Stavebound

Travel to any portal in the world. What you may carry through is decided by the staves standing at the far end — and every stave is bought with a boss's head.

Interact with a portal and pick your destination off the map. The choice belongs to the portal and applies to everyone, until someone re-aims it. Walking in travels.

Then the part that makes it more than another any-portal mod. Build an Elder's Stave beside a portal and that portal will accept copper, tin and bronze. It will still refuse iron — until you go and build a Bonemass's Stave there too, and it says so in as many words:

Iron cannot enter "Copper Mine" — no Bonemass's Stave there.

One end of the trip has to have paid. By default either end will do, so a site with an iron stave both takes iron from anywhere and sends it anywhere — and only two sites that both lack it cannot pass iron between them. Which end is asked is the dial most worth knowing about; see Which end pays.

You are told before you commit, not at the wall. The portal's runes go dark when it will refuse what you are holding, the offending stacks are marked in your inventory while you pack, and walking up to the portal gets you the reason in words.

Installing

Needs BepInEx and Jotunn. If you are using a mod manager both come as dependencies and there is nothing else to do. By hand, drop Stavebound.dll into BepInEx/plugins.

Install it on the server and on every client. The server works out clearance; clients need the map selector and the travel check. Clearance rules synchronise from the server, so nobody can loosen them locally.

Removing the mod removes its pieces, so any staves you built will vanish — normal for any mod that adds buildables. The extra data it writes is harmless to an unmodded game.

The staves

Each is built from that biome boss's trophy plus a little of what the biome gives you. Stand one within ten metres of a portal and it binds to it.

Tiers are independent — a site can accept silver while still refusing iron. Nothing makes you climb the ladder in order.

While you are holding one, a beam shows which portal it would bind to, and a circle shows its reach if nothing is close enough.

Which end pays

MaterialFlow, under 2 - Clearance. One rule for the whole world, set on the server — this is the setting that decides how the whole mod feels, so it is worth a minute before you start a save.

Under every one of them, a tier that neither end holds never moves. Nothing here lets you carry something nobody paid for; it only decides who is allowed to have done the paying.

One thing Both gives up, since it is the default and this is easy to discover the hard way: a single fully-staved base makes your whole network permeable in two hops — outpost to base, base to other outpost. Direct outpost-to-outpost still needs one of them to have paid. If that reads as too loose once you have played it, Receive is a one-line change and restores the original rule exactly.

Controls

All rebindable under 5 - Selector keys, each with a gamepad button beside it. The selector is fully playable on a pad.

Settings worth knowing

Which item belongs to which stave is configurable too, under 2 - Clearance. The list of blocked items is never hand-written — it is read from the game at startup, so a game update adding a new ore cannot break the mod. Anything unrecognised is held to the highest tier and named in the log.

LogNetworkSync defaults off. Turn it on before reporting anything about two machines disagreeing about a portal — it narrates every sweep, broadcast and receive, and it is the first thing anyone will ask for.

Note that changing a default only affects a config file that does not exist yet. If you have played an earlier build, your existing com.recognizerhd.stavebound.cfg keeps whatever it was written with — edit it, or delete it and let the game write a fresh one.

Console commands

Type help in the F5 console for the full list. The useful ones:

• stave_portals — every portal this game knows about, where it points, and its clearance
• stave_items — every item the game refuses to teleport, and which stave permits it
• stave_net — the sync's state. Run it on a server and a client and compare

A note on cheating

Cargo checks happen on your own machine, because that is where your inventory is. A determined player could bypass them. This is a rule system for playing with people you like, not anti-cheat — the server owns what each site permits, and never what you are carrying.

Licensing

Code: MIT — see LICENSE.

Valheim and its assets are the property of Iron Gate Studio. No game files are redistributed here. The mod builds its pieces by recolouring one that already exists in the game rather than shipping any art of its own.

Changelog

0.9.0 — 2026-09-06

First release. Both features have been played in single player and confirmed on a real network. Numbered 0.9 rather than 1.0 because the costs have not been tuned over a long game, not because anything is known to be wrong.

Any-portal travel. Interact with a portal to pick any portal in the world off the map. The choice belongs to the portal and applies to everyone until someone re-aims it. Pointers are one-way: aiming a portal at your base does not make the return trip. Vanilla tag pairing still works untouched on any portal nobody has re-aimed.

Destination clearance. Six staves, each bought with a boss trophy and a little of the metal it unlocks. Stand one near a portal and that portal accepts those metals — and refuses the rest by name: "Iron cannot enter "Copper Mine" — no Bonemass's Stave there." Only the destination is ever checked, so an outpost with no staves can send ore to your base forever and never receive any.

Knowing before you commit. The portal's runes go dark when it will refuse what you are carrying. Inventory slots mark the stacks that cannot make this trip while you are near a portal, rather than the ones that can never teleport at all. Walking up gets you the reason in words. Holding a stave shows its range and a beam to the portal it would bind to.

Optional seamless transit. Off by default. A destination already in memory skips the loading screen; one that is not shows it for as long as loading actually takes, rather than for vanilla's fixed eight seconds.

Five console commands for looking at what the mod believes: stave_portals, stave_aim, stave_net, stave_items, and the prefab tools stave_prefabs / stave_inspect / stave_preview.

Which end pays. MaterialFlow decides whether a site's staves count for arriving, departing, or both. Both is the default: either end is enough, so a site with an iron stave takes iron from anywhere and sends it anywhere, and only two sites that both lack iron cannot pass it between them. Receive is the sharper original rule — only the destination counts, so outposts are one-way. Deliver mirrors that, for supplying a frontier rather than feeding a capital.

Known gaps

Clearance and MaterialFlow have both now been played on a real network, which were the two things holding this back. LogNetworkSync defaults off as of that confirmation — turn it on before reporting anything about portals disagreeing between machines.

What is left is judgement rather than correctness, and is listed in TESTING.md: the §4 costs have never been tuned, and whether Both is the right shipped default is an open question about how it feels over a long game.