stands, and the pin comes off when it opens or dies.

The stowing post

The post is a real container, 12 slots, and it empties when you close its window rather than continuously, so two half-stacks dropped in can merge first. A spirit then carries the contents out 10 items per trip, flying in an arc over whatever is in the way, and re-checks every three seconds until the post is clear. Turn CarrierEnabled off and the post moves everything the instant you close it. The sorting is identical either way.

Anything with no home stays in the post. Its hover text separates the two cases: waiting means a home exists and the spirit has not got there yet, with nowhere to go means no chest in range wants it.

Telling a chest what it holds

Chest windows get a Holds… button under the game's own Stack all. The post has no button of its own because it distributes outward, so the rules live on the chests. The panel offers groups and single items, a search box for naming an exact item, and a Learn from contents button that reads the chest's current contents into a rule. Clicking a group cycles it through ignored, holds and refused, and shift-clicking a search result refuses that item instead of holding it, so "ore, but never tin" is two presses. A chest with a rule says so in gold in its hover text.

The rule is stored on the chest itself, so it saves with the world, travels to everyone on a server without any syncing of ours, and disappears when the chest is torn down.

Groups are derived from the game's own data at runtime, not from a list in the mod:

A mod that adds black metal ore or a new crop lands in the right group without this mod knowing it exists. Groups that end up empty are not drawn.

How an item picks its chest

Every item asks which chest wants it most, rather than every chest being asked what it wants. The order is: a chest naming that exact item, then one holding a group it belongs to, then one set to "Anything else", then a chest with no rule at all that already holds some of that item (MatchContents, which is what makes the post useful before you have configured anything). Ties go to the nearer chest, and a chest you have given a rule never falls into that last tier.

The post skips chests that are out of range, warded against you, set to anything but Public, open by anyone, on a cart or a ship, and other stowing posts.

Farming

Grid. With the cultivator out and a plant selected, from Farming 10, the ghost snaps to a lattice spaced by the plant's own grow radius. The lattice is drawn on the ground before you plant. The mouse wheel turns it in 22.5 degree steps, GridPinKey (numpad period) anchors it where you are standing instead of on the nearest plant of the same kind, and holding the game's AltPlace key (Shift unless you rebound it) plants free of the grid entirely. One seed per press throughout: the skill unlock is alignment, not quantity.

A ring at the plant's grow radius shows green when it would have room and red when it would not. The game itself does not check this at placement time. It checks ten seconds later, and a sapling with no room turns unhealthy or deletes itself with the seed already spent.

Area harvest. Shift+E on a ripe crop from Farming 15, reaching 2m at 15 and 8m at 80, up to 50 crops per press. Only crops are taken, meaning the grown stage of something plantable, read off the game rather than listed in the mod. Wild berries, mushrooms, thistle and dandelion are never touched. By default only the crop you clicked is taken, so a mixed bed comes off a kind at a time. Every neighbour goes through vanilla's own Interact, so skill gain, the level bonus roll, drop scaling and ownership are identical to picking each by hand.

Transplanting. Select Transplant on the cultivator (it sits beside the crops, and works like the hammer's repair entry) and click a wild plant. It comes up into your arms, no item and no inventory slot. While carrying you can walk but not run, jump, attack, use the hotbar or equip anything. Click open ground where that kind grows to plant it, or press R to set it down where you stand regardless of biome. Dying or logging out plants it at your feet. The same grown bush goes back down, picked-empty because its berries dropped into your hands at the dig, and it regrows on vanilla's own timer.

Each plant has a Farming level and a biome list:

Yellow mushrooms are a burial chamber crop and Plant refuses anything under a roof, so they can only be farmed in the forest above the crypt.

Bonemeal. BoneFragments:2, Entrails:1 at the workbench makes 5. Use it on a growing crop (crops only, never trees) and it marks the plant: picking the crop it becomes yields three times and grants 5 Farming skill, once, and the mark is spent. A fed plant says "Fertilised" on hover and a second bonemeal cannot stack the bonus. It does not speed growth up.

Sowing. Sowing/Enabled is false by default. Turned on, one click sows a row or circle of seeds, 1 at Farming 0 rising to 20 at Farming 80 for crops and 5 for trees, spaced by each plant's own grow radius. Numpad plus and minus change the count and numpad star cycles the shape.

Installation

1. Install BepInEx for Valheim, version 5.4.2350. This is BepInEx 5, not 6.
2. Put the Vaettir folder from the release into BepInEx/plugins/.

The mod is one DLL plus the .obj, .col and .png files beside it, which are read at runtime. They have to stay in the same folder together. There is no asset bundle.

Longhouse Core is an optional soft dependency. It is not needed in single player, and on a server it does the version check described under Multiplayer.

Built against Valheim 1.0.7, Unity 6000.0.75, BepInEx 5.4.23.5 and Harmony 2.9. Version 1.5.0 and later require Valheim 1.0; 1.4.2 and earlier do not run on it.

Configuration

One file, BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.vaettir.cfg, written on first run. Every entry carries its reasoning as a comment in the file.

BepInEx writes every entry to disk on first run and 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.

[Sapling]

[Spirit] and [Heartwood]

[Post], [Sorting] and [Carrier]

[Furrow], [Harvest], [Sowing], [Crops], [Trees]

[Thicket] and [Plants]

[Plants] holds one row per plant, formatted Farming level | cost | biomes | seconds to take root (min-max). The level and the biome list are live. The cost and grow time only configure the seedling prefabs, which are still registered for anything planted before 1.2.0 but are never planted new, since a dug plant now goes straight back down grown.

[Bonemeal]

[Keys]

Every key is read through the game's own input layer, so gamepads work and a key typed into chat, the console or a text box is ignored.

[Diagnostics]

Multiplayer

Install it on the server and on every client. The sapling, the spirit, the heartwood and the post are registered prefabs, and the game discards any saved object whose prefab name does not resolve rather than erroring. A server without Vaettir silently destroys everything already standing, and so does a client that joins without it.

Longhouse Core is what turns that into a refused connection. It checks each Ezomic mod's version and build id when a client connects and the server rejects mismatches. Without Core nothing checks. In single player none of this applies.

Core also applies the host's config values on connected clients, in memory, without writing the client's own config file. Thirty-three entries are per-player and never imposed by the host: the grid and sowing gestures and the grid angle, your map pins, the biome and base refusal messages, the sorting summary, the spirit's and post's local rendering (MoteCount, RingCount, ShowHoop, PartingEffect, CarrierScale, Thicket/Scale, the post light and flare settings and their donor lists), SayTheLevel, KeepHotbar, NeverStow, and every verbose or diagnostic toggle. Costs, ranges, health, rosters, caps and shared prefab facts stay the host's decision, and so do three that look personal: BeckonMessage and the sapling's Messages are read on the machine that owns the sapling and decide what other players see, and SpiritScale is baked into a networked object's transform.

Saplings, spirits and posts are each driven by whoever owns them. Map pins are local to you and saved in your own profile.

Compatibility

• BepInEx 5 only.
• Item groups are read off the game at runtime, so a mod that adds an ore, a crop or a building material lands in the right group with no work.
• The area harvest rides Pickable.Interact's alt argument, which vanilla never reads. Another mod that uses Shift+E on pickables will clash with it. Set PickArea to false.
• Setting GridTurnKey to Mouse2 suppresses middle-click removal while the cultivator has a plant selected. It is None by default, so removal is vanilla.
• A patch group that fails to apply costs one feature and names it in the log. The prefabs are declared before any patching, so a failure there cannot destroy anything built.

Troubleshooting

The post says it has nowhere to go, or the spirit never sets off. Three separate bugs caused this and all three are fixed in 1.5.1 through 1.5.3. Update first. The last one was a fixed collider buffer that silently truncated the search, which meant the post could not see any chest in a base with more than about 256 colliders within range. It passed in a test world and failed in a real base.

If it persists, check the chest: it must be Public rather than private, within Range (12m by default), not open by anybody, not warded against you, and not on a cart or ship. Turn Diagnostics/Verbose on and the log names every chest it skipped and why, then counts the usable ones.

Items multiplied in a chest. Fixed in 1.5.1. It affected partial takes, meaning any stack larger than ItemsPerTrip, and only once trips were landing at all.

A config change did nothing. BepInEx wrote the file on first run and the saved value wins. Edit BepInEx/config/ezomic.valheim.vaettir.cfg rather than expecting a new default to apply.

The sapling refuses to plant. Black Forest only by default, at least 5m inside the biome, and outside the area any workbench or fire radiates. The message says which of the two it was. A ward refuses it like any other piece.

A sapling stopped calling greydwarfs. It goes quiet while no player is within 48m, and while it sits inside a base. Kills still feed it either way.

The Transplant entry is missing from the cultivator. The build menu only shows known pieces and that list is rebuilt when you learn a recipe or a station, so a piece registered seconds after you spawned can stay hidden. The mod nudges that update itself. If the log says it could not read Player.m_knownRecipes, learning anything new will bring it back.

A sapling needs only three greydwarfs. TestMode is on. It warns on every startup.

A vanilla mechanic broke and LogOutput.log is clean. Gameplay exceptions land in AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\Player.log, not in the BepInEx log.

Bug reports

The Discord is the fastest route and the right one if you are not sure whether what you are seeing is a bug. Issues on the repo work too and suit anything long.

Attach BepInEx\LogOutput.log and say whether you were on a server or in single player. For anything about the post, turn Diagnostics/Verbose on first and include the lines naming the chests it skipped. For a vanilla mechanic breaking, include AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\Player.log as well. Your config file helps when a number looks wrong.

Discord

discord.gg/hJzAVaZ5wb is where updates, support, bug reports and compatibility questions go.

There's also a small EU server running the pack if you want somewhere to play: hard combat difficulty, resources at 1x, everything else vanilla, no application and no activity requirements. Details are in the Discord.

Upgrading from Stow

Stow shipped as a separate mod until 1.0.0 and is part of this one now. The post keeps its internal name, so every post already standing survives. Its settings moved into this mod's config file under [Post], [Sorting], [Carrier] and [Keys]. If you had tuned ezomic.valheim.stow.cfg, copy those values across once and delete it, and delete BepInEx/plugins/Stow if you are upgrading by hand. Two copies loaded at once is the thing that will go wrong.

Stow's and Furrow's history is in archive/, one git bundle each. See archive/README.md.

Design notes

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

Building

Target is net462 against the game's own managed assemblies, no NuGet. ValheimDir defaults to the usual Steam path and ProfileDir to the repo's own testprofile\, both overridable:

dotnet build Vaettir.csproj -p:ProfileDir=<your BepInEx profile>

The build copies the DLL and assets\*.obj, *.col and *.png into <ProfileDir>\BepInEx\plugins\Vaettir. tools/ holds the Blender scripts that produce every model, including the rejected ones.

Licence

MIT. Robbin Thijssen (Thijssen Software), GitHub Ezomic. Published on Thunderstore.

Part of Longhouse

Vaettir is in the Longhouse pack, which pins exact versions of the Ezomic mods and installs in one click. You do not need the pack to use this, and nothing here behaves differently on its own.

Changelog

Notable changes to Vaettir. Format follows Keep a Changelog, and the mod uses semantic versioning.

[1.5.4] - 2026-09-12

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.

[1.5.3] - 2026-09-11

The bug the previous three releases were chasing. None of them was it.

Fixed

• The post could not see the chests in a real base. CollectChests searched with a fixed Collider[256] and a single Physics.OverlapSphereNonAlloc call, with no layer mask. That is a silent truncation: the method fills the buffer you hand it, returns how many it wrote, and never reports that there were more. Every wall, beam, floor, roof tile and terrain collider within range competed for those 256 slots.

  In a test world that is a handful of objects and the chests are always found. Measured in a real base: over 1,024 colliders within 12m of one post, and all 24 of its chests invisible. The post reported "0 usable chest(s)" with a configured chest two metres away.

  It fails exactly where the mod is used and passes exactly where it is tested, which is why it survived three releases and four reports from the same player. The buffer doubles until the result fits now, so nothing can be missed, and it says so when it grows.

  Not fixed with a layer mask, though that would be faster: a mask hardcodes an assumption about which layers a container may sit on - chests, ships, carts, anything another mod adds - and a wrong mask fails the same silent way this did.

[1.5.2] - 2026-09-11

The stowing post still refused to send its spirit anywhere after 1.5.1, reported by the same player who found the original bug. Same root cause, one caller further on.

Fixed

• The post would not dispatch a single trip, and said nothing. 1.5.1 stopped trusting Container.IsInUse() for destination chests, because the raw m_inUse field is only ever written by the peer that owns the ZNetView and strands the moment ownership moves. CarryRun.Available was still asking that same question about the post itself, so the chests became reachable and the post never set off - the fix could not reach the person it was written for.

  It is worse on a post than on a chest, because you have to open a post to put anything in it. That is the act that sets the flag, so losing ownership before the window closes strands it permanently - and building a new post does not help, because using it recreates the state. Both callers go through one helper now.

• The post claimed "nowhere to go" about things that had somewhere to go. The hover text counted NrOfItems() - everything the post held - and called that number homeless. A post between runs holding one perfectly placeable stack said exactly what a post holding one nothing wanted says. It counts what it claims now, and says "waiting" for the rest.

  That sentence is what both reports quoted, and it was never evidence about chests. It sent three rounds of searching at real but unrelated bugs.

[1.5.1] - 2026-09-10

Two long-standing stowing-post bugs, both older than Valheim 1.0, and the reason neither had been found: nothing in the run said a word about either.

Fixed

• A chest you had once opened was never used again. Container.IsInUse() returns the raw m_inUse field, but Container.SetInUse only assigns that field when the caller owns the ZNetView. So on a client that does not own the chest the value is wrong in both directions, and worst of all a chest this client opened and then lost ownership of never receives its SetInUse(false) - the guard drops it - leaving it "occupied" for the rest of the session. Depositor.Usable rejected it there, before the chest's rule was ever read, and the post reported having nowhere to go while a correctly configured chest stood in range.

  It is worse than a stale read, because the state seals itself in. UpdateUseVisual is the only code that ever writes ZDOVars.s_inUse, it is reached only from CheckForChanges through Load(), and Load() returns false outright while m_inUse is true. So the flag blocks the one path that would clear it - on the instance and in the world file both - and stops that chest reloading its contents from the ZDO into the bargain.

  m_inUse is no longer consulted at all. When we do not own the chest, ZDOVars.s_inUse off the ZDO carries the shared answer, which is what vanilla's own UpdateUseVisual reads in its non-owner branch. When we do own it, nobody else can have it open - opening transfers ownership, because Container.RPC_RequestOpen ends in SetOwner(uid) - so the only honest question is whether we have it open, and InventoryGui answers that through public API with no private field to go stale.

  Both halves matter and they cover different people. A player on a shared server hits the non-owner path; a player in singleplayer owns every ZDO and only ever hits the owner one.

• The spirit flew back and forth without ever delivering. A trip carried an ItemDrop.ItemData reference, and Container rebuilds its entire inventory from the ZDO on every revision change - which a stow run causes constantly, because each deposit changes a container. Inventory.ContainsItem is reference equality on a List, so the reference was orphaned in flight almost every time. Move treated that as handled and returned silently, so the spirit landed, moved nothing, and set off again forever.

  The item is re-found on arrival by shared name, quality, variant and world level - the same fields Inventory.FindFreeStackItem uses to decide two stacks may merge, so anything matched is something the destination would have stacked with the original anyway.

  This one was hidden behind the first: with the chest excluded, no trip was ever dispatched.

• A stow could duplicate what it moved. Depositor.Deposit took the trip's share out of the source by writing item.m_stack directly, and only called Inventory.RemoveItem once the stack reached zero. A raw field write is invisible to the inventory: Inventory.Changed never fires, so Container.OnContainerChanged never runs and the post's ZDO is never saved. The destination's side does save - AddItem calls Changed - so the post reloaded its old contents from a stale ZDO, the stack came back, and the next trip moved it again. Measured at 21 coal in the post producing 140 in the chest.

  Only a partial take was affected, which is every trip of a stack larger than ItemsPerTrip, and it needs a trip to actually land - so it was invisible for as long as the two bugs above kept trips from landing at all. The removal goes through Inventory.RemoveItem(item, amount) now, and the source is checked for the item before anything is added anywhere, because an add that succeeds beside a removal that fails is the definition of this bug.

Changed

• The run explains itself now. A homeless report lists, per item, every usable chest, the rule it carries and whether it wanted the item, refused it, or was full. Move's three silent exits each say which one fired. Previously the log could show "2 usable chest(s)" and then nothing at all, which is the state both bugs above lived in.

[1.5.0] - 2026-09-09

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

• A patch failure can no longer delete what you built. The four prefabs were declared after thirteen PatchAll calls, so any one of those throwing - one renamed method after a game update, which is ordinary - took the declarations with it. That is not a lost feature: the game discards any saved object whose prefab name does not resolve, so every Heartwood, sapling, spirit and stow post in the world went with it. They are declared first now, and each patch group is applied on its own so one failure costs one feature and says which.
• Runs on Valheim 1.0. Hoverable gained a member, and Inventory.AddItem gained a required flag - the spirit's heartwood is handed over as legitimately earned, which is what it is.

[1.4.2] - 2026-09-01

Added

• Hold Shift to plant free of the grid. A Longhouse player asked to switch the grid off sometimes, to put one plant where it wanted to be - which is a gesture, not a setting. So it is a held key rather than a toggle or a cfg edit: the lattice, its preview, the scroll wheel and middle mouse all return to vanilla while it is down, and come back when the hand opens. The key is the game's own AltPlace - Shift unless rebound, which is already vanilla's "place free of snapping" gesture while building, so the habit transfers whole and follows a rebind in the game's controls for free. GridFreeKey in config replaces it for anyone whose Shift is overloaded.

Fixed

• Bonemeal threw on every use. BonemealRadius was read each time bonemeal was consumed on a plant, but it was never bound to the config file, so the read was a NullReferenceException on the one path the item exists for. The plant still advanced, because that happens first, and the exception landed in Player.log rather than the BepInEx log - which is why it read as working. It is now bound, off by default at 0; set a radius in metres to feed the neighbours in the same press. The radius could never actually be switched on before this, since no cfg row existed to set.

Changed

• Every config entry is now settled as either the host's or yours. The 1.4.1 grid-angle fix closed one instance of a class, so this release classified all 137 entries against Longhouse Core's sync. Thirty-three are per-player by nature and now say so through Suite.Local: the grid and sowing gestures, your map pins, the refusal messages on your own screen, the spirit's and post's local renders, KeepHotbar and NeverStow, and every Verbose and diagnostics toggle. Every gameplay number - costs, ranges, health, rosters, caps - stays host-decided on purpose, and so does every shared prefab fact. Three that look personal stay synced deliberately, and the code records which and why.

[1.4.1] - 2026-08-29

Fixed

• The grid would not turn on a server, while turning perfectly in singleplayer - which is the shape of bug that sends you looking everywhere except at the cause. GridAngle is a float, and Longhouse Core's config sync exempts only KeyCode and KeyboardShortcut from being decided by the host. So on a server the host's angle was imposed on the client, and Core's watch put an imposed setting straight back the moment anything wrote it: every scroll notch set the angle and had it reverted in the same frame. Nothing was wrong with the wheel, the input or the grid.

  The angle is now declared personal through Core's own Suite.Local, which is written for exactly this and names a UI scale or a colour as the same kind of setting. The host's value is never applied rather than applied and then fought.

  The actual rules stay host-decided on purpose - GridCell, GridLevel, GridEnabled and the harvest numbers are all things a server is entitled to settle for everyone. Which way one player's rows happen to run is not.

[1.4.0] - 2026-08-29

Added

• Shift+E on a ripe crop harvests the bed, reaching further as Farming rises: two metres at level 15, growing smoothly to eight by level 80. Plain E is untouched and still picks exactly one - an area harvest with no way to opt out is a mod deciding when you wanted the whole bed. Shift+E costs nothing to take: Pickable.Interact already accepts an alt argument and never once reads it.

  What it takes is deliberately narrow. Only crops - the grown stage of something plantable - and that set is read off the game rather than listed in the mod, by walking every prefab carrying a Plant and collecting its m_grownPrefabs. So a crop another mod adds is included the day it is added, and no wild berry, mushroom, thistle or dandelion is ever touched: those are Thicket's, and clearing a forest from one keypress is a different and far more generous mod than this one. By default it also takes only the crop you actually clicked, so a mixed bed is harvested a kind at a time rather than stripped in one press.

  Every neighbour goes through vanilla's own Interact, one call each, rather than reaching into RPC_Pick - which keeps the skill gain, the level bonus roll, the effects, the drop scaling and the ownership identical to picking each by hand. An area harvest the server disagreed with about who owns what is the kind of bug that only appears with other people watching. PickMax caps a single press so a dense field cannot empty an inventory onto the ground.

[1.3.1] - 2026-08-29

Three reports against 1.3.0's grid, all from one session of actually using it.

Fixed

• The grid did not exist until the second plant. Its origin could only ever be a plant that already stood there, so the first plant of every bed went down blind - nothing drawn, nothing to turn - and wherever it landed silently fixed the phase and the angle for every plant after it. The one plant that most needed aiming was the only one with no help. The bed now starts under the cursor: the lattice is drawn before anything is planted, and the first seed lands where it says it will.

• The turn key was never received. Furrow read its keys with UnityEngine.Input.GetKeyDown, and Valheim runs on the new Input System - ZInput routes a KeyCode to the mouse, keyboard or pad itself, and the legacy class does not see the middle mouse button at all. The key was bound, the config held the right value, and nothing happened. All of Furrow's keys go through ZInput now, which also repairs Sowing's shape, increase and decrease keys - broken the same way, and never reported only because Sowing is off by default.

Changed

• The mouse wheel turns the grid, and it is the gesture rather than an option. While planting the wheel is very nearly free: a crop carries m_randomInitBuildRotation, so the game re-rolls the ghost's facing after every single placement and the yaw you scrolled to is discarded as the seed goes in. Spending the same wheel on the rows spends it on the one thing that survives the click - and scrolling back turns back, which a key that only stepped one way could not.

• GridTurnKey now defaults to None, so middle click is vanilla's remove again. Set it to Mouse2 to have a key as well, and only then is removal suppressed while a plant is selected.

• The first grid drawn in a session names the gesture that is actually bound, so it cannot tell you to press something that does nothing.

[1.3.0] - 2026-08-29

Four reports, and the answer to each one.

Fixed

• "Sometimes it says there is nothing to dig up." Transplant took the first Pickable out of Physics.RaycastAll and answered with it - and RaycastAll returns its hits in ARBITRARY order, not nearest first. So whichever pickable the array happened to list first spoke for the plant you were actually aiming at, and when that one was not on the roster the dig was refused with a bush filling your screen. Nothing about the failure depended on where you pointed, which is exactly why it read as intermittent. Hits are sorted now, a roster plant always beats a stranger however close, and a refusal names what it found ("Mushroom cannot be dug up") instead of claiming there is nothing there. A clean miss falls back to a cone, because wild plants are ragged and several carry a collider narrower than they look.

Added

• The grid can be lined up with what you have built. All three properties of the lattice were the mod's and are now yours: GridCell in absolute metres, GridAngle for a building that does not sit square to the world, and GridPinKey, which anchors the lattice where you stand rather than on the nearest plant.

• You can see the grid before you plant in it. The rows are drawn on the ground under the ghost, from the same anchor, spacing and angle the snap itself uses, so the drawing cannot disagree with where the plant lands. It follows the terrain, and turns live with the grid.

• The grid turns on the middle mouse button. 22.5 degrees a press - vanilla's own building step, so anything you built square is reachable - wrapping at 90, where a square lattice repeats. Tying it to the ghost's own rotation was the obvious choice and is wrong: crops carry m_randomInitBuildRotation, so the game re-rolls that yaw after every placement and the grid would jump each time a seed went in. While the cultivator is up with a plant selected, middle click turns the grid and does NOT remove the piece under your cursor; removal is untouched everywhere else, and rebinding the key restores it.

• A ring says whether a sapling will actually have room. Green when it would grow, red when it would not, at the plant's own radius. The game never checks this when you place: Plant.UpdateHealth skips the test entirely for the first ten seconds after planting, so a sapling with no room looks healthy, then quietly turns unhealthy - or deletes itself, if it carries m_destroyIfCantGrow. The seed is spent before anything says no, and the loss shows up later somewhere you are no longer standing. The ring runs vanilla's own test, and shows whatever the grid is doing.

• The stowing post can say why it is doing nothing. Its hover text carries the count of items with nowhere to go, a corner message fires once when nothing in the post has a home, and Diagnostics/Verbose logs one line per nearby chest naming why it was skipped - privacy, range, a ward, an open window, a cart or a ship.

Note

Nothing about how anything looks has changed. A repo-wide rework of texture density is finished and held back deliberately: it has not been seen in game, and two choices about the stowing post are still open.

[1.2.1] - 2026-08-27

Fixed

• Grid rows no longer drift out of line while planting. Two causes, both only visible on a server where fields have had time to grow. The grid re-chose its anchor every frame (the nearest plant of the same kind), so a nearby free-placed plant could re-seat the whole lattice mid-row; and a grown crop is a different prefab from its sapling, so replanting a half-harvested field found no anchor at all and every new row started its own grid. The anchor is now held for the whole bed - one bed, one grid - and grown crops anchor exactly like the saplings they stand in place of.

[1.2.0] - 2026-08-27

Four features, every one reshaped in play before it shipped.

Thicket: move wild plants

Select Transplant on the cultivator and click a wild berry bush, thistle, dandelion or mushroom patch: it comes up roots-and-all INTO YOUR ARMS - no item, no inventory - riding the tool's tined end while you walk it home. Walking is the whole verb set: running, jumping, attacking, the hotbar, equipping and every ordinary interaction wait until the plant is down. Click open ground where its kind grows (the biome gate refuses elsewhere, keeping the carry), press R to set it down anywhere regardless, and the SAME plant stands there - picked-empty, its berries having dropped at the dig, regrowing on vanilla's own timer. Dying or logging out plants it at your feet: conservation does not take an exit as an excuse. The Farming ladder gates digging per plant, and the world's plant count only ever stays the same.

Bonemeal, without the bone mill

Two bones and an entrail make five at the workbench. Worked into a growing crop - crops only, never trees - it marks the plant: picking the crop it becomes yields THREE times and trains Farming hard, once, and the mark is spent. No growth speed-up, deliberately: bonemeal is resourcefulness, not haste. A fed plant says "Fertilised" on hover, and a second bonemeal on the same plant is refused rather than wasted. The sack is hand-built

• a lathe-turned tied sack in flat painted colours matching its icon.

The planting grid, from Farming 10

The cultivator's ghost snaps onto a lattice anchored to the nearest plant of the same kind, spaced by the plant's own grow radius - so beds come out in rows and columns you place yourself, one seed per press, exactly as vanilla plants. The first plant of a bed goes wherever you like and anchors it; no kin nearby, no snap. (Furrow's multi-sow machinery exists behind a config flag, off: one press planting a square was built and struck the day it was met.)

Housekeeping

1.1.0 was published with its version constants still reading 1.0.0; the gate never noticed because both ends ran the same bytes. This release re-aligns the numbers.

[1.1.0] - 2026-08-23

The sapling half. Four things, and the first of them is the one that matters.

The seed calls the forest to it

• A planted sapling now draws greydwarfs to itself, and calls harder the closer it is to opening. Without this it was entirely passive, and the quest it actually set was "go and find a place greydwarfs already walk through, then stand in it" - a scouting problem rather than a defending one, and the wrong half of what the piece is for. Now the place you chose is the thing that matters, and what it summons is what feeds it: a seed planted in an empty meadow is slow rather than impossible, and one planted beside a real camp is still faster, because the camp counts too.
• It ramps, and it is a raid rather than wildlife. The interval falls from 20 seconds at an unfed seed to 6 at one about to open, so the loudest part of the fight is the end of it. A constant rate is a wave you learn to stand in; a rising one can be heard without looking at anything. 90 and 30 were the first numbers and they were far too polite - one greydwarf every minute and a half is something you deal with between other jobs.
• Ridden on vanilla's own SpawnArea, which is the component a greydwarf nest is made of. That buys the near and total caps, the floor-finding, the spawn effect, and - the part that matters most - its own guards: owner only, inside the active area, with a player in range. Nothing happens while you are asleep, which was the sapling's first principle and is the one thing a spawner could most easily have broken.
• They arrive from a distance and run in rather than appearing around the seed. Found in play: they were materialising on top of it. Widening the radius does not fix that, because vanilla's FindSpawnPoint draws its distance from Random.Range(0, radius) - uniform across a disc, so most points land near the middle however wide it is. A prefix replaces that search with one that draws from a band, 35 to 60 metres by default, making the same two ZoneSystem checks in the same order so nothing lands inside a rock. Every other SpawnArea in the game runs vanilla's own method untouched.
• Getting them to actually come is a second thing. SetPatrolSpawnPoint is off, so they do not treat the trees they appeared in as home, and a sweep every two seconds calls SetHuntPlayer on everything from the roster within reach - which is what a vanilla raid does and means "stop wandering, go and find someone". They hunt the player rather than the sapling: there is no vanilla "attack this object" to ride, the player is standing at the sapling anyway, and it puts the raid on the person holding the ground instead of on the thing with 500 health.
• It says so. "The forest is enraged." goes to everyone within BeckonRange, centre screen, once per sapling per load - fired from the first wave actually landing rather than from planting, so a sapling that can find nowhere to spawn never announces a siege that is not coming. Everyone nearby rather than whoever planted it, because it is a warning about a place and on that frame there is nothing on screen to account for the noise. The text is a config line and blank turns it off.
• The first wave leaves immediately. Vanilla counts its spawn timer up from zero on a two-second repeat and fires when it exceeds the interval, so an unfed seed produced nothing at all for 22 seconds and then the wave still had to walk in - half a minute of silence after planting, which reads as the mod not working. The timer now starts full, so the first wave goes out on the next tick. It does the same on every later load, and since the timer only advances with a player in range, walking back to a half-fed sapling restarts the siege as you arrive rather than after another silent interval.
• The band came in from 35-60m to 25-40m with it, so the first wave is on you in roughly fifteen seconds rather than forty. Still far enough to be out of sight in forest.
• They arrive in waves, from one side. Vanilla's spawner produces exactly one creature per interval, which is a queue rather than a raid - a greydwarf, a wait, another greydwarf, and nothing that has to be handled as a group. A wave is 2 at an unfed seed rising to 5 at one about to open, and the whole wave comes out of the trees within 40 degrees of one bearing so it can be turned to face. The extra members go through the game's own SpawnOne, so MaxNear and MaxTotal police themselves and a wave that would breach them simply comes up short.
• A sapling now costs 50 greydwarf deaths, not 30. Thirty was chosen when the sapling was passive and thirty was roughly one raid happening to arrive. It does not wait for a raid any more, it makes one, so the number is the length of a fight you started rather than the odds of one finding you. Ten of them around you at a time, twenty-four alive in the area.
• The trigger range is 48m rather than vanilla's 256m. A nest filling a forest you are nowhere near is one thing; a sapling quietly getting itself killed by what it summoned while you are two zones away is another.
• Six standing around it at once, sixteen alive in the area. Deliberately more than the sapling survives being ignored for - it has 500 health and about ten brute hits in it - which is the trade the whole feature makes: the forest comes to you instead of you going out to find it, and the price is having to hold the ground.
• All of it is off with one setting, and every number above is config.

Black Forest only

• A seed refuses to go in anywhere but the Black Forest, and refuses the last five metres before the edge of it too. It is a greydwarf ritual - what it calls and what feeds it both live there - and one that works in the meadows makes the biome a backdrop rather than the reason.
• The margin is checked on a ring of eight points as well as under the cursor, so the whole circle has to be inside. Planting one step past the treeline and then summoning the forest would put half the fight in the meadow, and a boundary is where a raid is least interesting.
• Both the biome list and the margin are config, and the refusal says which of the two reasons it was.

It will not go in anybody's base

• A sapling cannot be planted inside a base, and one already standing goes quiet if a base grows around it. This is the price of the seed calling: passive, one planted in someone else's home was rude; summoning waves of greydwarfs at it is a weapon, and a dozen around a stranger's longhouse is the obvious grief on a public server.
• A ward already refused it and always did - the sapling is an ordinary piece, so PrivateArea turns it down like anything else. The gap was unwarded bases, which is most of them.
• Filled with the game's own EffectArea.PlayerBase, which is what a workbench or fire radiates and the same test vanilla uses to keep creatures from spawning in your house. So the counter-play to a sapling planted next to you is to put a workbench down rather than to fight it, and "is this someone's home" stays the game's question rather than a guess of ours.
• Any base, including your own. Working out whose it is means reading Piece.m_creator off whatever is nearby, which is more code for a worse answer - it would still stop you at a friend's base in co-op - and a wilderness ritual has no business in your own hall either.
• The refusal says which reason. Vanilla would show "invalid placement", which is true and useless to somebody standing in their own garden.
• Client-side, honestly. A modded client could ignore it; what makes it stick on a server is Core's version gate.

Everyone defending it can see the count

• Fixed: only whoever landed the killing blow saw the counter. Character.OnDeath runs on the client that owns the creature and nowhere else, and the message went to Player.m_localPlayer - so with two players clearing greydwarfs around one sapling, each of them saw roughly half the kills register and neither could tell whether the other's were counting at all. They always were; only the message was missing. It now goes to every player within the sapling's own feed range, which needs no networking of ours because Player.Message already RPCs to a player this client does not own.

A marker on the map

• A planted sapling puts a pin on your map, and takes it off again when it opens or is destroyed. This is the one piece in the mod you are meant to walk away from, and a seed in bare ground is not findable from fifty metres away - losing one to "I know it was around here" costs the same ancient seed as losing it to a brute.
• Client-side and per player, saved in your own profile like a pin you placed by hand. Nothing about it is networked and a server needs to know nothing about it.
• The pin comes off by reconciling against the world - a pin whose zone is loaded with no sapling under it is stale - rather than from the sapling's own OnDestroy. Found in play: the pins never went away. OnDestroy fires on a destroyed sapling and an unloaded one alike, and the test meant to tell them apart asked ZDOMan whether the ZDO was gone, which it never is on that frame - DestroyZDO only queues the uid on m_destroySendList and the ZDO leaves m_objectsByID some frames later. Both endings read as "merely unloaded". Asking whether a sapling is standing there needs no guess, covers every ending including one another player removed, and clears the pins the first version stranded.

The spirit's parting has an effect again

• The parting effect shipped blank in 1.0 because the name it wanted was a guess about the game and the honest answer was "not confirmed". It is now a list walked in order - vfx_ghost_death, then two fallbacks - and the first name that resolves is used, so the wrong ones cost nothing and are skipped in silence. Looked up through PropIndex as well as ZNetScene, because plenty of effect prefabs carry no ZNetView and are invisible to ZNetScene however loaded they are.

Not in this yet

• The sapling's staged growth and the sowing of a rank of seeds are still on v1.1-sowing, cut from 1.0 for their art. They are 1.2 now: the roadmap in the 1.0 entry below was renumbered when this release took the 1.1 slot, and that branch keeps its old name. Nothing here touches it, and merging is a separate job - it predates the 1.0 tidy-up and does not fast-forward.

[1.0.0] - 2026-08-18

First release. The number sat at 1.0 once before, early, and was taken back down when whole mods arrived on top of it without it moving. This is the version that earns it: one chain, finished, with everything that was not finished cut out and held on its own branch.

The chain, played end to end in a real world: an ancient seed planted, fed on greydwarf deaths through its growth, opened into a forest spirit, communed with, and the heartwood carried away and built into a stowing post that sorts the chests around it.

The sapling

• Plant an ancient seed in the Black Forest. It does not grow on time, it grows on death, and only on the deaths of greydwarfs, and only within sight of it. About thirty of them and it opens, which is one raid if the forest comes to you.
• Greydwarfs specifically, not "forest creatures". An early version used the game's own forest faction and swept up trolls, boars and the Elder, which turned clearing out a nest into killing anything anywhere near here. Greylings are on the list at zero, so it is visible that they were considered and refused.
• It can be destroyed, because being asked to fight for an hour beside something you cannot lose is not defending it. Around ten hits from a brute: a fight happening nearby is survivable, a mob left to work on it is not. It says when something is chewing on it and when it is gone, because losing an hour in silence is a mystery rather than a difficulty.
• One hand-built model, with its own icon so the cultivator stops offering a carrot. Built to the game's own measurements rather than to taste, because smoothness is most of what reads as modded and nothing else in the game at that size is round.
• The sapling does not change shape as it fills, and the hover text is what tells you how far along it is. Four staged models exist and work, and three of them were not good enough to ship, so the staging is held for 1.1 rather than released and apologised for.

The spirit and the heartwood

• The sapling opens into a forest spirit. Light with no body, bobbing and pulsing, and waking as you approach. Two rings of beads turn around it in step with each other, with no visible hoop, so it reads as one thing turning rather than as a swarm.
• Press use once and it folds itself into a piece of heartwood you carry away. It is a home rather than a heart: the spirit does not die and hand over a piece of itself.
• Build the heartwood somewhere and you have housed it.

The stowing post

Stow is no longer a separate mod. Its post, its spirit and its sorting ship here unchanged.

• One mod, not two shipped together. Stow arrived carrying its own [BepInPlugin], and leaving it there meant one DLL announcing two plugins in the log, writing two config files, registering with Core's version gate twice, and reporting two different version numbers. It reads as two mods in a trenchcoat, and it was one. The post's half is now driven by Vaettir's own plugin class: one GUID, one config file, one Harmony instance, one registration.
• Nothing you have built is affected. The piece keeps its internal name, so posts already standing survive.
• Its settings moved into ezomic.valheim.vaettir.cfg, under [Post], [Sorting], [Carrier] and [Keys]. Anyone who had tuned ezomic.valheim.stow.cfg copies those values across once; nothing reads that file 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.
• One spirit, not two. Each mod used to build its own from its own script and they had drifted into visibly different creatures. There is one now, and the carrier is that one at 0.62 scale so it is the size it has always been on screen. Set the scale to 1 for a full-size spirit.
• One setting still drops the heartwood from the recipe and puts the post back to wood and nails, for anyone who wants the sorting without the ritual.
• A spirit carries ten items a trip, so a stack of fifty wood leaves the post in five trips rather than crossing the room in one. A big load looks like a big load. ItemsPerTrip sets it and 0 restores the whole stack. This is the number the post upgrades are meant to raise.
• The carrying spirit and the one you commune with are the same creature, which took three passes to actually mean. The merge gave them one mesh; they still resolved their material through two different lookups against two different donor lists, and even once that was fixed only one of them glowed. The glow is a Light and an emission write, and the carrier had half of one, so the room around it lit up while its own mesh stayed flat. Colour, range, pulse depth and pulse period were each a second value too.
• The last of the seams from when these were two repos are gone. Icons and PropIndex each existed in two diverged copies, one per old namespace, and the comment justifying that said a copy was better than reaching into a sibling repo. There is no sibling repo.

Requires

Longhouse Core is optional. Without it nothing refuses a client that lacks this mod, and that matters: the sapling, the spirit, the heartwood and the post are registered pieces, and a client that cannot resolve one throws the object away rather than erroring. A server without Vaettir silently destroys everything already standing. Solo, none of that applies.

Known gaps

Stated rather than quietly shipped.

• Dedicated servers are untested. Everything here has been exercised in single-player. Each spirit, sapling and post is driven by whoever owns it, so co-op should be fine, and should is doing real work in that sentence.
• The spirit's parting has no effect on it. The setting names a vanilla particle to play where it stood and ships blank, because a wrong name costs the moment its flourish rather than breaking anything. It is a flourish that is missing, not a step that fails.
• The sapling stirs while it grows, and that motion is new enough that it has had far less play than the rest of the chain.

Held for later releases

Cut rather than shipped unproven or unfinished, each kept whole on its own branch so continuing is a merge rather than a rebuild.

This list was renumbered after 1.0 shipped. 1.1 became the sapling half instead - the seed calling greydwarfs to itself, the map pin, the co-op counter and the parting effect - which is work on the piece the whole chain starts at rather than on the two halves either side of it, and everything below moved down one. The branch names still carry their old numbers, because a branch is renamed easily and remembered wrongly: v1.1-sowing is 1.2 here, v1.2-panel is 1.3, and v1.3-bonemeal is 1.4.

• 1.2 - sowing a rank of seeds by Farming skill, and the sapling's staged growth. The staging works and has been played; three of its four models were not good enough. It sits directly behind 1.1 rather than ahead of it because the staged models are the visible half of the same piece, and it is worth knowing how a sapling plays once it is worth standing next to before choosing how it should look while you do.
• 1.3, a refinement pass - better animation throughout, and the post's own panel: fetch, tidy and presence. All three were built and none of them were proven, and with the three of them out the panel had nothing left in it, so it goes whole.
• 1.4 - bonemeal, and the bone mill that grinds it.
• 1.5 - upgrades for the stowing post. It starts out carrying ten items a trip and each upgrade raises that, so a post becomes something you improve rather than something you finish. It also gives the heartwood somewhere to go after the post is built.
• 1.6 - an upgrade that houses a second spirit, so two stacks are in the air at once rather than one moving faster. Two of them working is worth watching; one of them hurrying is a number.
• Unscheduled - the vaettr visitor and the market they were to stand in.

Late fixes

• A dropped heartwood no longer falls through the floor. Stripping the donor's mesh took the collider with it, because on that donor both live on the same object, and an item with weight and nothing to rest on simply keeps going. Found by throwing one away.
• The spirit's parting effect setting was renamed before release rather than after, when it would have stranded the old key in other people's configs.

Archived history

Stow and Furrow were separate repos before this. Their history is in archive/, one git bundle each, clonable with git clone archive/stow.bundle. See archive/README.md.