Hearthfolk

Your settlement, with people in it. Hearthfolk gives Valheim persistent human residents who live around your base: they sleep in your beds, eat at your fire, fell your trees, work your fields, guard your walls and follow you into the wilds. Every one of them is a real character in the world — visible, named, with their own inventory, their own gear and their own mood — and everything they do, they do physically, with the same tools and the same rules you play by.

💬 Join the Hearthfolk Discord — help, bug reports and screenshots of your villages.

Unofficial mod. Hearthfolk is a fan-created Valheim modification and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Iron Gate Studio or Coffee Stain Publishing. Use it at your own risk. See LICENSE.md and NOTICE.md included with this distribution.

Founding a settlement

Build an Exiles' Hearth from the hammer's Misc tab and use it to open the settlement panel: a two-tab interface where you recruit residents, read their status and happiness, hand out work and tune how the settlement behaves.

Every resident has a persistent appearance you can shape — body type, any native hair or beard, hair colour, skin tone — with a live 3D portrait of the actual person you are editing, and a name you can change whenever you like. Appearance and names survive death, respawn and reloading, and they are synchronised to everyone on the server.

Press Use on a resident to open their inventory. It is a real inventory: give them an axe and they wield it, give them armour and they wear it, and everything they carry takes real durability and can break.

What residents do

Lumberjacks search the work area for trees, logs and fallen wood, chop with their own axe, clear the remaining stumps and carry the wood back to storage. Each one has two exclusive work modes: Cut trees performs that full clearing loop, while Plant seeds stops cutting, fetches allowed tree seeds from its inventory, chests or ItemDrawers, and plants saplings throughout the hearth and Lumberjack Banner work areas. Saplings use natural forest ground rather than cultivated soil.

Miners do the same with rocks and ore deposits, using their own pickaxe, and without deforming your terrain.

Farmers work circular fields marked with buildable Farm Markers. Give them a Cultivator and they plant, tend and harvest any compatible crop, validate ground, biome, sunlight and spacing before planting, and replant enough of the harvest to keep the cycle going by itself. Each Farmer has a crop filter, can be assigned exact fields, switched between full-cycle, plant-only and harvest-only work, and given stock targets. Renewable vanilla wild plants — berries, mushrooms and herbs such as thistle — are farm crops too: planting consumes one real harvested item and the plant matures on its normal vanilla respawn timer. Planting resources can come from either chests or ItemDrawers.

Cooks work every cooking station, stone oven included: they fetch raw food from your chests or ItemDrawers, put it on a lit fire, keep the fuel topped up and — the reason the role exists — take every dish off the moment it is done, so nothing is left to overcook into coal.

Caretakers keep the place running. They refuel fires, torches and production machines from chests or ItemDrawers, load compatible inputs, collect finished output, sort your storage, and with a hammer in hand repair damaged structures. Each of those tasks can be switched on or off per Caretaker.

Foragers pick what grows on its own — berries, mushrooms, thistle, dandelion, wild seeds and whatever else a biome leaves lying about — and carry it home. They need no tool at all, which makes this the first useful job for a resident who owns nothing yet. They never touch a planted crop or anything standing inside a field: that is the Farmer's harvest.

Hunters take game inside the work area and bring back the meat, the hide and the trophy. They prefer a bow and open the fight at range, close with a blade when something reaches them, break off and recover when badly hurt, and never touch a tamed animal, a boss or a raid creature whatever their filters say. Which species they hunt is a per-resident list, and every one of them is on by default.

Companions, Guards and Hunters each choose how they fight: melee only, bow only, or bow then blade. A resident fully draws a player bow, leads a moving target at the release and spends matching ammunition from its real inventory.

Guards watch the settlement, walk patrol routes you draw yourself on an interactive map, and answer raids. An armed resident carries the best weapon it owns, only pairs a shield with a one-handed weapon, and restocks arrows from your chests or ItemDrawers when it carries a bow. Residents raise the shields they carry between their own attacks; after three blows stopped in quick succession their guard drops briefly rather than holding forever without player stamina.

Followers come with you. Command any resident with Crouch+Use and it walks at your heel, runs to catch up, boards the ship you sail and fights at your side. Three stances: Defensive answers a fight and never starts one, stepping in when something strikes you or your companion, or when a creature has gone alert and is charging either of you; Aggressive goes looking; Passive never fights at all.

Life in the settlement

Residents sleep in ordinary player-built beds. Hearthfolk ships no sleeping structures of its own: raise whatever house you like out of Valheim's own pieces, put beds in it, and each resident claims a free roofed bed within 30 metres of the hearth. A bed you have slept in yourself is never taken.

They eat real meals — dinner before bed, breakfast before work — fetching food from any chest or ItemDrawer inside the hearth's work radius, reserving a chair when one is free. No configuration is needed for meals: intake roles and sorting filters govern work materials, not food.

They have moods. Happiness reflects sleep, meals, seating, company, safety, a sheltered fire and suitable equipment, and the panel explains every recent cause. Idle residents form conversation groups, face one another and chat. Residents who stay miserable long enough will pack up and leave, so a settlement is something you look after rather than something you own.

They heal out of danger, die like anything else in Valheim, and return at the hearth after a delay, keeping their gear and its durability while losing gathered cargo. The panel shows a live countdown that survives world reloads.

They open doors on their way to work, close the ones they opened, and detour through a gate when a wall stands between them and where they are going.

Setting it up

Mark chests with Ctrl+Use to make them settlement intake chests for Lumberjacks, Miners, Farmers, Foragers, Hunters or any combination, and to choose what may be sorted into them; unconfigured chests infer their contents. Raise Lumberjack, Miner, Forager and Hunter Banners to extend where those roles may work. Their configurable radius defaults to 100 metres and can be raised to 400 metres, so a few banners can cover a broad region. Add Patrol Points to shape a guard's route, and Farm Markers to lay out fields. Residents can be moved from one hearth to another anywhere in the world, keeping their name, appearance, role and inventory.

Language and interface

Hearthfolk speaks English, Italian, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Interface.Language picks one and defaults to Auto, which follows the language selected in Valheim — but it belongs to the mod alone, so you can play in English and read the settlement panel in your own language. It is local to you and never pushed by a server. Translations are plain text files beside the DLL, so a correction, or a whole new language, needs no rebuild.

The panels are drawn outside Valheim's interface canvas, which its UI scale setting cannot reach, so they have their own: Interface.UiScale, from 0.75 to 2.5. Raise it on a high resolution screen.

Requirements

Requires BepInEx and Jotunn. Install it on the server and on every client — minor versions must match.

KGvalheim ItemDrawers is optional and not bundled: when it or Firehunter1980's unofficial QuickFix is installed, player-seeded drawers inside the work area are preferred automatically as sorting destinations. Cooks and Caretakers can also withdraw their raw food, fuel and machine inputs from those drawers. All resident supply routines also consider them for meals, ammunition and planting resources.

Known limitations

• Residents work in loaded zones only. There is no offline production while the zone or the game is unloaded.
• A resident's bed is released by dismissing them; there is no separate "release bed" button yet.
• Chest sorting covers materials, consumables, fish and trophies. Equipment, ammunition and quest items are left alone.
• Food preference favours variety and lower-value meals; individual favourite foods are not implemented yet.

Changelog

1.3.1

• Updated resident interactions and hover support for the installed Valheim API.
• Updated resident inventory open and take-all RPC names and response handlers, preserving the existing authentication checks.
• Adapted hair and beard equipment, cooking-slot queries, crop and tree creator assignment, and inventory equipment markers to the updated game API.
• Bound the bed-selection Harmony patch's hold flag by argument position so the renamed vanilla parameter no longer prevents the patch from applying.

1.3.0

• Settlement Places let one hearth support a real village layout. Build any number of Home Area and Gathering Spot markers, rename them and tune each radius from the new Places tab. Markers belong to the nearest settlement, including markers placed by an authorized guest in a shared settlement, and carry generated identities that survive world reloads and ZDO id changes.

• Homes and gathering preferences belong to each resident. A resident can use Automatic or one named marker for each place type, and the hearth panel can assign several selected residents in one operation without creating a new persistent group subsystem. Old worlds with no markers keep the original hearth-centred bed, meal and leisure behaviour.

• Residents can be given one exact physical bed. Select bed closes the panel and waits for the player to use a loaded bed in the world. The resident's ZDO owner resolves and validates that target, refusing player-owned, occupied, moving and out-of-settlement beds. The saved prefab, creator and position recover the bed after object ids change; a destroyed or repeatedly unreachable loaded bed falls back to the assigned Home Area and then the original 30-metre hearth search. Temporarily unloaded beds are preserved rather than discarded.

• Gathering Spots redirect meals and leisure without moving food storage. Residents still fetch food from settlement chests or ItemDrawers, then walk to their selected hall, tavern or square. Free seats near a fuelled fire rank first, cover breaks ties in favour of sheltered places, uncovered seats remain valid and a physical standing point is the final local fallback. The meal search deadline expands once food is carried so a long walk does not become a false missed meal, and idle residents converge before proximity-based social groups form.

• Residents can be given explicit melee and bow loadouts. Open a resident's inventory and drag weapons into the new Melee and Bow slots, click a slot to clear it, or use Alt+Click as a shortcut. Bow, then blade opens with the selected bow when matching ammunition is available and commits to the selected melee weapon once an enemy closes. A missing, broken or empty preference falls back to the best usable item; that automatic ranking now favours dedicated weapons over axes and leaves pickaxes as a last resort, so a Guard no longer chooses a mining tool over a sword and damages the ground around its target. Preferences persist on the resident and their RPC is authenticated and applied by the peer that owns the resident.

• Every new mutation follows the existing multiplayer security boundary. Place rename/radius changes, resident assignments and personal beds authenticate the live Player owned by the routed sender, apply SettlementAccess on the peer that performs the change and resolve marker or bed claims from authoritative world state. Unknown place types are refused rather than clamped.

1.2.3

• Lumberjacks no longer plant trees beside the hearth. A synchronized admin setting, Work.LumberjackHearthClearance, reserves a 15-metre radius around the settlement centre by default. Candidate points are rejected during the search and checked again before the seed is spent, preventing saplings from appearing inside the main house; setting the value to 0 restores unrestricted planting.

• Lumberjacks collect every material produced by their tree work. Their settlement-wide sweep remains limited to allowed wood and tree seeds, but after felling a tree or breaking a trunk or stump they also recover material drops at that work site, including resin, feathers and yields added by other mods.

• Recruitment cost now grows with the settlement. The default base of 10 coins uses multipliers 1, 5, 10, 30, 70, 100, making the first six prices 10, 50, 100, 300, 700 and 1000; the last price repeats for later residents. Both the base and the multiplier list are synchronized admin settings. On an old save the persistent recruitment counter is seeded from every resident already belonging to that hearth, including unloaded and respawning residents, so the correct next price appears without manual migration. Each later recruitment advances that counter even if a resident is eventually dismissed.

• A settlement can be shared with the other players on the server. Settlement.SharedAccess decides who manages a settlement besides the player who raised its hearth: OwnerOnly keeps the old behaviour, WardPermitted shares it with everyone an active ward covering the hearth lists as permitted, and Everyone with any player who can reach it. The permission is checked on the peer that applies each change, not only in the interface, and it covers the hearth panel, roles, work assignments, resident inventories and the banners, patrol points and farm markers any of the sharing players place. A resident recruited at a shared hearth now joins that settlement rather than the recruiter's, so a guest can no longer found a second settlement on the same ground by paying for a resident.

• A client-supplied player id is no longer accepted as proof of identity. Every Hearthfolk RPC that changes settlement, resident, farm-marker or chest state now resolves the live player owned by Valheim's routed network sender before applying permissions. The resident inventory's vanilla open, stack and take-all requests pass through the same authentication and settlement access gate. A modified client can therefore no longer claim the founder's id to manage somebody else's settlement.

• Resident size is explicit and no longer inherited from enemy difficulty. Settler.VisualScale changes the visible body and equipment from 0.75 to 1.30, defaults to 1 and is synchronised by the server. Collider, interaction reach, physics and pathfinding remain normal. Hearthfolk now normalises the root scale that Valheim applies to every non-player character from the world's EnemySpeedSize and WorldLevel keys, so a persistent difficulty value can no longer make residents in one save suddenly enormous; the first correction is recorded in the log with both the detected and configured scales.

• Followers cross dungeon entrances with their player. The resident is moved on the same frame in which the short-range vanilla transition actually places the player at its destination, before the source zone can unload it. This works in both directions and leaves distant world portals to Valheim's separate zone-readiness sequence.

• A dead resident leaves its cargo in a recoverable tombstone. Tools, weapons, shields and worn equipment still return with the resident at the hearth, with their exact durability. Arrows, food, gathered materials and every other cargo item remain where the resident fell; if the vanilla tombstone cannot be created, those items fall loose instead of being deleted.

• A full intake chest no longer blocks every resident assigned to it. When a settlement has several intake chests for the same trade, a resident carrying resources now chooses the nearest compatible chest that can accept one of its stacks. Farmers make the same choice for their tagged harvest, so an empty second chest is used instead of walking back to the full first one forever.

1.2.2

• A few work banners can now cover a wide region. The default banner work radius is 100 metres instead of 40, and the synchronized admin setting and its settlement-panel control now range up to 400 metres.

• Every resident supply routine can take resources from ItemDrawers. Meals, arrows, Farmer planting resources and Lumberjack replanting seeds now search compatible drawers as well as ordinary chests; Cooks fetch raw food and fuel, while Caretakers fetch resin, fuel and machine inputs. Withdrawal uses ItemDrawers' own network API, moves a real item into the resident inventory, and remains optional reflection-based compatibility with both the original mod and its unofficial QuickFix.

• Farmers can cultivate renewable wild vanilla plants. Berries, mushrooms and herbs such as raspberry, blueberry, cloudberry and thistle are discovered from the loaded vanilla prefabs and appear as ordinary Farm Marker crop choices. Planting consumes one real harvested item and creates the natural plant in its picked state, so it matures through its own durable vanilla respawn cycle instead of becoming an instant harvest.

• Lumberjacks have separate cutting and planting modes. Cut trees clears standing trees, fallen trunks and vanilla stumps, then banks the wood. Plant seeds stops cutting and instead fetches allowed tree seeds from its inventory, ordinary chests or ItemDrawers, planting vanilla saplings progressively across the hearth and Lumberjack Banner work areas. Tagged saplings grow on natural forest soil while retaining vanilla biome, spacing and sunlight rules.

• Worn equipment now looks worn everywhere. Trinkets were retained on death but never passed through the resident's equipment sync, so their body attachment was never created. They are now equipped and released like every other body slot. The resident inventory also restores Valheim's equipped marker for armour, capes, utility items and trinkets; the stock container panel deliberately hides that marker, even though the shared body inventory carries the correct state. Taking worn equipment back now clears that state before Valheim transfers or clones the item, so it no longer arrives highlighted as equipped in the player's inventory.

1.2.1

• Residents use their shields. Until now nothing in this mod ever raised a guard: a companion carrying a shield got its armour value and then stood there taking every blow on the face, in every stance. That was the price of driving the fight ourselves — which is what stopped companions fleeing mid-battle and swinging once every thirty seconds — and blocking was the piece that never got carried across. Followers and Hunters now block between their own blows and drop the guard to strike. It is a held block, never a timed parry: a resident that parried perfectly every single blow would stagger anything it faced forever, which is not a companion, it is a wall.

• Residents were far tougher than the armour they wore. A player noticed his companions shrugging off blows that would have hurt him in the same leather, and he was right: armour was being summed over every equipped item rather than over the four a player counts — helmet, chest, legs, cape. One resident was reporting an armour of 136 while dressed in leather, and Valheim's armour curve turns a number that size into something close to immunity: forty damage arrived and three landed. Armour is now counted exactly the way the game counts a player's, so a resident is as tough as you are in the same gear and no tougher.

• Bows finally loose real arrows. A player bow gets its launch speed from how long the attack button was held. A resident has no attack button, so every shot silently captured a draw of zero and left the bow at two metres per second — it looked like a shot, spent an arrow, and dropped at the resident's feet. Residents now commit to a full draw when they decide to fire. At the animation's actual release frame they also aim from the real projectile origin, lead a moving target and account for the arrow's gravity. Animation, ammunition, damage, durability, projectile collision and network ownership all remain Valheim's own.

• An archer told to keep to its bow now keeps its distance. It used to plant itself and let whatever it was shooting at walk all the way in. A pure archer now gives ground while it fires; bow then blade draws a melee weapon when something closes. The launch fix above means a crowded archer still sends a clean shot rather than being forbidden to fire at an arbitrary minimum range.

• No more haircuts hanging over the hearth. A dead resident waits out its respawn invisibly, and hiding it switched off every part of it that existed at that moment — but dying changes what a body is wearing, and Valheim rebuilds the hair and the beard whenever that happens. The new ones arrived switched on and in nobody's list, so a settlement was left with a beard and a head of hair floating over the hearth until the countdown ran out.

• A guard that never tires would be a wall, not a resident. Blocking arrived with a problem attached: you pay stamina to hold a shield and eventually run out, and a resident has no stamina to run out of, because Valheim keeps that accounting on players alone. The first thing this bought was a companion in leather with a wooden club walking away from a draugr. So the guard now tires in the only currency a resident has — blows stopped. Three in quick succession and the arm drops for a moment, long enough for the next one to land, and a quiet few seconds put it back up.

• Each resident now chooses its own weapon. Three modes on the resident's card, for anyone who fights on purpose — companion, guard, hunter: melee only, bow only, or bow then blade, which opens at range and draws a melee weapon the moment something closes. Residents you have never touched keep behaving exactly as before, from the settlement setting.

  The third mode exists because the right answer depends on the resident. An archer carrying only a bow must give ground and keep shooting; a companion with a blade can stop trying to create distance and meet the attacker instead. That choice now belongs to each resident rather than once to the whole settlement.

• The PreferRangedWeapons setting no longer describes itself wrongly. 1.2.0 preserved a bow's elevation, and this release supplies the draw strength and the release-frame trajectory that were still missing. An archer resident is worth having now, if you can keep it in arrows.

• A resident that ends up with nothing in its hands says so in the log. One report of a companion punching while holding its shield turned out to be a second companion mod undressing it, and this is what will tell the two apart next time.

1.2.0

• Two new residents: the Forager and the Hunter. They arrive together because most of what they do is the same work — find something, take it, pick up what falls, carry it home — and building them as a pair cost far less than building them one after the other.

• Foragers pick what grows on its own: berries, mushrooms, thistle, dandelion, wild seeds, and whatever else a biome leaves lying about. They need no tool of any kind, which makes this the first useful job for a resident who owns nothing yet — recruit someone at dusk and they can start in the morning. What they may pick is a per-resident filter with five switches, and an unrecognised plant falls under "other pickings" rather than being silently taken, so a settlement that only wants berries gets only berries.

• A Forager never harvests a planted crop, and never touches anything standing inside a farm field. Which plants are crops is read from Valheim's own cultivator table rather than a list written here, so a mod's crops belong to your Farmer too.

• Hunters take game inside the work area and bring back the meat, the hide and the trophy. They prefer a bow, open the fight at the range a bow is good at, and swap to a blade once — and only once — if something reaches them. Badly hurt, a Hunter breaks off, comes home and does not go out again until it has healed: a dead resident costs the settlement a dormant replacement and a day of waiting, and no boar is worth that.

• A Hunter stalks. For the last twenty metres, while the animal still has not noticed, it crouches and slows to a walk. This is Valheim's own stealth and not a crouching animation — the body really is crouched, so the game's own detection maths applies and so does its sneak-attack bonus. Deer stop bolting the instant a resident crests the rise, and the first arrow of a hunt often ends it. Once the quarry is alerted there is nothing left to hide from, and the hunter stands up and closes.

• Every species a Hunter may take is a switch, and all of them start on, wolves and lox included. What no switch can turn on is anything tamed, any boss, any raid creature and any other resident. Your pigs are safe from your hunter.

• Forager and Hunter Banners join the Lumberjack and Miner ones, and a banner now belongs to exactly one trade. Before this, a banner raised for the lumber camp also widened where a Caretaker or a Cook would wander; roles with no banner of their own still see all of them, but the four trades that have one now use only their own.

• Chests can be marked for the two new roles, alongside Lumberjacks, Miners and Farmers. A chest you already marked keeps exactly the roles you gave it — nothing was widened behind your back — so tick the new ones on the chests you want them using. A resident with no intake chest for its trade still uses the chest assigned to it personally, as every role always has.

• A resident with a bow now fights at bow range. This was written for the Hunter and every Follower gets it: until now a companion holding a bow walked all the way into contact and fired point blank, which is the one distance at which a bow is worse than a knife. It now stops where it can see its target and shoots from there.

• Intake chests no longer forget what they are. Marking a chest and then logging back in left the settlement with no intake chest at all: residents gathered and then stood about with full packs and nowhere to put anything. The assignment was still written on the chest — what had gone was the reference to the hearth, because Valheim renumbers object ids every time a world loads, and that assignment was the one thing in this mod still identifying a hearth by its id alone. Chests now remember which hearth by where it stands and who built it, which nothing renumbers. Assignments already lost are adopted back automatically the first time you load, as long as only one of your hearths is close enough for the answer not to be a guess.

• The role buttons in the settlement panel are laid out over two rows. Ten roles on one line squeezed the labels to nothing in half the languages we ship.

1.1.4

• English inside the DLL is now actually used when the language folder is missing entirely. That fallback was written in 1.1.3 for exactly one situation — a mod manager installing the assembly without the lang folder beside it — and in exactly that situation it never ran, because the loader gave up before reaching it. The panels stayed full of key names for anyone it was meant to rescue. Nothing bails out of the load any more: a folder that is not there simply means no files to read, and the embedded copy carries the interface.

• The Changelog tab on Thunderstore works again. Moving the mod under BepInEx/ in 1.1.3 took CHANGELOG.md down with it, and Thunderstore reads that file from the root of the archive and nowhere else, so the tab emptied the moment that version went up. All four files the site reads — the manifest, the icon, the page description and the changelog — are back at the root, while the mod itself stays under BepInEx/plugins/Hearthfolk where the mod managers keep its language files with it.

• Still on 1.1.2 with unreadable panels? Uninstall and install fresh rather than updating in place. The install path changed, so an update can leave the old copy behind, and only one copy of a mod can load.

1.1.3

• The panels can no longer lose their words. A player who updated from Thunderstore found every label reading [hf_panel_settlers] instead of text: those brackets are what Valheim prints for a token it has never been given, so the language table had not loaded at all. The texts live in a lang folder beside the DLL, which is what makes a translation fixable without a rebuild — but it also means the mod is only readable if that folder survives however it was installed, and if the copy being loaded is the one it sits next to. English now travels inside the assembly as well, and is used when the file is not found. The folder became an override rather than a requirement: at worst a bad install costs the other seven languages, and says so in the log.

• Both downloads now install to the same place. The Thunderstore archive carried the mod at its root, which mod managers unpack into a folder named after the package, while the Nexus archive unpacked into BepInEx/plugins/Hearthfolk. Anyone who had ever used both, or who copied a DLL out of one by hand, could end up running two installations of the same mod under different names — and only one of them can load, which is how a copy with no language files beside it ended up being the one that ran. Both archives now unpack to BepInEx/plugins/Hearthfolk.

1.1.2

• Followers fight. A companion escorting a player would close on a greydwarf, stand a metre from it facing it squarely with a club in hand, and swing about once every thirty seconds before running away — while the same resident at the hearth fought perfectly well, because there the enemies come to it. The cause was not any one broken piece: the resident had two masters. Valheim's creature AI was chasing and choosing targets while the settlement logic held position, moved to a formation slot and chose targets of its own, each at its own rate, and the vanilla answer to a fight it cannot resolve is to flee — which is what players saw.

  A follower is now a companion in the way a tamed wolf is. With nothing to fight, Valheim's own follow walks it at your heel and runs it back to you when it falls behind. In a fight it is driven entirely by Hearthfolk, using the same swing the Lumberjack has been felling trees with since the mod began: close, turn, hit. Nothing in that path knows how to run away.

  The stances now mean what they say. Defensive never starts anything: it answers a creature that strikes the resident or its player, or one that has gone alert and is coming at either of them from within ten metres — a boar is met on its first charge rather than after the first hit lands, and wildlife minding its own business is ignored, however close it walks. Aggressive still goes looking out to thirty metres, and Passive still never fights. A companion also lets go of a creature that has lost interest and moved off, instead of being towed away from the player it is escorting.

• Hearthfolk speaks eight languages: English, Italian, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Interface.Language chooses one and defaults to Auto, following the language selected in Valheim — but the setting belongs to the mod alone, so a player who prefers the game in English can still read the settlement panel in their own language. It is local to each client and never pushed by a server. Where Valheim's fonts cannot draw the alphabet, as in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, the panels fall back to a system font: a panel in a plainer typeface beats a panel of empty boxes. The texts moved out of the code into plain lang/<Language>.json files that travel beside the DLL, so a correction or an entirely new language is a text file and a restart, with no rebuild — and every string the mod shows already went through Valheim's own translation table, so nothing about how they are drawn had to change.

• Followers step off a ship when their player does. Boarding was a deliberate move across, because a hull is not on any navmesh, but leaving was left to ordinary following — which from a deck cannot find a route at all. The rescue that teleports a straggler did not help either: it waits for a follower that has fallen a long way behind, and a player stepping onto the pier is three metres away. The crew stayed aboard on its benches, for good. Leaving is now the same deliberate step as boarding, and a resident that was seated stands up first. A follower set down beside a player standing at the end of a pier also lands on the player's own footing rather than in the water behind it.

• Settlement intake roles can no longer be lost on the way to the save. Valheim clears ownership of everything on each world load, so the first chest a player configures in a session can reach a hearth nobody owns yet: the request was then broadcast to every peer and refused by all of them, and a chest owned elsewhere accepted a write that only ever existed on the local copy. Either way the panel showed the new roles, the settlement worked for the rest of the evening, and the assignment was gone after the next load. The hearth now takes ownership before answering, exactly as the sorting rules have done since 1.1.0, a chest that cannot be taken is refused in the log rather than in silence, and every assignment that does persist says so — a configuration that quietly fails to save is otherwise indistinguishable in game from one that was never made.

• A resident riding a ship's deck and the ship itself no longer hurt each other. Valheim exempts a crew from its own hull by asking whether the thing it just hit is a player, and a resident is a plain humanoid: the ship treated a passenger as something it had rammed, and the passenger answered in kind, so a voyage cost both of them health even in calm water. Only passengers travelling on foot were affected — one that finds a free seat is attached to the ship and never collides with it — which is why a longship shows it first, carrying more crew than it has benches. A resident is exempt only while it is aboard; one swimming in front of a hull is still very much in the way.

• Residents no longer pick work that lies under water. Nothing in the mod knew the sea was there: a Miner chose a deposit on the seabed exactly as it would one in the meadow, broke it, and then went after stone that had sunk out of reach — residents avoid water while pathing, so it spent the rest of the day walking into the shore. Work targets and dropped materials with no footing within a metre of the water surface are now skipped, by miners, lumberjacks, caretakers and cooks alike — footing rather than depth, because most items float and a stone bobbing a hundred metres out sits exactly as high as one on the beach. A rock standing in a hand's depth of surf, and a drop resting on a jetty over deep water, both stay ordinary work.

1.1.1

• Fixed the Cook assignment selecting Farmer instead, which made the new role impossible to use at all. The role network call clamped the requested value to the highest role that existed when it was written, so the Cook — one past that ceiling — silently became the role below it. An unknown role is now refused outright rather than quietly turned into a neighbouring job.

• Residents can be moved from one hearth to another, from their resident card. The destination list is read from the world's hearths rather than from the ones currently loaded, so a settlement on the far side of the map is a valid choice. The resident keeps its name, appearance, role and inventory, and leaves behind everything that belonged to the settlement it left: its bed, its assigned chest, its patrol route and its assigned fields, all of which name objects that stay where they are. The destination is resolved from the world on the peer that owns the resident, never from a position supplied by the client asking for the move.

1.1.0

• Residents recover health out of danger, and the settlement panel shows how much each of them has left. Until now the only ways back to full health were a night's sleep and, for Followers, eating their own food: a resident hurt during the day, or one with nowhere to sleep, stayed wounded with nothing the player could do about it — and no way to even see it. Recovery runs at Settler.HealthRegen (3 health per minute by default, 0 disables it) and stops during an alert, while a resident holds a hostile target, and for a few seconds after any hit, so nobody heals mid-fight.

• New Cook assignment. A Cook works every cooking station in the settlement, the stone oven included: it fetches raw food from the settlement chests, puts it on a lit fire, refuels the stations that burn fuel, and takes each dish off the moment it is done — which is the point, because Valheim turns an unattended dish into coal. Finished food is collected off the ground and returned to storage. A station is only loaded when its fire is actually lit, one Cook works one station at a time, and every change goes through the same authoritative calls a player triggers, from a Cook standing at the fire.

• Residents walk to a spot they can actually use a chest from, instead of to the nearest point of its collider. That point was measured from wherever the resident stood when the trip began, so for a chest against a wall — or in a storeroom entered through a door — it was the outside face of the wall: the resident walked up to it, decided it had arrived, then failed the reach test for as long as the job lasted. This is why settlers queued on the far side of a wall from the crates they were assigned. Each trip now picks a standing post around the chest that passes the real reach test first, which also gives the gateway detour a reason to open the door in between. The search is nearest-post first and stops at the first usable one, so a chest the resident is already standing in front of costs a single ground probe.

• A rebuilt Exiles' Hearth now adopts the residents of the one it replaces. Membership was purely positional — a resident belongs to the hearth standing on its home point — so a player who tore the hearth down to move it a few metres lost the entire roster: the new hearth listed nobody, the old residents went on serving bare ground, and putting the hearth back where it stood was the only way to see them again. A resident whose hearth is gone now joins the first one raised within Settlement.RehomeRadius (24 metres by default, 0 disables it) of where it used to live. A hearth that is still standing keeps its residents, so a second hearth next to a live one never poaches them, and residents who died during the move are adopted with the living instead of never coming back.

• Fixed a resident going on wearing armour the player had taken back. Equipment is driven from the resident's shared inventory, but nothing ever undid it: Valheim only takes gear off automatically for a Player, and a settler is a plain Humanoid, so the body kept displaying a helmet or a cuirass that was already in the player's own inventory — with the resident's inventory visibly empty. The resident now takes off anything it no longer owns.

• Followers now travel at the pace of the player they escort instead of always walking. The civil movement policy that makes residents stroll around their own village was applied to escorts too, and it silently cancelled the follower's own request to run: a companion physically could not exceed walking speed unless it was fighting, so it fell behind on every journey and only ever caught up by teleporting after sixty-five metres. A follower now walks when its player walks, jogs when it jogs and runs when it runs, and still sprints on its own to close a gap.

• Followers now sail with their player. A companion left standing on the pier while the boat pulled away was the whole of the previous behaviour, and one that tried to reach a hull under way could only swim after it: a deck at sea is on no navmesh. A follower now boards the ship its player is travelling on, takes a free seat if the ship has one, and otherwise rides the deck without walking, since every step on a moving boat is a step towards the rail. It steps off with the player and resumes the normal formation ashore. Escorting a mounted player also counts as a run: a rider reports neither walking nor running, so followers used to stroll after a galloping lox.

• Followers no longer shove the player around. Two causes. A player turning on the spot swings every formation point with them, and the follower chased the swing straight through the player — the reason companions pushed players off jetties and into deep water. Followers now settle further out and absorb a turn instead of tracking it. Separately, no resident ever gave way to a player: Valheim characters push each other physically, so one holding its course against a standing player slid that player backwards. Every resident now brakes for a player in its path, and presses on after two seconds so a player standing in a doorway can never freeze a job loop.

• The Hearthfolk panels can be resized with Interface.UiScale. They are drawn with Unity's immediate-mode GUI, which Valheim's own UI scale setting cannot reach — that setting drives the game's interface canvas, not ours — so on a high resolution screen the text stayed at its fixed pixel size with nothing the player could do about it. The new value scales the panels whole: text, boxes, item icons and the patrol map together. It is local to each client and never synchronised, because the right value depends on the screen sitting in front of the player and not on the server they joined.

• Fixed residents being unable to use chests stacked on top of each other. The reach test measured a straight line from the resident's eyes while the walk towards the chest measured ground distance only, so the height of the stack ate into the horizontal budget until no standing position could satisfy both: the resident walked under the stack, reported the storage as unreachable and waited there. Horizontal and vertical reach are now separate budgets, a chest standing in front of another chest is no longer treated as a wall blocking the line of sight, and both are exposed as Work.StorageReach and Work.StorageVerticalReach. Horizontal reach also grew from 2.8 to 3.2 metres, still well under the 5 metres the player enjoys.

• Fixed armed residents standing still instead of fighting. Two separate causes. A weapon was picked by taking the first matching item in the inventory, so a bow that happened to sit in an earlier slot than a sword disarmed the guard in practice: Valheim refuses to start a bow attack without ammunition, and the resident simply stood in front of its target. Weapons are now ranked, an empty bow does not count as a weapon at all, and the resident reports that it needs arrows instead of claiming to be armed. Separately, equipment was re-synchronised every two seconds and equipped a shield on top of a two-handed weapon or a bow; each of the two unequipped the other, so the pair flip-flopped forever and every swap restarted the equip animation. A shield is now only worn with a one-handed weapon, and during a fight the vanilla AI's own weapon choice is left alone.

• Residents carrying a bow restock arrows from a settlement chest, up to Guards.ArrowSupply (30 by default, 0 disables it), and never during an alert. Melee weapons still win over a bow when a resident owns both, because the vanilla creature AI handles a blade far more reliably than a player bow; a settlement that wants archers sets Guards.PreferRangedWeapons.

• Hearthfolk no longer ships sleeping structures. Residents now claim any ordinary player-built bed near the hearth, so the player raises whatever house they like out of Valheim's own pieces and puts beds in it. A bed a player has ever slept in is never taken — claiming one is how you keep it for yourself — and beds on ships and carts are ignored. The Settler Tent and Settler Lodge are retired: already placed ones load once, refund their full build cost and remove themselves, and neither appears in the hammer again. Everything that existed only to serve them is gone with them: the shelter component and its berths, the wake-from-tent routine, the procedural canvas, thatch, plank and flame surfaces, the decorative torches and the camp props. Roughly 2,900 lines removed.

• Fixed chest sorting rules being lost on the next login. A chest nobody has touched this session is ownerless, and Valheim resets ownership on every load, so the configuration RPC was broadcast with no owner to accept it: every peer ran the handler, every peer failed its owner check, and the rules were silently discarded. Configuring a chest now takes ownership first, exactly as the intake-role path already did, and the write is logged so it can be confirmed.

• Fixed the whole settlement scattering after one resident was attacked. A hit raises a twelve second alert during which every resident acquires a target; when that alert expired nothing released it again, because only Followers had a combat policy. Every other role kept its target forever, fell through to the base monster AI and chased with no leash and no job control. Working residents now hold a defensive policy of their own: they never go hunting, they fight what attacks them, and they disengage once the fight drags them away from where it started. Settlement defence radii were also cut so an alert no longer sends everyone sprinting fifty metres at a single wanderer.

• Smoothed resident movement. The steer-while-walking threshold sat at exactly 90 degrees, which is the turn a right-angle corner produces, so settlers stopped dead to rotate on some corners and not others depending on rounding; it now sits clear of the angles real routes generate. The default guard ring gained two more posts for the same reason, and a resident turning on the spot interpolates its facing per frame instead of stepping round at the think rate.

• Fixed Guards and Caretakers sitting by the fire all night showing "Resting until morning". A seated resident is pinned to its chair every frame, so the walk to the bed was silently overridden; any movement order now stands the resident up first. This also fixes a seated resident never being able to reach a food chest.

• A Guard with no configured Patrol Points now walks a watch ring around the hearth and faces outward at each post, instead of freezing wherever its last chase ended.

• Residents no longer get permanently stuck. Stall detection now measures actual body movement instead of distance to a logical target, so it also fires while a gateway or physical recovery route is active and while approaching a work target whose aim point shifts every tick. Every idle, meal, rest, sleep, seed, harvest and sorting trip that previously had no reachability check now backs off, temporarily marks the unreachable chair, chest or bed, and continues with normal behaviour instead of pushing against an obstacle forever.

• Fixed the two hard deadlocks that suspended a resident's entire job loop: a meal in hand in front of an unreachable seat, and the nightly bed routine looping between selecting and discarding the same access point. Residents now eat where they stand once the meal search window expires, and lie down from the validated access point.

• Fixed residents that stayed visible but completely inert when their shared inventory failed to bind on the first frame; the binding is now retried.

• Removed multi-second freezes caused by the physical path planner. Planning is capped per search and per frame, gateway searches stop once that budget is spent, path smoothing no longer scales quadratically, and the grid buffers and physics probes no longer allocate on every node.

• Reduced per-frame cost further: the settlement alert state is cached per frame instead of being recomputed up to ten times per resident, the door probe and open-door bookkeeping are throttled, structural obstruction raycasts are cached, the Farmer's crop stock sweep uses a narrow layer mask and a longer cache, and navigation logging is rate limited.

• On dedicated servers the host no longer races the responsible client for ownership of the same resident, which caused residents to freeze and rubber-band.

• 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.

1.0.0

First public release, on Thunderstore and Nexus.

Everything listed in the README ships in this version: recruitable residents with persistent appearance and inventory, the Lumberjack, Miner, Farmer, Guard, Caretaker and Follower assignments, Farm Markers and crop cycles, per-role intake chests with sorting rules, daily meal and sleep routines with happiness, doors and gateway routing, and the settlement panel that drives all of it.

Earlier development history is kept in the repository's Git history rather than shipped with the package.