Changelog

1.0.0

• Farm Markers now draw their exact circular field perimeter on the terrain while the player looks at them. Using a marker keeps the boundary visible for four seconds while cycling crops. The client-only visual follows uneven ground, reflects the live configured radius and adds no persistent objects to saves.

0.19.2 - Beta

• Added LICENSE.md and NOTICE.md to every distribution package, with a clear unofficial-mod disclaimer in the README. No disclaimer is displayed during gameplay.
• Farm Markers now expose an explicit combined option for reciprocal Cultivator pairs, such as Carrots + Carrot seeds. The selection and its alternating planting preference persist on the marker, keep both crops growing in the same circular field and remain compatible with dynamically discovered modded pairs.
• Farmers, Lumberjacks and Miners now enter the normal seated/conversation rest routine when their work, materials or valid targets are exhausted. The Farmer's scan throttle no longer cancels an in-progress walk to a chair on every tick; all three roles immediately release their seat when new work is found.
• The Farmer work-mode selector now gives the active Full cycle, Plant only or Harvest only button a dedicated highlighted style and visible check mark.
• Fixed expedition Followers inheriting MonsterAI's wounded/unreachable flee behaviour. Defensive Followers now protect themselves and their player, while Aggressive Followers proactively fight within their configured radius instead of running away and later teleporting back. Passive remains intentionally non-combat.
• Followers no longer forget their player when that player disconnects. Loaded Followers return to the hearth and unloaded follower ZDOs are recalled there without clearing the persistent player identity or Following mode; they resume the assignment automatically after reconnection.
• Reduced settlement frame-time spikes with larger populations. Resident job, equipment and target-acquisition timers are deterministically staggered instead of firing together, and expensive Unity scene scans for beds, storage, doors, resources, crops and service targets are now shared through short-lived caches rather than repeated independently by every NPC.

0.19.1 - Beta

• Civil movement now uses Valheim's true walking pace for every resident. Lumberjacks and Miners run only while carrying out their field work, including travel to resources and the intake chest. Meals, sleep routines, patrols, Caretaker work, farming and follower travel remain walking activities. Alerts, hostile targets and attacks always override the civil rule and restore running.
• Intake/sorting storage is now assigned per role from each physical chest. Use Ctrl+Use on an accessible player-built chest to enable Lumberjack, Miner, Farmer or every worker role. A settlement can have several independently configured intake chests, while Caretakers inspect and sort every one of them.
• Role assignments persist on the exact chest together with the hearth identity. Existing single-intake and per-resident links remain strict identity-based migration fallbacks; the first role edit preserves the old chest as an all-worker intake and never reconnects broadly to a nearby chest.
• Farmers now discover reciprocal Cultivator recipes and replant only enough harvested carrots, turnips or onions to regenerate their seeds. Growing and mature seed crops count toward the reserve target, while an exhausted cycle may consume one harvested product to restart itself. Self-seeding crops keep their existing behaviour.
• Added a persistent per-Farmer Allowed crops filter to the settlement panel. Crop families are discovered dynamically from Cultivator recipes, so a single toggle controls both a food crop and its reciprocal seed crop and remains compatible with modded crops. The filter applies to markers, planting, ripe crops and physical harvest drops, defaults to all crops for existing saves and survives resident death and respawn.
• Farmers now harvest only the crop family configured on each Farm Marker instead of collecting any unrelated ripe crop that happens to grow inside its radius.
• Added persistent per-Farmer field assignments. The default remains every connected Farm Marker, while the settlement panel can select an exact subset or explicitly assign no fields. Assignments use persistent marker ZDO identities and survive save/reload, ownership transfer, death and respawn.
• Added per-Farmer work modes: full cycle, planting only or harvesting only.
• Added optional stock targets for every discovered crop family. A target of zero keeps unlimited planting; positive targets stop new planting when the intake chest, the Farmer's carried harvest and the projected yield of already-growing crops reach the requested amount. Local field scans are cached per crop family to keep the feature inexpensive in larger settlements.

0.19.0 - Beta

• Replaced the wall-style Lumberjack Banner with a classic Valheim-shaped field banner: one heavy post planted in the terrain, a top rail and a long pointed patterned cloth. Added a differently coloured Miner Banner in the same style; each extends only the matching role's work area. Their buried posts now explicitly permit terrain and object clipping, fixing the permanently red placement ghost. They now clone a genuine ground piece and explicitly require no crafting station, instead of inheriting the vanilla wall banner's hidden workbench and wall-placement restrictions. Existing piece_hf_lumber_banner objects retain their prefab identity and receive the new model automatically.
• Patrol routes are now configured and persisted per guard instead of globally on the hearth. Each guard stores the ordered position, prefab and creator identity of its selected Patrol Points directly on the resident ZDO, so multiple guards can follow different routes and point ZDOID changes do not erase them.
• Settlement entrances now persist redundantly on the selected vanilla door ZDOs, keyed to the hearth position and creator. If the cloned hearth loses its custom fields during a disconnect, it reconstructs the exact selected doors from those markers rather than returning silently to automatic mode.
• Settler Tents now discard the cloned bed's obsolete snap points and enforce a terrain-level, non-submerged foundation, preventing the large placement ghost from being confirmed below the ground. The hammer description now also reflects the uniform white canvas instead of the retired random palettes.
• Added the buildable Settler Tent, a decorated A-frame canvas camp reserved for one Hearthfolk resident. Its hidden real bed drives sleep while the visible interior uses layered pelts, a hide pillow and rolled blanket. Timber frames, tied flaps, seams, guy ropes, stakes, pennants, an entrance runner, travelling shield and a furnished side awning turn it into a complete personal campsite. Purpose-built repeating weave and fur textures replace the unsuitable black banner-border material and unavailable vanilla rug prefabs. Every tent now uses the same natural white canvas for its roof, flaps and trim. The larger player-enterable interior has a broad physical doorway. Its two always-lit particle torches emit visible flames, warm light and the vanilla Fire status. Waking residents now leave through dedicated interior and exterior markers before breakfast or work can replace their movement target, with bounded recovery if another body blocks the doorway. Existing vanilla-bed claims remain valid and migrate automatically as free tents are built.
• The intake/sorting chest is now assigned from the physical chest itself. Use Ctrl+Use on an accessible player-built chest and select Use as intake chest; the exact chest is persisted on the nearest owned hearth and shared by every current and future resident in that settlement.
• Existing per-resident storage links remain available as an exact-identity save migration fallback. The new assignment never reconnects broadly to a nearby chest.
• Farmers now collect every available unit of the selected planting resource above the configured reserve in one chest visit, including multiple stacks. They finish carried batches only in Farm Markers configured for the matching crop before fetching a different planting resource.
• Reworked civil door navigation for beds, storage, work targets and patrols. Residents now stage on real humanoid navigation points on the reachable side of a door, cross its physical portal and resume the original destination. The same recovery can chain a perimeter gate and one or more interior doors instead of steering into the nearest wall.
• Replaced Valheim navmesh reachability checks during stuck recovery with an on-demand local A* route over real physics clearance. Player-built walls, palisades, furniture and closed doors now block the planner, which generates stable waypoints around the obstacle or to the reachable face of the selected door. This planner is shared by workers, sleep trips and guard patrols.
• Door staging faces and patrol markers are now projected using physical standing clearance as well. They no longer disappear merely because NavMesh.SamplePosition has no generated polygon beside a player-built gate or banner.
• Physics-validated waypoint segments now steer the resident directly with local obstacle avoidance instead of being submitted back to BaseAI.MoveTo. This removes the stop, walk-in-place and restart cycle caused when the terrain navmesh rejected an otherwise clear player-built route. Door search also stops after the first physically reachable preferred candidate instead of evaluating several expensive losing routes.
• Bedtime now targets a physically clear standing point with direct sight of the assigned bed instead of the bed collider face nearest to the resident. This prevents residents outside a house from walking into the wall behind the bed or squeezing into the gap between the bed and the wall. Doors that are already opening or open also remain valid until the resident has crossed them.
• Gateway routing no longer requires the exact chest or machine transform to be a navmesh point. This prevented every otherwise valid perimeter gate from being selected when the destination itself occupied the end of the path.
• Patrol markers are projected once onto the humanoid navigation surface and kept stable for that leg. Guards no longer repeatedly steer at an invalid raw marker; unreachable points are skipped for the current circuit and retried on the next.
• Farmer placement now mirrors vanilla crop-spacing checks before planting and forces the full vanilla health evaluation immediately after spawning. Valheim's normal ten-second “always healthy” grace period can no longer hide an invalid Needs more room placement while consuming a seed.
• ItemDrawers integration now walks to and validates the physical player-built piece instead of the API's internal network node. This supports both KGvalheim's original build and Firehunter1980's ItemDrawers_QuickFix_Unofficial while retaining reflection-only optional compatibility.
• Added a settlement-entrance editor to the hearth map. Players can mark one or more physical doors or gates as preferred perimeter entrances. Marked gates are prioritised for trips entering or leaving the camp, while ordinary interior doors always remain available for houses, beds and indoor storage. Automatic preference remains available for unconfigured settlements.
• ItemDrawers reach checks now ignore occlusion from adjacent ItemDrawers in the same bank while ordinary walls, floors and unrelated pieces still block remote deposits.
• Residents no longer reserve or sit on the translucent placement preview of a chair or bench. A seat must be a live, player-placed network piece before it can be used, and a removed seat is released immediately.

0.18.2

• Residents blocked by a player-built perimeter now search loaded doors and gates for a viable detour instead of steering directly into the wall. They approach the near side, open the gateway, cross it, resume the original work destination and close gateways they opened once the passage is clear.
• Gateway routing preserves the original job target across repeated AI ticks, supports chained interior/perimeter doors and temporarily rejects failed or recently crossed gateways to prevent oscillation.
• Door detours activate only when a built structure obstructs the destination, so natural terrain and ordinary character avoidance do not cause unrelated routing.

0.18.1

• Residents now require true three-dimensional reach and an unobstructed physical line of interaction before using beds, storage, production machines, fires or repair targets. They no longer operate objectives through walls or floors.
• Civil movement now detects physical stalls even when the navmesh reports a valid path, and one resident deterministically yields when two residents block each other. Unreachable work targets are abandoned or retried instead of being pushed against indefinitely.
• Improved Dragon Bed use: residents approach an accessible side of the bed before attaching to its native sleep point.
• An attacked resident immediately interrupts civil movement, targets the attacker and switches to an available weapon. On-duty guards scan for nearby hostiles during patrols even when no settlement-wide alert is active.
• Equipped armour now contributes its real armour value to resident damage mitigation.
• Bed ownership now uses a persistent resident identity instead of the display name. Residents with the same name can no longer share or steal a bed, and the identity survives death and respawn.
• Newly recruited residents receive a genuinely random 50/50 body type, persisted across saves and respawns. Existing residents keep their current appearance.
• Added the Recruitment.NamePool setting. Custom comma/semicolon-separated names are used for recruitment, with suffixes added after the list is exhausted so generated names remain unique.
• Added per-resident Caretaker task toggles for structure repair, storage sorting, fire fuel, machine fuel, machine input and output collection.

0.18.0

• Added the Farmer profession and buildable Farm Markers. Each marker defines a configurable circular field and lets its owner cycle through Cultivator crops whose planting material they have discovered.
• Farmers use a real Cultivator, harvest ripe vanilla crops, collect physical drops, fetch real planting resources, validate cultivated terrain, biome, sunlight and crop spacing, plant networked vanilla crops and return tagged harvest cargo to their assigned storage.
• Farmers preserve a configurable planting-resource reserve, repair a broken Cultivator at a crafting station, and follow the existing meal, sleep, happiness, door and settlement-defence routines.
• Caretaker shortage statuses now name the exact missing material and target machine, such as Missing Coal for Smelter, instead of showing only a generic unavailable-supplies message.
• Residents now open closed doors and gates while travelling to beds, work targets and patrol routes, including when entering buildings or leaving walled bases. Each resident tracks the doors it opened and closes them after passing, while waiting for other characters to clear the doorway.
• Fixed continuous Unity linear velocity of a kinematic body warnings caused by dormant dead residents continuing to receive physics updates during their respawn countdown.
• Idle residents can now form social groups of two or three while resting. They reserve available seats or chat while standing, face one another, exchange synchronized English speech bubbles and use subtle conversational gestures.
• Completing a social break grants a configurable happiness bonus once per resident per day. Socialization chance, duration, bonus and the entire feature can be configured from the hearth's Routine and happiness settings.
• Reworked automatic settlement defence so nearby creatures no longer trigger an alert merely by entering the hearth radius. Outside a vanilla raid, residents mobilize only when a resident is actually attacked or a non-player attacker deals real damage to a player-built structure inside the work radius.
• Base-damage alerts are synchronized through the hearth, linger briefly after the last hit and ignore weathering, structural decay, players and tamed creatures.
• Added an interactive patrol-route map to the hearth. Players can select built patrol points in exact visit order, inspect numbered markers and directional links, pan or zoom the map, undo, clear, save, or restore automatic clockwise ordering. Manual routes persist and synchronize in multiplayer.
• Added persistent resident appearance customization to the hearth panel: body type, native hair and beard styles, hair colour, skin tone and randomization. A live 3D portrait previews changes on the actual resident. Residents can also be renamed, including their claimed-bed label. Appearance and names are network-synchronised and preserved through death and respawn.
• Vanilla raids now automatically put the affected settlement on alert. Every resident interrupts routines, runs to the hearth and proactively engages nearby enemies; normal roles and routines resume when the raid ends.
• Added persistent Defensive, Aggressive and Passive combat stances for Followers, selectable per resident from the Exiles' Hearth panel.
• Multiple Followers assigned to the same player now keep deterministic formation slots behind them instead of converging on the same point.
• Added a server-synchronised WalkOutsideCombat setting, enabled by default: Guards and Caretakers use Valheim's true walking state during civil activity and switch back to combat movement while responding to a hostile target.
• Fixed Followers oscillating between the player and their vanilla patrol point after reaching follow distance.
• Added follow-distance hysteresis so small player movements no longer make a stationary Follower repeatedly start and stop.
• Added the Follower assignment: any player may use Crouch+Use to make an assigned settler follow them or wait at the current position.
• Followers walk near their player, run when catching up, defend them with their equipped weapons and recover from blocked or excessively distant paths.
• Followers retain meals and happiness but do not claim beds, sleep or receive sleep-related morale modifiers.
• Followers eat scheduled meals exclusively from their own inventory and can consume carried food to recover health during an expedition.
• When the followed player disconnects, the Follower automatically returns to the Exiles' Hearth, including when its network object is currently unloaded.
• Added a Follower summary and recall command to the settlement panel.

0.17.0

• Standardised every Hearthfolk-facing label, status and panel on English, including when Valheim itself is configured to use Italian.
• Dead settlers remain visible in the hearth panel with a clear dead state, preserved role and live respawn countdown, even if their dormant network object is unloaded.
• Expired unloaded settlers are pulled back to their hearth so respawn reliably completes after world reloads and zone unloads.
• Added optional KGvalheim ItemDrawers integration: caretakers prefer compatible, player-seeded drawers when sorting their assigned intake chest.
• Drawer deposits use ItemDrawers' public API and preserve exact prefab and item quality. Hearthfolk still works normally when ItemDrawers is not installed.
• Removed the retired sawmill, mine and barracks placeholders from the hammer catalogue while retaining hidden legacy prefabs for safe old-save cleanup.

0.16.8

• Removed the retired sawmill, mine and barracks placeholders from the hammer catalogue.
• Legacy structures remain available only as hidden network prefabs so old saves can safely recover stored materials and clean their stale ZDOs.

0.16.7

• Rebuilt the Exiles' Hearth around Valheim's real campfire, preserving its authentic flame, logs and stone ring.
• Removed the procedural stones and hanging cloth decorations.
• Replaced the compact frame with one large, clean rustic wooden arch and diagonal braces.

0.16.6

• Refined the Exiles' Hearth with eleven irregular rounded fieldstones, a dark ash bed and crossed charred logs.
• Rebalanced the wooden gateway proportions and added rustic diagonal braces.
• Replaced the rigid hanging blocks with two-sided ochre cloth meshes featuring tapered, torn hems.

0.16.5

• Fixed hearth registration failing when Unity cannot resolve the stripped Standard shader.
• Hearth geometry now searches several valid vanilla material sources and safely retains the primitive material if none is available.

0.16.4

• Replaced the unreliable decorative-prefab composition with a deterministic procedural hearth model: eight textured stones, two wooden posts, a crossbeam and custom ochre woven ribbons matching the crafting icon's silhouette.
• Added physical colliders to the visible stone/wood structure and a large invisible interaction proxy covering the complete model. The hearth can now be selected by looking at any part of it instead of aiming precisely at the central flame.

0.16.3

• Raised the entire custom hearth model 0.52 m above the floor-brazier placement pivot so its stone ring and wooden frame no longer spawn below terrain.
• Recursively activates the pristine visual hierarchy and all renderers, preserving the expected vanilla wood and stone materials instead of leaving only banners.
• Removed every inherited fire Aoe damage component. The central flame is now a harmless visual/lighting effect and cannot burn players walking over the hearth.

0.16.2

• Fixed the Exiles' Hearth world model showing only its two banners. Decorative Valheim pieces now clone their explicit pristine WearNTear visual, which keeps the wooden posts, crossbeam and new eight-stone fire ring visible.
• Kept the brazier flame active after removing its fuel interaction and reduced every inherited light to a restrained radius/intensity to prevent bloom from washing out the structure and nearby characters.

0.16.1

• Fixed Exiles' Hearth registration on Valheim 0.221.12: the displayed piece_firepit localization key was incorrectly used as an internal prefab name. The hearth now resolves a verified vanilla floor-brazier base with defensive fallbacks instead of aborting prefab creation.

0.16.0

• Removed the Sawmill, Mine and Barracks prefabricated-building system and its automatic/offline resource generation. Existing 0.15.x worker links are cleared safely while every settler keeps their current role; stored building items are moved into recoverable vanilla loot before retired structures are deleted.
• Restored direct role assignment at the Exiles' Hearth. Lumberjacks and miners once again perform their physical field jobs with real tools, filters, work areas and deposits; Work Banners are buildable again.
• Preserved guard shifts, settlement alerts and patrol routes without a barracks. Shifts are configured per guard in the hearth panel, and Patrol Points attach to the nearest same-owner hearth. Existing barracks shift values are migrated when their saved ZDO is available.
• Reorganised settler details to show assignment, storage, work filters and guard schedules together. Removed obsolete production settings from the panel.
• Replaced the guardian-stone hearth clone with a distinct communal-fire model and a new embedded, transparent crafting icon.

0.15.1

• Rebuilt the Sawmill, Mine and Barracks visuals from tiled vanilla Valheim building pieces and role-specific props, replacing the stretched primitive roofs and frames.
• Assigned carpenters and miners now remain at their station instead of falling back to the retired roaming jobs. They work with a calm interaction animation, keep their armour equipped and no longer require, wield or consume axes and pickaxes for automatic production.
• Fixed the repeated Unity warning caused by writing linear velocity while a resident's rigidbody was kinematic during sleep, meals or respawn.

0.15.0

• Added three hammer-built settlement structures: Sawmill, Mine and Barracks, each with a distinct framed prefab, internal storage and management panel.
• Sawmills and mines support up to three assigned settlers and generate the selected discovered resource at a configurable rate (10 items every 10 minutes per settler by default). Workers still obey tools, durability, meals and sleep.
• Production progress, selected output and worker slots persist in the building ZDO. Optional unloaded/offline catch-up is enabled by default and capped at a configurable number of hours; its work-time percentage is configurable and defaults to 60% to account for sleep, darkness and meals.
• Barracks provide permanent guard posts. A new settlement alert button temporarily turns every resident into a guard and rallies them at a nearby barracks; ending the alert restores their previous roles and production assignments exactly.
• The hearth now recruits caretakers and is limited to recruitment, resident status and global settings. Carpenters, miners and guards can only be assigned through the sawmill, mine and barracks respectively; legacy unassigned field workers are migrated to caretakers and no longer roam the map.
• Barracks support individual hourly shifts (06-14, 14-22 and 22-06 by default). Off-duty guards sit during daytime and sleep at night, while on-duty guards patrol.
• Added buildable Patrol Points. Nearby points form a deterministic clockwise route around the nearest same-owner barracks.
• Residents now walk for all routine movement and only run when threatened, during an active raid or while the manual settlement alert is active.

0.14.1

• Redesigned the Exiles' Hearth panel as a larger, responsive two-tab interface.
• The Settlers tab now uses a resident list and a focused detail pane for status, happiness, role, storage, work filters and dismissal.
• Global settlement options moved to a dedicated Settings tab and are grouped by work area, daily needs and lifecycle for faster scanning.
• Bed assignments now reconcile stale reverse claims after a world reload by using the settler name stored on the bed, without stealing beds owned by other settlers.
• Idle residents and caretakers with no current task now reserve a nearby free chair or bench and sit down until work, danger or a daily need requires their attention.

0.14.0

• Settlers now fetch and consume one real nutritious food item for dinner before sleeping and for breakfast before starting work. Accessible stationary chests inside the work area are searched, with configured food chests preferred.
• Meals last a configurable one to five world minutes (two by default), advance correctly during Valheim's accelerated sleep, survive save/reload, prefer food variety and never consume meads or non-nutritious consumables by accident.
• Settlers reserve nearby vanilla chairs and benches, walk to them and use the sitting animation while eating. Occupied seats are skipped; without a seat they return near the hearth and eat standing.
• Completed sleep restores full health in the morning. Multiple guards alternate half-night rest shifts and take meals one at a time; a lone guard remains on duty.
• Added persistent happiness (0–100) with panel-visible reasons for sleep, meals, seating, shared meals, safety, roofed fire comfort and suitable equipment.
• Miserable settlers issue warnings and leave after a configurable number of simulated days. They release bed/storage/job state and leave all inventory in a persistent tomb-style container at the hearth. Unloaded days never count.
• Happiness and need history survive settler death and automatic respawn.

0.13.0

• Added safe settler dismissal to the hearth panel with a two-click confirmation. Dismissal requires an empty inventory and releases the claimed bed, assigned storage, active job and map presence before deleting the settler persistently.
• Dead settlers now create a persistent dormant replacement at their hearth and respawn after a configurable delay (five minutes by default, adjustable from one to 120 minutes in the panel or configuration file).
• Respawn preserves identity, role, work filters, assigned chest, weapons, tools, armour and accessories, including item quality and durability. Materials, consumables, fish, trophies, ammunition and sorting cargo are lost on death.
• The respawn deadline uses persistent UTC time, so closing and reopening the world cannot cancel or restart the countdown.

0.12.2

• Assigned chests now retain a safe recovery identity (position, prefab and creator) in addition to their ZDOID. If the saved ID becomes stale after a reload, settlers reconnect only to the matching chest at the saved position.
• Existing assignments migrate automatically the first time their chest is resolved. Clearing or replacing an assignment also clears the old recovery identity, preventing accidental reassignment to a different nearby chest.

0.12.1

• Settlers now repair both sides of their persisted bed link after a world reload instead of requiring the settler and bed ZDO claims to match already.
• Restoration first uses the saved bed ZDOID, then recovers by the vanilla owner name that remains visible on the assigned bed. Child-mounted Bed components are resolved from the network root as well.
• Beds claimed by another loaded settler or by a player are never stolen. Failed restoration now emits a throttled diagnostic line for future troubleshooting.

0.12.0

• Chest filters and physical sorting now include consumables, cooked food, fish and trophies in addition to raw materials. Equipment, ammunition and quest items remain excluded deliberately.
• Interrupted sorting cargo is tagged in the settler inventory, survives save/reload, and is returned safely to the intake chest if its destination disappears, fills up or is opened during transit.
• The sorting panel now describes generic items rather than materials; known cooked boar/deer meat and trophies such as Neck trophies appear normally.

0.11.0

• Ctrl+Use on a stationary player-built chest now opens a dedicated sorting panel without replacing Valheim's normal Use or Shift+Use interactions.
• Players can search known materials, select multiple exact items, seed the list from current chest contents, save an empty rule, or restore automatic mode.
• Explicit filters persist on the chest ZDO and are changed through an owner-authoritative RPC, so they survive saves and replicate in multiplayer.
• Configured empty chests can receive materials immediately. Unconfigured chests retain the 0.10.0 content-inference behaviour for backwards compatibility.

0.10.0

• The assigned chest is now the settlement intake: caretakers physically carry material stacks from it to specialised chests inside the hearth radius.
• A chest opts into an item by already containing that exact item. Empty chests, food and equipment are never interpreted or moved automatically.
• Refuelling and production loading can draw supplies from every accessible specialised chest, so sorting fuel or ore out of the intake does not stop work.
• Open, inaccessible, protected, ship and cart containers are ignored. Multiple caretakers reserve separate destination chests to avoid conflicting transfers.

0.9.1

• Caretakers supplied with a usable hammer now repair player-built structures below 90% health inside the hearth radius, prioritising the most damaged one.
• Repairs use Valheim's authoritative repair RPC, restore the piece fully, play the hammer animation and placement effect, and consume real hammer durability.
• Vanilla crafting-station and ward access rules are respected; ships, carts, destroyed pieces and structures outside the settlement are ignored.
• Multiple caretakers reserve different repair targets. A broken hammer is taken to a nearby crafting station and repaired before work resumes.

0.9.0

• Replaced the placeholder Hauler with the Caretaker, preserving role value 3 so existing saves migrate automatically.
• Caretakers use real supplies from their assigned chest to refuel player-built fireplaces, torches and production machines inside the hearth radius.
• Production machines are loaded only with compatible inputs; an existing queue keeps its current material instead of being mixed arbitrarily.
• Finished material drops are collected physically and returned to the assigned chest. Multiple local caretakers reserve different structures.
• Structures are serviced when at or below 35% and filled to 75%. Missing supplies are reported in the settlement panel.
• Miners now target the exact live collider of multi-part rocks and ignore fully buried or exhausted hit areas, preventing repeated swings at phantom rocks.
• Rock and tree material filters now use the persistent prefab identity rather than mutable scene names, so a Stone-only miner no longer selects ore veins.

0.8.4

• Miner pickaxe swings can no longer hit or deform terrain. Settlers still play the real swing animation and hit the selected rock, with the existing manual fallback when the animation misses.
• Miners now aim vertically at the rock's closest point instead of only turning towards it on the horizontal plane.

0.8.3

• Miners now obey the configured night-rest schedule, like the other workers.
• Updated the packaged documentation to describe the Miner, material filters and current death handling instead of listing shipped features as future work.

0.8.2

• Settlers no longer freeze when the player is far away (the real fix). Valheim strips ZDO ownership from everything beyond ~1 zone of every player every 2 seconds, even though objects stay loaded further out — and an ownerless character has no motor, no AI and no jobs. Settlers now reclaim ownership of themselves (responsible peer only: the recruiter's client, or the server), so they keep working across the whole loaded area.

0.8.1

• Work filters are now by material, as intended: lumberjacks pick which tree species to fell (Beech, Fir, Pine, Birch, Oak, Swamp, Yggdrasil, Ashlands) and miners which materials to mine (Stone, Copper, Tin, Silver, Obsidian, Iron, Flametal). The filter applies to the whole loop — standing trees, fallen trunks, and ground pickup (species-specific items like fine wood, core wood or ores are only gathered if their source is enabled; plain wood is always gathered). Unknown/modded species are never blocked.

0.8.0

• Fixed settlers freezing when the player walks away: the player rig's Animator culls off-screen, and Valheim attacks only complete through animation events — a culled settler stayed "mid-swing" forever until looked at again. Settler animators now always animate, so they keep working unattended (within loaded zones).
• New role: Miner. Give a settler a pickaxe: it mines ore veins and large rocks (MineRock5) and pickaxe-only boulders inside the work area, honours pickaxe tiers, gathers the ore and banks it in the assigned chest, and repairs a broken pick at the workbench. Fallback damage only when the real swing misses, same anti-double-hit logic as the lumberjack.
• Work filters in the settlement panel: per settler, choose what it may work on — Lumberjack: trees / logs / pickup; Miner: veins / boulders / pickup.
• Death safety: a settler that dies drops its whole inventory on the ground (nothing is silently lost) and its bed is released for others. Zone unloading is never treated as death.
• Settlers now deposit any raw material they carry (wood, stone, ores…), not just wood.

0.7.1

• Settlers now actually sleep: at night they lie down in their bed with the vanilla sleeping pose (they only walked next to it before) and get up in the morning — or immediately if attacked.
• Claimed beds show their occupant: a bed taken by a settler reads "Astrid's bed" on hover, and players can no longer claim it by accident.
• Map pins: work banners (hammer icon) and settlers (player icon, live position with their name) now show on the map. Session-only, never saved into the map file.

0.7.0

• Beds: working settlers now require a free bed under a roof near the hearth (same roof check as vanilla sleeping). They claim it persistently; player-owned beds are never taken. Without one they wait at the hearth ("needs a bed").
• Night rest: workers stop at dusk, walk to their bed and rest until morning; guards keep watch through the night. Both behaviours are configurable.
• Tool repair: a settler with a broken axe physically walks to the nearest crafting station, pauses at the bench and repairs its tools.
• Smarter hauling: settlers bank their load once they carry 20+ resources (configurable) or when nothing is left to gather — no more hoarding until the inventory is stuffed.
• Fixed chest assignment from the hearth panel: it searched near the settler (possibly out in the woods) instead of near the hearth, silently clearing the link. It now links the chest nearest to the hearth and reports when none is in range.
• In-game radius tuning: hearth and banner work radii are adjustable with −/+ directly in the hearth panel (server-synced in multiplayer). Banner radius default raised 25 → 40 m, banner leash 120 → 200 m.

0.6.0

• Fluid, ASKA-style work flow. Two systemic stutter sources removed:
  • the 10° facing gate made settlers stop-turn-go at every path bend; they now walk and steer simultaneously (only stopping when the target is behind them);
  • every success event (tree felled, trunk broken, wood collected) now forces an immediate rescan, chaining straight into the next action instead of standing idle for up to 1.5 s between each micro-step.
• Faster decision tick (0.3 s) for snappier transitions.

0.5.3

• Fixed the real standing-still bug: the AI forced the settler to face the final target every frame while the pathfollower needed it to face the next waypoint — the two fought and movement stalled whenever the route bent. The path follower now owns the look direction.
• When no route exists, settlers fall back to direct steering (walking around obstacles) for a few seconds and retry the pathfinder periodically.
• Settlers now open closed doors in front of them while steering (vanilla ward/key checks respected) — a settler recruited indoors can finally leave the house to work.

0.5.2

• Fixed frozen settlers: after one genuinely unreachable target, the AI's "path blocked" latch was consulted before the new move command reset it, so every following target was instantly branded unreachable and the settlement ground to a halt. New destinations now clear the latch first.

0.5.1

• Restyled the settlement panel with Valheim-flavoured colours: dark wood panel, parchment text, tan buttons with gold hover; the active role glows gold.
• Fixed the collect/tree status flip-flop: settlers now pick the targeted wood drop up explicitly (with authoritative ownership) when in reach, and blacklist it if the pickup fails, instead of hovering next to it forever.

0.5.0

• Settlement panel on the hearth: using (E) the Exiles' Hearth now opens one panel that manages the whole settlement — recruit button with the coin cost, settler count, and a scrollable list of every settler with live status, role buttons and chest assignment. The per-settler panel is gone.
• Using (E) a settler now opens its inventory directly; Crouch+Use still assigns the nearest chest to that settler.

0.4.0

• Settler management panel: using (E) a settler now opens a panel to assign the profession with one click, see the live status, and link the nearest chest. Shift+E (inventory) and Crouch+E (assign storage) still work.
• Lumberjacks now actively walk to wood lying on the ground and gather it (highest priority after hauling), instead of only vacuuming pieces they happen to pass.
• Targets that take no damage after several swings (wrong axe tier, protected area) are abandoned and reported as "needs a better axe" instead of being hacked at forever.
• Path-failure detection now requires a sustained failure (~2 s) before giving up on a target, removing spurious "no trees in the area" reports.
• Removed the home/tree flip-flop between target searches.

0.3.2

• Unreachable targets are now detected instantly: when Valheim's pathfinding cannot produce a route, the settler blacklists the target immediately instead of walking blind and timing out mid-way.
• Honest status when the work area only contains higher-tier trees (e.g. birch with a stone/flint axe): "Needs a better axe for the trees in the area" instead of "No tree in the work area".

0.3.1

• Fixed the movement deadlock that made settlers shuffle in place: with Valheim's smooth-movement path the motor was fed a tiny forward-scaled direction when slightly misaligned, so the body rotated towards its own forward instead of the target and never turned. Settlers now use turn-then-go movement.
• Lumberjacks now break down fallen trunks (TreeLog) after felling a tree — trunks take priority over standing trees, so felled wood is fully processed.
• Settlers aim at the nearest point of the target's collider, so long fallen trunks are reachable from the side instead of their distant pivot.
• Unreachable-target blacklisting now applies to trunks as well.

0.3.0

• Added a buildable Lumberjack Banner (hammer, Misc). Place banners around the world to widen where lumberjacks may work: a tree counts if it is within the hearth radius or within any owned banner's radius (banners are ignored beyond a configurable leash from the hearth).
• Settler hover now shows name, role, live status and the interaction hints (previously the empty vanilla Character hover shadowed it).
• Reach checks now use horizontal distance, matching Valheim pathfinding, so a settler that walks up to a tree actually chops it.
• Added optional verbose work logging (Debug/VerboseLog).

0.2.0

• Rebuilt from the ground up. Settlers are now human NPCs cloned from the vanilla player rig instead of the Dverger.
• Fixed the recruitment crash: the settler prefab was cloned while active, which destroyed its own ZNetView (ZDOMan is null during registration) and produced a broken, unspawnable NPC. Prefabs are now cloned inactive and registered properly.
• Added persistent inventory shared with the body via a Container, so equipped items are real, visible, durability-consuming, and survive save/load and ownership transfer without duplicating.
• Added a job architecture (Idle, Lumberjack, Guard, Hauler) with per-role strategy objects.
• Lumberjacks walk to real trees inside a work radius, swing the equipped axe (real hit; manual damage only as a fallback when the swing misses), collect the wood, and haul it to an assigned chest when full.
• Added storage assignment (crouch + Use targets the nearest chest) and authoritative, owner-side deposits.
• Server-enforced, admin-synced configuration for cost, radius, chop damage and settler health.

0.1.2

• Simplified recruitment: settlers now require coins only.

0.1.1

• Fixed recruitment to accept cooked boar meat and cooked deer meat, including mixed stacks.

0.1.0

• Added the buildable Exiles' Hearth.
• Added resource-based settler recruitment.
• Added persistent settler inventory and automatic equipment.
• Added Idle, Lumberjack, and Guard assignments.
• Added real-tree lumberjack work with tool-tier checks and durability use.
• Added automatic collection of nearby wood drops.