Huskarl

Place named, interactive NPCs in your world. Pick a body, customize it, stand it exactly where you want it, and give it a job.

A húskarl is a free retainer of a household: a person you keep who does a job for you.

Install this on the server and on every client. An NPC is an ordinary creature with its AI switched off. A player who does not have the mod sees a live, hostile Draugr standing in your marketplace.

Making One

Press F6 as an admin.

• Name it. That is what players see when they look at it.
• Pick a body. Every creature in the game is on the list, including ones from other mods. Drag the preview to turn it.
• Make a person. Choose the player character as the body and you get the full character creation options: build, hair, beard, hair colour and skin colour.
• Stand it up. Place mode points the NPC wherever you look. Scroll to turn, shift-scroll to raise and lower, arrow keys to nudge, and G holds it still so you can adjust it without the mouse dragging it around.

Once placed it stays put. It does not wander, does not despawn, is ignored by other creatures, cannot be killed, and is still there after a restart.

Jobs

Trader

Opens the game's own store with a ware list you choose. Players buy with gold exactly as they do with Haldor, and can sell anything valuable back at the item's own worth.

Guise

Changes how your gear looks and nothing else about it. Free, as often as you like, and always reversible.

Pick any piece of gear you are carrying and choose a look. Stats, name and inventory icon are untouched; a guised item just gets a small "Guised" mark in the corner of its tooltip.

• You can only choose looks you have found. The list is everything of that kind that has ever been in your pack.
• A look has to be the same kind of thing, held the same way. A one-handed sword can look like any other one-handed sword, but not like a mace, a greatsword or a bow.
• Anything you hold can also carry an effect - five made for the mod, plus dozens taken from weapons in the game that have their own flame, frost or glow. A plain iron sword can wear Frostfire, Flametal or Thunderblood.
• If the item already has a Runemark enchant glow, your effect replaces it, and the enchant glow returns when you clear it.

Everyone can see your guise, including players without the mod.

Gambler

Pick which of three games the NPC runs.

Slots

Three reels and a lever you pull. Stake gold at one, five or ten times.

The symbols are the real items - gold, Ochre and the five runes - and the symbol you line up is what you win. Three of a kind pays properly, three Sowilo is the jackpot, two of a kind pays one of it, and everything else pays a small consolation. Every spin pays something.

The paytable is printed on the cabinet. It is a slot machine, so over time it pays out less than it takes in.

Marbles

Ten marbles race a course of corners, swinging axes and spinning tumblers, built fresh every time. Back a colour and stake gold, Ochre or any rune.

First pays five times the stake, second pays twice, third hands your stake back. Winnings come back in whatever was staked, so three Ansuz on the winner is fifteen Ansuz.

Every marble has the same one in ten chance. They start side by side on one line and the lanes are drawn fresh each race, so no starting position is worth more than another.

Plinko

Buy five balls for one stake, pick a chute and drop them. Double-click a chute to drop into it.

Drop them as fast as you like - all five can be in the air at once, and they knock each other about on the way down.

The nine buckets keep changing what they hold, and a ball takes whatever is under it when it lands. Buckets come up Common, Fine, Rare or Fabled, and the rarity multiplies the prize - a Fabled bucket is worth fifteen of a Common one.

A bucket that catches a ball freezes on what it paid for the rest of the round, so a good bucket is worth aiming your remaining balls at.

Every ball pays something. The worst bucket is two gold.

Car keys

Every wager at any of the three games has a small chance of paying out a Skeid car key or a lowrider key - one in twenty thousand each at the standard stake, about as likely as the slot machine's jackpot.

Each key is rolled on its own, and a bigger wager is proportionally likelier. A key comes alongside the normal prize rather than instead of it.

Requires Skeid. Without it, keys are never given.

How the games compare

A thousand gold buys about the same reward whichever of the three games it goes into, so the choice is down to which one you prefer to play.

The Gambling Skill

All three games level a Gambling skill. Every wager teaches you a little, win or lose, and at a hundred it turns one losing wager in ten into a win. It never makes a win bigger, only more frequent.

The size of the wager is what counts. An ordinary slot pull teaches a full step, about seventy-five pulls to reach level 10. A minimum bet teaches very little, so repeating the cheapest wager is a slow way to level the skill.

What the games pay out

By default the prizes are gold, Ochre and the five runes from Runemark. A thousand gold is worth roughly ten Sowilo once fused and enough Ochre for sixteen Inscribes, while about a third of the gold comes back.

Runemark is not required. If those items are not installed the machine pays in ordinary ones instead - wood, stone, flint, coal, bronze and iron - so it still works on a plain install.

Either way the server decides. Every symbol's prize is listed in gbv.valheim.huskarl.slots.cfg under item, alongside the odds, and can be pointed at any item in the game:

item ochre  Wood
item sowilo BlackMetal

Settings

Credits

Built for the Guys Being Vikings server. Part of the GBV suite alongside Highseat, Runemark, Byrding, Idavoll, Hermod and Skald.

Changelog

0.2.0

Added

• New job: Banker. A vault for gold, Ochre and runes. No fee, no limit.
• Banked items are not dropped on death.
• Every banker opens the same vault. It is per character and per world.
• Deposit and withdraw in 1, 10, 100, 1000 or All, or move everything at once.
• The bank leaves locked stacks alone.
• huskarl_bank shows your balances. Admins can set one with huskarl_bank set <currency> <amount>.
• Plinko: a rare RAIN bucket. Land a ball in it and forty-five free balls fall, five waves of nine, one wave a second.
• Marbles: charms on the course, which only your marble can pick up. One up to 50 gold, two to 150, three above that.
• Charms do three different things. Slipstream is a burst of speed, Featherweight stops anything slowing you, Hammer throws the other marbles aside and stuns them.
• Paytable files now carry a version line and are updated automatically when the mod ships a new one. Your old file is kept as a .bak. Add pin to keep yours.

Changed

• Slots: the bonus round now depends on your wager. Roughly one pull in twenty at 20 gold, one in ten at 100, one in seven at 200. It was one in six hundred at every stake.
• Slots: the bonus round is three free spins, not ten, and the trigger no longer pays gold on top.
• Slots: free spins can no longer open another bonus round.
• Slots: payouts reduced. A 20 gold pull pays a third of what it did, 100 and 200 gold a quarter.
• Plinko: bucket payouts doubled.
• Marbles: first place pays 3x, was 5x.
• Bonus rounds play much faster.

Fixed

• A server running a paytable from before the bonus round existed could never trigger one.
• The cabinet advertised four times what the machine actually paid at the larger stakes.
• The paytable listed three Bonus symbols as paying "nothing".
• The starburst behind the reels showed a square edge sweeping round it.
• Plinko balls could get stuck and never pay out during a RAIN. Balls now pay on entering a bucket.
• Your Haul totals each item instead of listing every ball.
• Marble charms were invisible until collected, and did not say what they were.
• Bank buttons hung out of the bottom of their rows.
• NPCs twitched to a different heading and back while being placed.

0.1.9

Added

• Human NPCs can be dressed in chest, legs, helmet and cape from the Looks tab, so they are no longer bare. Any armour in the game works, including armour from other mods.

Fixed

• Placing an NPC no longer twitches it back and forth while you aim.
• Placing a cat or a dog no longer sends it lurching towards and away from the camera.

0.1.8

Added

• Three Bonus symbols on the slots win ten free spins. They play themselves at double speed, at the stake you hit the bonus on, and pay far more often than an ordinary pull.

Changed

• Every panel is rebuilt with real depth. Surfaces now sit above or below one another instead of everything being flat: cabinets and cards stand up, and the reel glass, the marble track and the plinko board are sunk in behind them.
• The slots cabinet changes for the whole bonus round, and a starburst turns behind the reels for a jackpot or a bonus.
• Plinko's side panel now shows how many balls are left, what each bucket rarity is worth, and your haul as it fills, newest first.
• The marble you back stands up off the betting board.
• Headings, body text and labels are properly distinct sizes now, and a text box you are typing into looks like it.

0.1.7

Fixed

• A Runemark enchant glow is hidden again when you give the weapon a Guise effect. Recent Runemark versions put it straight back, so both showed at once.

0.1.6

Added

• Armour can now be set to Hidden in Guise, so a helmet or cape can be worn without being seen.

Fixed

• Crossbow effects no longer vanish when a bolt is loaded, sheathed or fired.
• Talking to a trader NPC no longer sometimes closes the shop window the instant it opens.
• Weapon effects no longer bunch up at the grip on weapons the game does not let us read.

0.1.5

Fixed

• Nameplates no longer stick to the screen, vanish entirely, or drag the frame rate down. An NPC's nameplate is now cleared away with the NPC.
• Opening the Body tab no longer breaks other players' nameplates for the rest of the session. Some bodies could not be fully stripped for the preview, and one that slipped through left the game unable to move any nameplate until the game was restarted.
• Guise weapon effects now follow bows and crossbows instead of streaming off into the air.
• Two looks sharing a name, like Leather Trousers, are now told apart rather than listed twice.

0.1.4

Fixed

• NPCs placed while the world was still catching up could keep their AI, a health bar and a nameplate. They are now always settled, however slow the world is.

0.1.3

Changed

• Tidier headings in the README.

Fixed

• The mouse cursor no longer vanishes on the title screen after leaving a world.

0.1.2

Changed

• Clearer wording throughout the README.

0.1.1

Added

• Skeid's lowrider key can now be won from the gambling games, at the same odds as the car key.

0.1.0

Place named NPCs around the world and give them a job.

Added

• An admin panel on F6 to create, name, dress, place and delete NPCs.
• Any creature in the game can be the body, picked from a searchable list with a 3D preview you can drag to turn.
• A player-bodied NPC can be built with the full character creation options.
• Place mode: point where you want them, scroll to turn, shift-scroll to raise and lower, arrow keys to nudge.
• Trader NPCs open the game's own store, with wares you choose, and buy your valuables.
• Guise NPCs change how your gear looks and nothing else about it, free and unlimited.
• Guise covers every slot, and you can only pick looks you have actually found.
• Weapons and shields can carry an effect: five of ours plus dozens borrowed from weapons in the game that have their own flame, frost or glow.
• Other players see your guise whether or not they have the mod.
• Gambler NPCs run one of three games: slots, a marble race, or plinko.
• Slots: three reels, real item icons, a lever you pull. Every spin pays something.
• Marbles: back a colour and watch ten marbles race a course that is built fresh each time.
• Plinko: buy five balls and drop them where you like while the buckets keep changing what they hold.
• A Gambling skill that levels on every wager and, at a hundred, turns one losing wager in ten into a win.
• A thousand gold buys about the same reward whichever of the three games it goes into.
• Prizes fall back to ordinary items when Runemark is not installed, and the server can set every symbol's prize and odds in the config file.
• Any wager at any of the three games can pay out a Skeid car key, at about jackpot odds.