CollectionChest

A switch inside the chest's menu that allows you to enable auto collection! No more wandering around smelters, furnaces, windmills and other appliances manually collecting random stuff.

Every chest you build gets the switch. Turn it on, and the chest pulls in any item dropped right beside it. Put a chest where a smelter spits out its bars and the bars store themselves.

How it works

Open a chest. Just below the chest's panel, on the left, there is a new button: Auto-collect: OFF. Click it to turn it ON.

From then on the chest checks once a second for dropped items within 1 metre of it, and moves them in. That covers anything that ends up on the ground: bars from a smelter or blast furnace, coal from a charcoal kiln, flour from a windmill, thread from a spinning wheel, eitr from a refinery, honey from a beehive, and things you drop yourself.

The switch is saved with the chest, in the world. It stays on through restarts, every player sees the same setting, and hovering over a collecting chest says so:

• Auto-collect on: collecting.
• Auto-collect on - full: no empty slots left. It still tops up stacks it already has, but anything else stays on the ground.

It will not overfill a chest

A chest only ever takes what it has room for. It fills stacks of the same item first, then empty slots, and stops there:

• If only part of a stack fits, it takes that part and leaves the rest on the ground, still one pickup, for you or another chest.
• A full chest leaves items where they are and does not keep grabbing at them.
• The drop on the floor is reduced by exactly what the chest gained, counted after the move rather than assumed, so an item cannot end up both in the chest and on the ground.

Range, and tightly packed bases

The 1 metre is measured from the chest's sides and lid, not its centre. An item resting on the chest is at 0, and a long chest reaches no further past its ends than a small one does.

It is tight on purpose. A chest under one smelter should catch that smelter's bars, not the next one along the wall. If your layout needs more reach, raise Range a little at a time; it goes up to 4 metres.

What it leaves alone

• Storage that is not a chest you built: carts, ship storage, gravestones and loot bags get no switch.
• The obliterator. It has an inventory too, but a self-filling obliterator is one lever pull from destroying whatever wandered into it.
• Food set out on a table, fish still in the water, items stuck in tar, quest items, and anything the game only lets you pick up by hand (the same items your own auto-pickup ignores).
• Items that have only just dropped: like your own auto-pickup, it waits half a second.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/com.ljindustries.valheim.collectionchest.cfg, written on first run.

BepInEx only reads the file at startup, so edit it with the game closed or use a configuration manager in game.

Multiplayer

Install it on every player's game. The server does not need it.

Valheim gives each chest to one player's game to run, normally whoever got near it first, and only that game is allowed to change what is in the chest. That game is the one that does the collecting, which is what keeps two players from each storing the same bar. If the player running a chest does not have the mod, that chest simply pauses until someone who does takes it over. It does not break, and nothing is lost.

Works alongside MultiUserChest. With it, a second player can have a chest open at the same time, and flipping the switch from their menu asks the player running the chest to do it.

Install

Through a mod manager (r2modman, Thunderstore Mod Manager), or by hand: drop CollectionChest.dll into BepInEx/plugins/.

Requires BepInExPack Valheim.