Chaos Polymorph

Two transformation staves for Valheim:

This mod gives no eitr on its own. Use it with a mod that adds early eitr food, such as Therzie's Wizardry or Path of Valheiman.

Install on the server and every client. Requires BepInEx and Jötunn. Config is server-synced.

Staff of the Chaos Polymorph

Every creature caught in the orb's burst turns into a random creature from your own kill list for a short time.

• Crafting: Forge, level 1. Costs 10 Core wood, 4 Bronze, 2 Surtling core, 1 Ancient seed. Upgrades to quality 4.
• The orb: lobbed, bursts on the first thing it touches. Anything with part of its body inside the radius is caught. Does no damage by default.
• Duration: 5s at Q1, then each upgrade adds a little less: 9.25s at Q2, ~16s at Q4, and at least +2s per level after that.
• Your shape pool: every creature you've landed the killing blow on, saved per character. Creatures whose trophy you've discovered count too. Variants count as one shape (every Skeleton variant is just "Skeleton"), and a creature never turns into its own kind.
• Weighted toward weaker forms: lower-biome creatures are more likely. Forms stronger than the target are rarer still.
• Same health, different body: a 600 HP Troll becomes a 600 HP Skeleton, with the Skeleton's attacks, speed and weaknesses. It doesn't skip a health bar. It disarms a big hitter and exposes a weakness.
• Everything else carries over: star level, and any data other mods store on the creature (Monstrum, Path of Valheiman, CLLC…). It turns back exactly as it was, with the health its borrowed body had left.
• Death breaks the spell: kill the borrowed body and the real creature takes the killing blow. Loot, kill credit, world-progress keys and other mods' kill rewards (like Path of Valheiman XP) all come from the original.
• It's angry at you: transformed creatures target the caster when they change and when they change back.
• Eitr cost: 60% of your max eitr, never below 20. You can always cast with any real eitr food, but it uses most of your pool.

Staff of the Ember Hen

A quick self-centred cast. Every creature around you becomes a tame, passive, unkillable copy of the staff's creature for 4 seconds and runs around in a panic, away from you. Use the time to drink, run or reposition.

• Crafting: Forge, level 1. Costs 8 Black metal, 6 Linen thread, 10 Feathers. Upgrades to quality 4.
• Radius: grows with quality: 4m, 5.4m, 6.6m and 7.6m at Q1 to Q4. The duration and the 45-second cooldown stay fixed.
• Choosing the creature: drag a trophy onto the staff in your inventory. The trophy is used up and the staff keeps that creature, which shows in its tooltip and perches on the staff. An egg sets it back to a Hen.
  • Anything up to about 3m tall works, so a Neck, Greydwarf shaman or Skeleton is fine.
  • Trolls, Lox and other big creatures can't be slotted, and neither can bosses, flyers, water creatures, babies or summons.
• While emberized: creatures show the green tame health bar, never attack, and take no damage from anything. Monsters you didn't catch may stop to swing at them.
• Effects: an ember burst on cast, the creature's own sound, and a puff where each creature changes.
• Eitr cost: half your max eitr, never below 25.

Both staves

• Always immune: players, bosses, tamed creatures, summons, water creatures, Gammeltrolls, boss aspects and Hildir's minibosses.
• Exact revert: when a creature changes back, anything its temporary body picked up (a tamed flag, gear, a pet name) is removed.

Console commands

Configuration

BepInEx/config/lynx.chaospolymorph.cfg is created on first launch.

Recipes, models and icons need a restart. Everything else applies live.

Known limits

• Kill credit goes only to the player who lands the killing blow.
• If you uninstall the mod while a creature is transformed, it stays in that form permanently.
• The Ember staff's inventory icon always shows a Hen. The staff in your hand and its tooltip show the creature it actually holds.
• The Ember staff trims Staff of Protection's head off by copying its mesh back from the graphics card. If that fails on your system, it uses a plain wooden shaft instead.
• Emberized creatures are tame for real while it lasts, so they can be petted or named. Everything is wiped when they change back.

Credits

• Chaos staff model: "Monkey Staff" by madmachabre, from https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/monkey-staff-c05ccb9719c849048fefcc281b3c6598, licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/). The model ships unmodified and is loaded as-is.
• Ember staff: built at runtime from Valheim's own Staff of Protection and creatures, so no extra model files ship with the mod.
• Mod icon: a render of the Monkey Staff model.
• Built with BepInEx, Harmony and Jötunn.

Changelog

1.3.0

New: Staff of the Masquerade, a Meadows-tier toy that turns you into the creature it holds.

• Drag a trophy onto the staff to choose the creature; any size works, bosses included. Big creatures are shrunk to viking size, so you get a pocket Troll.
• Creatures of the same kind ignore you, and stop chasing you. Doors, chests, pickups and crafting still work.
• Attacking, taking damage or running out of eitr changes you back. Casting again counts as attacking. The attack that ends it is cancelled, and nearby creatures of that kind become alert, so there's no free sneak attack.
• 10 eitr to cast, then 1 eitr per tick with no regeneration. Quality slows the tick: 1s, 1.5s, 1.9s, 2.2s at Q1 to Q4.
• Humanoid forms hold your staff; while you're disguised, the staff's topper shows a green viking.
• Recipe (Workbench): 10 Wood, 6 Flint, 6 Leather scraps, 4 Dandelions. Settings are in 9 - Masquerade Staff and 10 - Masquerade Staff Model.

1.2.0

New: Staff of the Ember Hen, a Plains-tier panic button.

• A quick cast turns every creature around you into a tame, passive, unkillable copy of the staff's creature for 4 seconds. They panic and run away from you, and take no damage from anything. Bosses, tamed creatures and the usual exclusions are immune.
• Quality increases the radius, not the duration: 4m at Q1, 5.4m, 6.6m and 7.6m at Q4, and at least +0.25m per level after that. The cooldown is a fixed 45 seconds. The eitr cost is half your max eitr, never below 25.
• Drag a trophy onto the staff in your inventory to change its creature; an egg sets it back to a Hen. Anything up to about 3m tall works. The tooltip shows which creature a staff holds.
• An ember burst on cast, the creature's own sound, and a puff where each creature changes.
• Built from Staff of Protection's shaft with an animated ember copy of the creature perched on top, both borrowed from the game, so there are no extra model files. Other players see your staff's creature too.
• Recipe (Forge): 8 Black metal, 6 Linen thread, 10 Feathers. Settings are in 7 - Hen Staff and 8 - Hen Staff Model.

Chaos staff:

• The burst now reaches creatures by their body, not their centre, so big creatures like Lox can be caught when you're next to them.

New testing command: chaospoly_nocooldown (cheat) turns both staves' cooldowns off until restart.

1.1.0

Balance: the polymorph no longer skips a creature's health bar.

• New health model Pool (default): a creature keeps its own health pool in any body. A 600 HP Troll becomes a 600 HP Skeleton, with the Skeleton's attacks, speed and weaknesses. Damage carries over 1:1 in both directions.
• In 1.0.0, a creature kept its health percentage instead, so killing a weak borrowed body killed the original outright. That behaviour is still available as HealthModel = Percent. Borrowed gives the borrowed body's own health and banks the damage against the original, which is a much weaker version.
• New setting: HealthModel in 5 - Behaviour (server-synced).
• Server and clients must all update: 1.0.x and 1.1.x won't connect to each other.

1.0.0

First release.

• Staff of the Chaos Polymorph: Black Forest tier, crafted at the Forge, upgrades to quality 4.
• Lobbed orb, cloned from Staff of the Wild with its roots removed, that bursts on first impact.
• Polymorphs creatures into random shapes from your kill pool. Duration has diminishing returns: 5s at Q1, 9.25s at Q2, ~16s at Q4, and at least +2s for each level after that.
• Shape pool is saved per character; discovered trophies count as kills.
• Creature variants count as one shape, and a creature never turns into its own kind.
• Weighting favours lower-biome forms; creatures in the Deep North content get the correct tier.
• Star level, health percentage, and other mods' creature data carry over both ways.
• Reverting is exact: anything the temporary body added (like a tamed flag) is removed. Forms that start tame, like Hens, are never picked.
• Death breaks the polymorph: the killing blow turns a creature back and kills the original, so loot, kill credit and other mods' kill rewards (e.g. Path of Valheiman XP) come from the real creature.
• Transformed creatures target the caster.
• Transformed creatures show only their new body's own gear (no Troll logs on Skeletons); the original's gear returns on revert. (Miss the log-wielding Skeletons? Check the config file.)
• Eitr cost is a share of max eitr with a minimum; flat-cost mode and a cooldown are optional.
• Custom monkey staff model with its own posed inventory icon. The vanilla Staff of the Wild is untouched.
• Server-synced config; detailed logging is behind VerboseLogging.