VSS — Valheim Storage System

A shared storage and resource network inspired by the Refined Storage mod for Minecraft.

Build a book-and-quill pedestal, press E, and search all your nearby chests from one screen. Your items stay in the actual chests.

0.3.2 performance update: addresses lag while building, using workbenches and facing refillable objects. Automatic refill still starts Off, and special woods remain protected.

The storage controller and linked-chest preference button now use new icons styled to fit Valheim's inventory artwork.

Storage controller	Chest preferences

Features

• Cheap to build: Storage Inventory costs just 5 wood, with no workbench required.
• Nearby storage: combines accessible chests within 20 metres; the host can configure 1–100 metres.
• Search and sort: search item names, sort by name, quantity or category, and filter resources.
• Drag and drop: transfer items between the storage grid and your actual player inventory.
• Stack-first deposits: fills compatible partial stacks before taking new chest slots.
• Capacity at a glance: used/total slots, percentage occupied, free slots, chest count and radius.
• Chest preferences: choose the preferred resource category with the small icon beside a linked chest's normal inventory.
• Native inventory behavior: equipped-item highlights, hotbar numbers, right-click equip/unequip/use, and native notifications above the storage window.
• Craft and build from storage: workbenches, forges and other crafting stations can use linked chest resources, including upgrades and alternate-ingredient recipes. Your hammer can build using the network too.
• Station supplies: add fuel and processing inputs directly from storage to kilns, smelters, blast furnaces, fires, torches, lamps, cooking stations, ovens and other pieces using the same native components.
• Automatic refill: one master switch per storage network plus a saved on/off choice for each nearby fuel user or processing machine. Both start off.
• Partial stacks and consumption: select Stack/Half/One and right-click stored food or mead to consume it directly.
• Co-op support: synchronized chest access, permissions and host-controlled settings. The author reported successful multiplayer testing of 0.2.4; the newer resource features need broader live co-op testing.

Wooden, reinforced and black metal chests, barrels, and accessible personal chests are supported. Chest privacy and ward permissions apply. Carts, ships, graves and temporary loot containers are excluded.

Getting started

1. Install VSS through a Thunderstore-compatible mod manager. The required BepInExPack Valheim dependency installs automatically.
2. Install the same VSS version on every player and the host/dedicated server.
3. Restart Valheim, equip your hammer and build Storage Inventory under Furniture or Storage. You need to have discovered wood normally.
4. Place the pedestal near your chests and press E to open the storage grid.

The pedestal refunds its 5 wood when removed. The window closes when you leave interaction range, die, teleport, or press Escape/Tab.

For a manual installation, install BepInExPack Valheim and copy the package's plugins/VSS folder into BepInEx/plugins. Keep VSS.dll, vss_assets and the complete ui and icons folders together. Avoid duplicate installations of the old mod.

Controls

Withdrawals take at most one item's normal maximum stack size. A full player inventory accepts only the amount that fits. Unequip equipment before transferring it.

Stored consumables can be used even when your player inventory is full. Half-stack transfers round upward for odd stacks.

The capacity indicator counts occupied item-stack slots, not individual items. For example, 120/120 (100%) used • 0 free • FULL. A chest with every slot occupied can still accept items into compatible partial stacks.

Preferred resources

Open a chest normally while it is within range of a pedestal. Click the small icon beside its inventory and choose Any, Wood, Raw food, Food, Mead, Weapons, Armor, Ammo, Materials, Trophies, Tools or Misc.

Preferences are stored on the chest and shared with other players. Deposits fill matching partial stacks first, then prefer category-matched chests, unassigned chests, and finally other categories. Preferences guide new deposits; they do not relocate existing contents or block other items.

Item quality, variants, durability, crafter information and custom item data are preserved.

Crafting, building and station supplies

Place a crafting station or fuel-using piece within a pedestal's radius. Use its normal game interface. Crafting and upgrading use resources from your inventory first, then accessible linked chests. Native recipe discovery, station level, shelter, DLC, inventory space and stamina requirements still apply. Building uses a nearby pedestal while the player is inside its radius. The placed piece can be outside that radius when the player is within reach.

For manual station refilling, your own inventory keeps the normal priority. When you have none of the required fuel or input, VSS supplies it from a linked chest. Cooking racks and ovens support manual input as well as fuel refilling. Native conversion lists determine accepted inputs, including the kiln, smelter, blast furnace, windmill and spinning wheel.

Auto refill starts off at both levels. Enable the master switch in a pedestal's storage window, then face each machine, fire or lamp you want supplied and press G. The hover prompt shows VSS auto-refill: On / Off. These choices are saved on the actual objects and shared in co-op. If you opt an object in while its master is off, the prompt shows master Off, and supplies remain paused. Turning the master off pauses every opted-in object in that network while preserving their individual choices. With overlapping networks, the nearest eligible controller supplies the object; an enabled farther controller cannot bypass its master's Off switch.

Loaded, opted-in machines receive fuel and processing inputs periodically, with normal capacity limits. Auto refill uses the pedestal builder's chest and ward permissions; manual actions and object toggles use the acting player's permissions. Automatic cooking inputs are deliberately disabled because unattended cooked food can burn; ovens still receive automatic fuel.

VSS station supplies use only normal Wood when consuming wood. Fine wood, core wood, ancient bark, Yggdrasil wood and ashwood are always protected, including when VSS fetches supplies through the normal refill interaction. Clearing AutoRefillExcludedItems cannot disable this protection. Coal, resin, ores and other accepted supplies remain available. Building and crafting can still use their required special woods normally. Explicitly using an item through the game's own item-selection interaction retains vanilla behavior.

Use AutoRefillExcludedItems for additional automatic-supply exclusions. Auto refill operates on loaded pieces and stops when the controller or object's switch is off, the pedestal is removed, or the object leaves range.

Configuration

Edit BepInEx/config/georo.vss.cfg, then restart the game:

[General]
RegisterStand = true

[Storage]
RadiusMeters = 20
AutoRefillExcludedItems = FineWood,RoundLog,ElderBark,YggdrasilWood,Blackwood

[Controls]
AutoRefillToggleKey = G

[UI]
RefreshSeconds = 0.75

Set the radius and additional automatic-refill exclusions on the host/server; clients use the host's values. The toggle key is a local preference and can be remapped. Only loaded chests and machines are scanned, so raising the radius does not force distant world sectors to load.

Multiplayer

The author tested the 0.2.4 storage grid in co-op successfully. Version 0.3.1 added crafting, building and automatic supplies with per-object controls; version 0.3.2 addresses lag in their availability and hover checks. These newer features have passed isolated native checks and still need broader live co-op validation. All participants need the same mod version. Chest owners validate access, distance and the pedestal, then grant a short exclusive lease before transfers update the normal chest inventory. Vanilla chest operations respect the lease.

Crafting and building acquire all required chest leases before the native action. Changed resources or a cancelled crafting action abort before payment. Refill operations run on the machine's owner and remove a resource only after the native machine actually accepts it.

Busy chests are skipped. Cancelled or unanswered requests do not remove player items. Leases expire after 10 seconds if a player disconnects.

For broader server testing, use the co-op checklist. Development tests cover local transfer and lease behavior; they do not replace every live network scenario.

Source and development

Source: Georodin/VSS-ValheimStorageSystem. Bug reports: GitHub Issues.

Clone this repository as VSS-ValheimStorageSystem inside your Valheim installation. The build references your locally installed game's managed assemblies and BepInEx; it requires the .NET SDK.

.\build.ps1 -NoInstall
.\test.ps1
.\test.ps1 -RenderPreview
.\test-isolated.ps1
.\package.ps1

Running build.ps1 without -NoInstall also installs the mod locally. package.ps1 writes the Thunderstore ZIP under dist without changing the installed mod.

Use test-isolated.ps1 while the game is open. It creates a separate hidden headless runtime with its own mod, config, logs and temporary saves, runs at idle priority and never installs into the live game. Normal build/install commands require Valheim to be closed. After testing, package.ps1 -SkipBuild packages the exact existing DLL and rejects C# sources newer than that build.

6,241 native checks passed for 0.3.2, including a stress fixture with 60 chests and 3,000 stacks. Repeated building, workbench and refill hover reads reuse availability data instead of searching the Unity scene or traversing every stored stack on each query. Inventory changes invalidate item totals; availability also refreshes periodically and when the player, station, radius or world changes. Actual actions recheck permissions and plan payments from fresh, leased inventories. The synthetic timing report is in tests/runtime/isolated-game/report.performance.txt; these timings measure query work and do not predict FPS in a particular world.

6,064 native runtime checks passed at both 1440×1080 and 800×900 for version 0.3.1. Diagnostics cover inventory quantity/identity conservation, stacking, full inventories, equipment, lease expiry, native recipe discovery, asset-bundle loading, storage payment planning, scoped native recipe checks, alternate-ingredient batches, direct consumption, owner-side station acceptance, fuel/queue limits, authenticated object toggles, saved switch states, special-wood protection and UI layout. Tests use isolated temporary inventories and saves, and require Valheim to be closed. The screenshot above is an in-game runtime preview with test inventories.

Credits

Created by Georodin. Inspired by the Refined Storage mod for Minecraft.

The thumbnail, decorative UI layers and controller/chest-preference icons were made with AI image generation; code development also used AI assistance. The square thumbnail master and exact prompt are in assets/branding, UI prompts/layout are in assets/ui, and icon masters/prompts are in assets/icons. Icon styling used a locally rendered reference sheet of installed vanilla sprites; vanilla artwork is not redistributed. Pedestal export details are in assets/README.md.

VSS is an unofficial Valheim mod.

Changelog

0.4.0 — machine output collection

• Add a separate auto-collect master in the storage window and a saved F7 toggle while facing a producing machine. Both start Off, independently of auto-refill.
• Collect finished food from grills/cooking stations and ovens, plus output from charcoal kilns, smelters, blast furnaces, windmills and spinning wheels.
• Deposit into existing compatible stacks before using free slots and respect chest resource preferences, range, permissions and exclusive leases.
• Retain food on cooking stations and remaining machine drops when storage is full or busy; never sweep up unrelated loose items.
• Preserve native item identity, world/cheat flags and output provenance across save/load. Only the machine owner collects, with fresh checks before deposit.
• Move the auto-refill default from G to F6 because vanilla uses G for the radial menu. Migrate the old unmodified G default; preserve other custom shortcuts. Both new keys are configurable.
• Keep automatic cooking inputs disabled and special-wood protection unchanged. Retain the 0.3.2 availability and hover performance fixes.

0.3.2 — performance fix

• Remove scene-wide Unity object searches from ward checks; read Valheim's live ward registry instead.
• Cache controller lookup and indexed item totals for repeated build and workbench availability checks, including when no controller is nearby.
• Refresh availability on inventory changes, movement, station changes, radius/world changes, transaction changes and a short periodic timeout.
• Reuse refill hover hints and avoid finding the controller twice on every hover update.
• Avoid temporary argument arrays and allocated scopes in native requirement patches.
• Preserve fresh permission checks, chest leases and exact resource planning for actual actions.
• Add an independent low-priority headless test runner that leaves an open game's installation, config, logs and saves untouched.
• Prevent normal build/install commands from replacing the mod while Valheim is running.

0.3.1

• Keep the storage controller master Off by default and start every refillable object's automatic supplies Off too.
• Add a configurable G key control while facing a linked machine, fire or lamp, with a native VSS auto-refill On/Off hover prompt.
• Save and share individual object choices in co-op; the master switch pauses the whole network without clearing those choices.
• Enforce both switches during chest authorization and again before automatic supplies commit.
• Use the nearest eligible controller consistently when network ranges overlap.
• Always protect core wood, fine wood and other special woods from VSS station supplies, even with an empty exclusion list. Crafting/building retain access to their required woods.
• Add native owner-RPC tests for toggles, sender identity, actor distance/death, master/object gating and the real kiln's normal-wood conversion.

0.3.0 — local test build

• Craft and upgrade at linked workbenches, forges and other crafting stations using chest resources, with player inventory taking priority.
• Build with the hammer using the storage network while inside a pedestal's radius.
• Refill native fuel users and processing machines directly from storage, including fires, torches, lamps, kilns, smelters, blast furnaces, windmills and spinning wheels.
• Add a saved, shared Auto refill toggle per pedestal. Protect special woods by default with host-synchronized exclusions.
• Support manual cooking input and automatic oven fuel, while keeping automatic cooking inputs disabled to avoid burning food.
• Add a visible Stack/Half/One transfer selector and direct right-click consumption of stored food and mead.
• Add AI-generated controller and chest-preference icons styled using actual installed vanilla sprite references.
• Acquire required chest leases before crafting/building, preserve native recipe gates, and debit refill items only after owner-side acceptance.
• Expand isolated native tests for exact resource payments, changed items, alternate-ingredient batch quality, direct consumption and partial-stack controls.

0.2.4

• First public release, inspired by the Refined Storage mod for Minecraft.
• Searchable shared grid over nearby chests, with name/quantity/category sorting and drag-and-drop transfers.
• Book-and-quill Storage Inventory pedestal, available for 5 wood.
• Chest resource preferences and stack-first deposit routing.
• Multiplayer chest leases, permission checks and host-synchronized storage radius.
• Separate AI-generated UI layers with complete corners, clear panel spacing and native equipped-item highlights.
• Native equip/unequip messages appear above the storage window.
• AI-generated square thumbnail and Thunderstore packaging that preserves the UI asset folders.
• Successful live multiplayer testing reported by the author; 5,494 native runtime checks passed during development.

0.2.3

• Redesigned storage screen and equipped-item indicators.

0.2.2

• Added the exported pedestal model and corrected native furniture recipe registration.

0.2.1

• Corrected the stool prefab used for the building base.