Ore Finder

Points you to the ore veins around you in Valheim 1.0, and to dungeon entrances, monster spawners, ancient roots and rare pickables. Every second the mod looks for ore within a configurable radius (20 m by default) and for the other targets within 40 m. The first time something comes into range it gets a screen arrow with its name and distance, a coloured light, a vertical beam and a glow, for 10 seconds by default, plus a pin on the map. Each find is shown once, so walking past a deposit you already know does not nag you.

Only real ore counts: copper and tin deposits, silver veins, iron scrap piles, flametal. Plain rocks, obsidian and black marble are ignored unless you list them. Press F9 to turn the finder on and off.

Client-side: install it on every player's game that should use it. Nothing is needed on the server, and players without the mod can play on the same server.

Source, issues and releases: github.com/egor-muindor/ValheimMods.

Features

• Screen arrow: an arrow with the ore name and distance is drawn over the vein while it is in view. When the vein is behind you or outside the screen, the arrow sits at the screen edge and points towards it.
• Vein highlight: a pulsing point light in the ore's colour (orange for copper, blue-grey for tin, white for silver, rust for iron, red for flametal), a 30 m vertical beam and an emissive tint on the vein itself. Everything fades out at the end of the highlight.
• Once per vein: a vein is highlighted the first time it enters the radius and not again, until you leave the world or run orefinder reset.
• Ore list: look for every ore, or only the ones you name.
• Map pin: a dot pin named after the ore, saved with your map, for every found vein. Nothing is added when another pin is already nearby, so your own pins and re-found veins do not pile up.
• Your own names: call the ores what you like, for example one letter each so the map stays readable. Off by default.
• Hidden ores need the Wishbone: silver veins and the scrap piles the Wishbone reacts to are only found while you carry it, like in the game.
• More than ores: entrances of crypts, caves and mines (with their own map pin icon), monster spawners (greydwarf nests, bone and body piles, surtling spawners and other respawning spawn points, with a hammer pin), ancient roots for the sap extractor, pickables you list (dragon eggs, Jotun puffs, Magecap, Fiddlehead, Volture eggs by default) and trees you list by their wood.
• Each group on its own switch: ores, dungeon entrances, roots and spawners can be turned on and off separately, in the config, from the console (orefinder dungeons off) or with their own hotkeys.
• Toggle key: F9 by default, configurable, with modifiers if you like. The state is saved to the config file.

Installation

Requires BepInEx 5.

• With a mod manager (r2modman, Thunderstore Mod Manager): install as usual.
• By hand: unzip the release and copy the plugins/OreFinder folder into BepInEx/plugins, so the mod ends up at BepInEx/plugins/OreFinder/OreFinder.dll.

The config file BepInEx/config/muindor.OreFinder.cfg is created on first launch.

Configuration

General

Detection

Highlight

Targets

Hidden

Names

Map

What counts as ore

With an empty Ores list, a mineable object is ore when one of the items it drops has the word Ore or Scrap in its name: CopperOre, TinOre, SilverOre, IronScrap, FlametalOre, FlametalOreNew, and the Deep North's GoldOre (Petrified Tissue). Anything a game update adds with such a name is picked up automatically. LeatherScraps and ShieldCore do not qualify, and neither do Stone, Obsidian, BlackMarble or Softtissue.

With a list, an object is ore when one of its drops or its own prefab name is in the list. Names are case-insensitive and $item_ localisation keys are accepted. The list replaces the rule: to get every ore plus obsidian, list all of them:

Ores = CopperOre, TinOre, SilverOre, IronScrap, FlametalOre, FlametalOreNew, Obsidian

Console command

orefinder status   # show the active settings and counters
orefinder on       # turn the finder on (same as the toggle key)
orefinder off      # turn it off
orefinder reset    # forget the veins already shown, so they are highlighted again
orefinder reload   # re-read the config file

orefinder ores off        # stop looking for ores, keep the other targets
orefinder dungeons on     # look for dungeon entrances again
orefinder spawners        # flip the spawner search
orefinder roots off

The group commands change FindOres, Dungeons, Spawners and Roots in the config, like the hotkeys do. Pickables and trees are lists; empty the list to turn them off.

How it works

Once per ScanInterval the mod walks the objects the game has loaded around the player (ZNetScene's instance table) and keeps the ones within Radius. Each object's prefab is classified once, through its drop table: MineRock5 (copper, silver, flametal), MineRock (tin, obsidian) and DropOnDestroyed (scrap piles). An untouched copper or silver deposit is a plain Destructible that turns into the mineable MineRock5 on the first hit, so the finder also looks at what a destructible spawns when destroyed. Veins are remembered by their network id and position: a partly mined deposit is still the same vein, and so is the rock that replaces an intact deposit after the first hit.

Hidden ores are recognised the way the game does it: the object (or what it turns into) carries a Beacon component, which is what the Wishbone's finder effect listens for. The Wishbone check looks at the inventory once per scan.

The other targets are recognised by their components too, so nothing is hardcoded to a list of prefabs: a root is a ResourceRoot, a spawner is a SpawnArea (nests, piles) or a CreatureSpawner with a respawn time, a pickable is a Pickable whose item is in the list (its picked state is read from the object, so picked ones wait until they regrow), and a tree is a TreeBase whose log chain (TreeLog and its sub-logs) drops a listed wood.

Dungeon entrances take a detour. A door is a Teleport trigger, but the game does not spawn it as a network object: a location is spawned in two parts, every ZNetView on its own and everything else as one plain object under the location's LocationProxy (which is a network object). The doors are in the second part, so they never appear in the instance table. The finder looks at every proxy within TargetRadius + 50 m (a proxy stands at the location's centre, the door can be some way out), takes the teleports under it that are not inside the interior (the game keeps interiors above 3000 m; the exits are there) and marks each door by its own position. The door is named after its enter text (Burial Chambers, Sunken Crypt, ...) or, without one, after the location.

The highlight does not touch the vein's game object: the light and beam are separate objects, and the glow is a material property block that is cleared when the highlight ends. Map pins go through Minimap.AddPin like your own pins and are saved with the map. The screen markers are drawn with IMGUI, so no canvas or font asset is needed. The only Harmony patch is Terminal.InitTerminal, for the console command.

Compatibility

• Works alongside any mod: nothing of the game is patched except the console command registration.
• Modded ores are found when their ore item's prefab name contains the word Ore or Scrap; otherwise add them to Ores.
• The toggle key is checked through the game's input layer (ZInput), so it works with the same keys the game accepts.

License

MIT